Nitpickery: Hunter X Hunter, Part 2

Hey y'all.  So it's back to Hunter X Hunter, and let's finish this thing.

Spoilers!

Okay, so the fourth season pick up after an extremely violent fourth season.  Gon and Killua are trying to find Gon's father Ging, and attempt to do so by entering a game called Greed Island.

I have to say it -- naming the family Ging and Gon is a really bad pun.  For the record, "ging gon" is the Japanese onomatopoeia of the sound of a bell ringing.  So cheesy.

But anyway, Gon and Killua spent season 3 (when they weren't helping Kurapika) trying to earn enough money to try and buy a copy of Greed Island.  At the beginning of season 4, they figure that they can't afford it, so they decide to let someone else buy it, and then offer to play. Someone called Battera has bought up all the copies he can get his hands on.  He's hiring anyone who can use nen well to play the game and beat it, because the person who beats it can pick three cards to take into the real world, and he wants those cards.

Nitpickery: Sword Art Online -- Alfheim Arc

Hey y'all.  So I've got that second half of the Sword Art Online first season to talk about.   Yep.  Uh-huh.  This is where it all goes downhill.

Oh, sure, the first time I watched it, I was pretty entertained.  But when I watched it again for reviewing purposes, the story seemed to drag.  Sure, the pacing is better than the beginning of the season, but several factors bring down the overall quality of the show.

But first, a summary.  Spoilers.

Kirito and the thousands of SAO survivors are finally in the real world again.  Minus, sadly, three hundred of them, including Asuna.  Kirito is home with his mopey, melodramatic sister (who is really his cousin), Suguha, who is somehow in love with him.  For some reason.  Kirito doesn't notice, and instead pines for Asuna.  He visits Asuna in her hospital room, where he meets Nobuyuki Sugou, the man who has arranged with Asuna's parents to marry her.  Sugou reveals that he's the one who trapped Asuna, and that he's going to marry her no matter what Kirito says.  However, Andrew Mills, the real world Agil, discovers a picture of an Asuna-like person in the new game Alfheim.  So Kirito has to enter this game and rescue her from the inside so that she can log-out.  He does this with the help of the reincarnated Yui, and fellow player Leafa....who is really Suguha, but he doesn't know it.

Okay.  This is going to be far more easy to summarize than the first part of Sword Art Online. Hm...y'know, I kind of like how I formatted my Star Trek movie reviews.  I'll go ahead and keep going with that.

---- Top Ten Things to Say about Sword Art Online, Alfheim Arc ----

Nitpickery: Volition Agent

Hey y'all.  So I got in a free book on a facebook contest.  It's called Volition Agent.

I call it terrible.

Nitpickery -- Starcraft: Shadow of the Xel'Naga

Hey y'all.  It turns out that my store did have the second of the Starcraft fanfiction trilogy, Shadow of the Xel'Naga.  And guess what it has in common with all the other Starcraft novels?

Nitpickery -- For a Few Dollars More

Hey y'all.  So the next movie in the trilogy is For a Few Dollars More.  The strange thing about it is, many people apparently think this is better than the Good, the Bad, and the Ugly.  I don't.  Granted, it does a few things that make it a huge step up from A Few Dollars More, but in my opinion GBU eclipses it as it's more of a total package.  Few Dollars More has a division of both good and not so good.

So this is a movie about the Man with No Name -- named Manco -- who is going after a new bounty: El Indio, a murderous madman who's just escaped from jail.  The reward for El Indio is $10,000, and that's something Manco has to get on.  He finds out about a rival for his bounty, Colonel Douglas Mortimer. Mortimer suggests they team up to take out El Indio, and they do so, attempting to stop Indio from robbing a bank.

Eh, that's not the best summary I've ever done, but this is a fairly complex movie, and I can't explain it out without ruining at least some of its charm.  Or at least going on too long about details that are better seen than told about.

In any case, be ready for spoilers.


-----  Ten Things to Say about For A Few Dollars More -----


10.  This movie suuuuucks.

And this time I mean it.  Mostly.

Nitpickery: My Little Pony

Hey y'all.  So I saw fit to write a blog on that whole Equestria Girls thing, and so why not talk about the show My Little Pony itself?  Like I said before, I'm not a brony.  I saw the show on Netflix because I was bored, and it was there.  I wish they would put Trading Spaces available for streaming, but what are you going to do?

So the show.  Yeah.  It's there.  Much of it is fairly standard kid's fare, what with learning a simplistic lesson at the end.  It's the story of Twilight Sparkle, a purple pony, and her candy colored friends, who together must operate the "elements of harmony" to stop bad guys and to learn lessons of friendship along the way, an obvious reference to the subtitle "friendship is magic".  This is the ultimate theme of the show.

While the ponies do have their adventures, most of the time they're just going through life normally, as normal a life as a magical pony can have.  They deal with things like bullies, sisterly conflict, worrying about careers, and making sure Ponyville has enough apples.  Okay.  Stuff.

The trouble with this concept is that people seem to have flocked to it rather insistently.  It's like the second coming of Star Trek, only cuter.  While I theorize that most franchises have some sort of loyal fanbase, until this point no fanbase has come to be known as so obsessive as Star Trek.  Even the rival Star Wars has fans that don't take their series as seriously as the Trekkers (though that may be George Lucas' fault).

The thing that made Star Trek unique was its philosophy: the idea that people in the future will overcome their petty bigotry and become super moral humans.  I personally feel that this is a silly, unrealistic goal, because morality does not evolve, as ancient child sacrifice and modern abortion prove.  Each person born knows nothing, and is only able to learn the lessons of morality from his sires.  Therefore, morality can't really progress all that well.  There are actually other problems with the Star Trek philosophy, but we'll get to that some other time.

What is both good and odd about My Little Pony is that it has a moral much more straightforward and harder to argue against: friendship is magical, and makes people better.  I would venture to say that the wrong friends are as harmful or worse than being alone, but y'know, whatever.  It is true that good friends make you a better person, so yeah, a good thematic basis there.  This, according to my estimation, is the source of the bronies' love.  They like all that love and tolerance schmuck.  There's only one problem with that.

This is a children's show!

Nitpickery: Equestria Girls

Hey y'all.  That's right.  I'm going to do it.  I'm going to nitpick a movie where magical ponies turn into cliche teenagers.  Yup.  Why?  Because I can.  And I'm bored.  And it was on Youtube, not pulled down because probably it's a testimonial to how exactly Hasbro feels about its creation.

So how did it go?  Was the brony fan-rage well deserved, or did Hasbro convince them all that turning ponies into high school girls is super interesting?

The answer to that, is meh.  Truth be told, it wasn't bad enough to deserve hatred.  Neither was it good enough to be anything better than a cheap cash grab.  It was just there, with all of its errors and flaws.

Spoilers abound.

Before we get on, allow me to first say that I am not a brony.  I'm a girl, for one, and for two, the show isn't anything that special.  It's cute and all, but it's essentially standard fare for cartoons.  I fail to see why grown people consider it any better than things like Arthur the Aardvark or The Power Puff Girls.  The show has its ups and down, but doesn't seem to be anything deserving of the adoration of tons of fans.  I am left to ponder why it has become a comparable sensation to Star Trek.  This phenomenon is worth investigating.

Also, note that this isn't an attack on the My Little Pony show itself.  The show isn't horrible, and is in fact sometimes fun.  I'm just nitpicking because that's what I do.

Nitpickery: The Search for Jackie Chan

Hey y'all.  So, one of my favorite movies is a Chinese film, called The Search for Jackie Chan.  Actually, that's the Chinese name.  The name in the english market is Jackie Chan: Kung Fu Master.  For some reason.

Look, peeps, if you're going to sell something to somebody, you have to market it for what it is.  Don't lie to your consumers.  They never like that.  That's at least half the reason why people despise Star Fox Adventures.  We looked at the cover and expected a Star Fox game, not a mediocre dinosaur story with gameplay ripped off from the Legend of Zelda.  And when an American sees a movie with Jackie Chan's name and face on the front, he generally expects a kung-fu movie with Jackie Chan as the main character.  He doesn't expect a movie about a dorky Indonesian kid on a kiddie adventure to find Jackie Chan.

Nitpickery -- Firefly

Hey y'all.  Do you like sci fi shows?  Then I suppose you've heard about this one show called Firefly, which lasted only one season, and had a movie.  I believe it was the Fox network that cancelled it, if I'm not mistaken.  Now, Fox is notorious for cancelling stuff, but this time, you have to wonder if they did it right.

Of course, you might be one of those fans that can see no wrong in Firefly.  I ask you at this time to set aside your enjoyment of the show and consider what I'm saying for a bit.  After all, it's good to see the other side of things once in a while, and it's always possible to enjoy something that isn't perfect.  For example, there apparently was once a blogger who claimed Captain Picard was a wuss.  Instead of getting offended, I examined some episodes of Star Trek: TNG to see.  He's not a coward, but he did have a hard time getting Deanna Troi's mother to leave the transporter room, and acts as if he's got no spine whenever she's mentioned.

But this isn't about Star Trek.  In fact, it's really unfair to compare Firefly to Star Trek, so I'm not going to do that...for the most part.  There's some storytelling aspects that are acceptable to compare.  However, Trek is generally idealistic and Firefly isn't, so I won't compare a lot.

So anyway, this series is the story of several future people flying around in their spaceship Serenity, doing various jobs legal and illegal, whatever happens to come their way and will earn them money.  They have to stay far away from the central planets, because the big ol' government has taken over and of course cannot be trusted.

Hm.  I wonder if that's a stereotype...

Nitpickery: Heaven's Devils

Hey y'all.

Have you ever read a book and wonder how it got published?  The first time I did that (other than with school books...guh) was when I was reading Mary Higgins Clark.  She comes up with really great premises, like a criminal investigator who sees a victim that looks just like her, but the execution of it wasn't that great.  The endings are just too nice, wrapped up in a perfect little bow.

This is my official apology to Mary Higgins Clark.  She only somewhat deserved the things I thought about her, and even then people really do like endings with perfect little bows.  How else do you explain romance novels?  Just because her endings are that way doesn't mean she can't write.  She's able to connect with the readers through emotion, and that's got to count for something.

And that brings us to a recent read of mine: Heaven's Devils by William C. Dietz.  This is an official Starcraft fanfiction, and it's aimed to give us Raynor's backstory.  At least it....tried.

Nitpickery: The Avengers

Hey y'all.  Guess what?  I actually saw a movie on the day it came out.  I never do that.  I'm usually that pretend to wait for the dollar theater but end up forgetting about it until it comes on Netflix sort of person.  And I'm a cheapskate.  But it was my birthday, so I wanted to go see a movie.

I had a really good birthday, actually.  I got free fancy tea, put in an application for a new job, and had one of those "baconator" sandwiches from Wendy's.  Yummers.  Oh wait, I forgot, I have leftover cake.  Be right back!

...

Okay, cake acquired.  Movie review time.

Nitpickery: Hollow Fields

Hey y'all.  So I was working at the bookstore the other day, and I was putting up some new manga books we just bought in.  One of these was a thick volume called Hollow Fields.  This is what the back cover of it says:

"Little Lucy Snow was meant to be enjoying her first day at the nice Elementary school in town, however a macabre twist of fate sees her enrolled instead at Miss Weaver's Academy for the Scientifically Gifted and Ethically Unfettered- also known as Hollow Fields.

Located on the outskirts of Nullsville and run by the insidious Engineers, the grim boarding school dedicates itself to raising the next generation of mad scientists and evil geniuses!  Classes include Live Taxidermy, Cross Species Body-Part Transplantation and Killer Robot Construction, and for her own survival Lucy has to master them quickly...the student with the lowest grades at the end of each school weeks is sent to the windmill for detention -- and so far, no child has ever returned!"

Nitpickery: Writing and Selling Your Novel by Jack M. Bickham

Hey y'all.  So as you know, I'm a writer, and I work in a bookstore.  It's now a used bookstore, but I still get to "check out" and read books.  I've been trying to read more books that will help me, rather than just history or fiction books.  Those are helpful for writing, but I want to get more into business books and those that will help me get published.

So this book, "Writing and Selling Your Novel" sounds perfect, yes?  You'd think that.  I mean, it is a helpful book in its own right.  However, writing is all about voice: the way your books sounds when it's read out in the mind.  Some people have sarcastic voices, others blunt or fanciful.  While voice is important for fiction, it's even more important for non-fiction.  In non-fiction you're more constrained about what you can write, and the entertainment factor heavily depends on the reader's base interest in your subject matter.  The only major place where a non-fiction writer can show their own independent creativity is in their voice and presentation of the subject at hand.

And that's where Jack Bickham gets me.  I'm all excited to be reading the book, and then I get to paragraph three.  At once I'm pulled out of it, no longer following the writer as he speaks.  Lemme quote it.

"Of course you'll need talent, too.  But 'talent' is a mysterious quality that can emerge only after a professional attitude has been cultivated and fully developed.  To put this another way, 'talent' is what people say you have after you have worked like hell for years to improve yourself."

Um, no.  Bickham's doing a little thing here I've seen in other writers where he changes the meaning of a word and accuses other people of having misunderstood it in the first place.  Honestly though, having read further, I do understand his sentiment.  Basically he's trying to say that you shouldn't just call yourself a writer and then produce five pages every two months.  You have to have a professional attitude about your work.

My problem with this passage is that he's going too far with it.  Talent, yes, is a mysterious thing that is a bit awkward to define.  I personally, as well as most people in general, refer to it as having naturally the qualities that would make you good at a job or trade.  You've met people that are just good at singing or drawing or something, and you wonder how they do it.  This doesn't mean they're perfect or anything, because all babies start out with no knowledge, but it does mean that if they decided to persue a singing (or whatever) career, they'd end up having to work less hard at it than you to produce the same results.

Talent does include a necessary amount of work for success, but at the end of the day, that's not talent.  That's drive.  Talent is capable of existing in people who have no drive.  This is what we call wasted talent: you know they're good and could be great, but they slack.

Yes, nitpickery perhaps, but already Bickham's got me ranting and raving in my head by the third paragraph.  Not good.  I guess he's trying to be abrupt and extreme by coming across strong, but it's really very off-putting if you're someone like me.  Other people will like Bickham's directness, and I would too if he didn't feel the need to be unnecessarily contrary.

Still, there are others who will feel differently than I do about it, willing to see it more from Bickham's perspective.  Really, all Bickham wants is for writers to take what they do more seriously.  That is a good endeavor, and does help the book go on.  Still, I have other grievances with his work, yes, nitpicks, but that's what I do.  I'm only going to mention a few problems I have, because I get too ranty sometimes.

And so I quote again.

"It's only in this century that the distinction between 'what's good' and 'what's popular' began to be drawn by academics and their hoity-toity followers."

How do you know that?  How do you know it's only been going on now?  Snobs have only existed in the past 100 years?  None before then?  Also, how do you know it's the "hoity-toities" that are to blame?  Aren't there lower-class people who have thumbed their noses at "cultural" stuff?  And why would anyone follow an academic?  I follow people I like and trust, not just smart people.  Again, nitpick, but this statement just reeks of oversimplicity.

"...and give up the mystical baloney about 'inspiration' and other stuff that doesn't exist except in the fevered imagination of a few deluded English teachers."

I really want to give Bickham credit.  He feels passionately about writing and does have a lot of good and important things to say.  Yet again this statement trips me up unnecessarily.  All he had to say is to not wait for inspiration and just work until your motor neurons are just used to being creative all the time.  This does happen the more you write.

That doesn't, however, negate the existence of inspiration.  Inspiration is essentially that burning, excited feeling you have within you when you realize you have something to write and can possibly do it.  Or, alternatively, it's the little spark of something you see, hear, and/or feel that gives you an idea of something you want to write.  Sure, inspiration is a floating mystical thing that nobody really understands properly and you have to make disciplined to work in your favor, but it exists.

Probably Bickham is just complaining about it because he's annoyed that people go on and on talking about inspirations and ideas but never put anything down on paper.  I wish he would just say so instead of throwing the baby out with the bathwater.  Sometimes we writers just want to take a break and be all pretentious and talk of such things.  There's nothing wrong with that, as long as we also get work done.

Okay, so my problems with all those other comments is just the unnecessary hatred that comes along with them.  Bickham's sentiments in and of themselves are perfectly acceptable and in fact even necessary to the budding writer.  He just feels the need to go that extra step and really narrow down the meaning of his words, making it easy for the reader to get thrown and off-topic.  Again, he's probably just trying to be extreme, and there are those who will like his more practical perspective.  But at the end of the day, writing is an art.  All arts will retain an aspect of floaty, emotional strangeness that is more or less so depending on the specific artwork.  Art does not exist to be purely practical, and therefore no one can be purely practical and a good artist.

My next complaint will be about the advice Bickham gives.  Let's see...I'll give you two more quotes and my problems with them, then I'll give an overall review of the book.

Okay, so chapter five opens with a really weird story about a caveman named Hrothgar.  Hrothgar is just a nobody caveman that isn't popular or admired.  One day, Hrothgar gets into a battle with a tiger, and after a long battle, the tiger jumps at him.  Hrothgar ducks, and the tiger jumps completely over him and into a river.  So Hrothgar goes back home and tells everyone this story, and they're all really impressed.  Hrothgar likes the attention, so he makes up similar stories, hoping to continually impress his clan.

Of course, eventually this stops working, because obviously no one warrior could have all these adventures.  So Hrothgar starts telling them from the second person perspective.  "Imagine you were a warrior...", etc.

I thought at first that the point of this mini story was going to have to do with believability.  Not so.  Bickham's trying to make the overall point that all writers should want to make the reader see themselves in the story.  While this is true sometimes, trying too hard to have a second person perspective risks being really gimmicky.  It's a choice an author makes depending on what they intend to write.

Bickham continues to explain that a viewpoint must be maintained.  A viewpoint or perspective, however you want to put it, is basically who's telling you the story or whose eyes you are seeing the story through.

Please forgive this brief lesson in elementary writing.  It's necessary to make a point.  I was armed with this information in my head as I read the passage, and it alerted me at once to Bickham's opinion.
1st person writing- "I went down the hallway..."
2nd person writing- "You went down the hallway..."
3rd person writing- "He/she/it went down the hallway..."

Note that third person has two different forms, limited and omniscient.  These terms basically refer to how you reveal new information.  Limited means that you only learn about what one person sees.  For example, if Bob is your viewpoint character, in 3rd person limited the author only writes what Bob can experience.  Bob goes to a party, and he can tell you the sights and sounds.  He cannot, however, tell you what the girls he hits on are thinking.  In omniscient, the author does reveal what the girls are thinking directly.

Limited: "Bob felt so nervous.  He barely managed to say his name to the hot blonde, but she only wrinkled her nose and turned away."
Omniscient: "Bob felt so nervous.  He barely managed to say his name to the hot blonde, but she obviously felt negatively about the possibility of them going out."

Now, knowing this, I read what Bickham had to say.  He had some very good points about 3rd person limited, telling his readers not to switch perspectives or go outside of the experiences of the viewpoint character.  Bickham basically says that 3rd person omniscient is old fashioned and outdated.  While I do appreciate how he hammers down the point of not switching perspectives too much and he does explain viewpoint characters very well, it's silly of him to knock 3rd person omniscient.

As soon as he started knocking it, all I could think of was the stories I liked that had 3rd person omni.  In particular I kept thinking about C.S. Lewis' The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe, and the passage where Lewis explains each of the four childrens' reactions to hearing the name of Aslan.  Yes, I know that was written decades ago, but the fact is, people still read and buy the Chronicles of Narnia books today.  They're still good.  And therefore, so is 3rd person omniscient, which I'm sure I could find in many other good novels.

Yes, people do abuse 3rd person omni, and they should be aware they do so.  But you can't throw the baby out with the bathwater.  He also said, "there is no use in trying to write a modern novel from the viewpoint of the passive observer" (emphasis his).  All I could think of is Perelandra, where Lewis uses himself as the passive storyteller of his friend Ransom's adventures on Venus.

Thing is, art should be liberating, not constraining.  Yes, limiting oneself can produce new skills and strengthen weaknesses, and thus is good at times.  But art in and of itself can be many various things.  You can paint with watercolors, acrylics, food, digital pixels, and even chicken crap.  Art is expression in various different ways, and just because a way is different doesn't mean it's wrong.  Except for the chicken crap.   Saw that in a museum once.  Very wrong.

And then he gets into one of the most bizarre comments I've ever heard.  First he lists a few examples of a "viewpointless" statements.

"-Something crawled across Joe's hand....
- Joe took a drink.  It had almond flavoring....
- Smoke filled the room.  Joe got up....

This is description or narration from no viewpoint.  It's neutral.  The reader doesn't know who he is supposed to be."

And suddenly the story about Hrothgar makes more sense.  Bickham thinks a reader wants to be a character.  In some cases, this is true, but by no means is it all.  Nor should a writer have to plan for a reader to want to be a character.  A lot of the time they don't want to be someone, they merely want to be themselves, perhaps with powers or weapons, inside that universe.

Take Star Trek.   You've got a lot of good characters in that universe, but people don't want to be any of them.  They want to be a cool captain like Kirk, or an ex-Borg like Seven of Nine with her regenerative nanites, or perhaps a Klingon like Worf.   They don't want to be those people exactly, because then they would have to play by the personality rules of Kirk, Seven or Worf.  They want to have their own personalities.

At the end of the day, it's not about creating a cool person, it's about creating a world.  A world with seemingly no limits, where readers can fill in their favorite gaps with their own imaginations.  A world they can build on in their minds, either adding themselves or maybe their own set of characters.  It's one thing to limit oneself, but shame, Bickham, don't limit the reader.

Crap.  I wrote down in my journal some of the stuff Bickham wrote on page 29.  I was going to skip over this for the sake of brevity, but I really want to talk about them.  Characterization is one of my favorite parts of writing, so I feel I have to address some of this.  Here we go.

First, a minor nitpick.  Bickham claims that it is the author that forms plot and not chance.  That no plot is an accident.  While on one level this is true, it sort of diminishes the fact that characters write stories.  I don't remember if I posted it here, but I wrote an essay on facebook once about predestination and free choice existing both at the same time.  It does in writing.

You, the author of a story, are writing out what happens.  However, it is only bad authors that force characters to do things that they would not choose or say things they wouldn't say.  In this sense, it's the characters that make choices for you, deciding which paths are possible and which are not.  Therefore it is an effort of both author and character that writes the plot.

But fine, that's a nitpick.  Let me get to a real issue.

"In the first place, a character is not a real person.  Real people, when rendered with total fidelity on paper, are dull, unconvincing, and vague.  A fiction character must, first of all, be a host of exaggerations.
"Why?  Because one of the hardest things we ask readers to do is to take some symbols on a piece of paper, translate these symbols into words, process the words into meanings, sort out and react to both the denotation and connotation of those words (not to mention deep processing of secondary associations!), then take all this and imagine a human being, then believe the human being actually exists--but in a make-believe world--identify with the person, care about the person, worry about the person and invest time in finding out what happens to that person-- who doesn't really exist anywhere except in the imagination!
"Readers understandibly aren't very good at this."

Bickham, Bickham, Bickham!  Why must you insult readers?  That's highly offensive, and very near to calling non-writer people stupid.  For one thing, anyone who reads is already doing those things, unless they don't connect to your writing for whatever reason.

Note that there are several reasons why a reader might not connect to a writer's story.  Perhaps they feel the author isn't creative enough or his writing is faulty.  Or they have different beliefs than the writer and the story primarily involves these beliefs.  Or maybe they just don't like your genre.  Sometimes people don't like fiction altogether.  Maybe they're just in such a bad mood they can't like anything at the moment.  Or in Bickham's case, I don't connect to his book because he makes too many broad statements.  There are multifarious different ways a reader can be disconnected from a book, none of which have to do with the reader having no intelligence or imagination.   On occasion, it's the author with none.

The thing that bothers me the most about the above statement is that all the things Bickham mentions are just things that everyone does subconsciously when they read.  Sure, some people are better than others at interpreting language, but it is a process every reader does.  Taking "symbols on a piece of paper" and "translat[ing] these into words" is the very simply process of reading.  If you're a reader at all of the language, you can translate our Roman symbols into words.  You do it every day.

As for having any sort of emotions for a character, that depends almost entirely on the writer.  It's the writer's job to get you interested in the character, not the reader's job to muster up emotion for a fictitious person.  This might be difficult for the early writer, but it's still their job and something they have to learn to do.  You can't put the burden of believability on someone else.

Okay, so insulting the reader aside, let's deal with his first statement that complains real people on paper are dull, unconvincing and vague.  I don't know why he says that.  Quite frankly, I crave real people in writing, and when authors present this cartoonish fops to pass as characters, I find it hard to continue reading.  And yet that's just what Bickham asks the budding writer to do.  Later on he makes the statement that because the story is going on in words instead of a visual medium like movies, all characters must be exaggerated to garish proportions.

NO.  NOOOOOO.  No.

Okay, okay.  There is a time and a place for having more cartoonish characters.  Those are specific genres or specific roles that are not at all meant to be taken seriously.  However, with the normal character, you don't exaggerate.  You imply.

The reason he claims writing a real person on paper is dull may possibly be that it just takes too much information to explain a full person out.  Writers should be careful not to overload their readers with information about a character, especially not a two page essay on who that person is.  That's why I say imply.  You take the individual characteristics of a person and imply them throughout the story.  Perhaps you have a female cop and want to explain that she has an affinity for fashion, wondering if she is any good at it.  You could imply this by having her job take her to a clothing store, and she takes a second to peruse some racks and wonder if a shirt would look good with a skirt she has at home.  Or you could have her sketching dresses in her spare time.  She could tell a criminal that he should never wear a plaid jacket with pinstripe pants.

The art of writing is not about explaining everything to your reader.  You should not assume your reader is stupid.  In fact, you should assume they are intelligent.  Leave little clues about a person and let the reader come up with their own ideas.  For example, King Theoden in Lord of the Rings makes the statement, "I am old, and fear nothing anymore".  This shows without showing that Theoden is a crusty older person that's gone through a lot, and yet is a completely hardcore guy you don't want to mess with.  Readers see this statement and enjoy Theoden's personality for being so fearless.  The point is to let readers decide on their own how they feel about your character.  Your skill as a writer will be revealed if they feel the same way you do about them.

The ultimate example of implication is Star Trek: The Original Series.  People have their ideas about Star Trek and it's pretentiousness, but the original series was never like that at all.  It's goofy, hilarious, and yes, a tad self-righteous.  At the end of the day it's nowhere near as grand as people see it in their imaginations.  Seriously, watch "The Trouble with Tribbles" or "I, Mudd".  You'll see what I'm talking about.

Back when Star Trek first aired, it had meh ratings and a fight against cancellation ensued at the end of the first and second season (no one bothered for the third).  The saddest part is that the fan mailings and gatherings that supported the continuation of Star Trek were all organized by Trek's creator Gene Roddenberry himself.  When Gene got a bad time slot for the third season, he even gave up on his own creation, leaving it to the writers and producers to figure out what they were going to do.

Only in re-runs did Star Trek come back to life.  It wasn't Gene's doing, or the doings of Paramount (they own Trek) or any of the people associated with the show.  Fans just liked it.  They put meaning into Star Trek that no one had ever intended in the first place.  Roddenberry didn't create the Trekkers, they created themselves.

And that's why we should never assume the reader is stupid.  Their additions, encouragements, and feelings for your characters, even if it's not obvious at first, are what make you a success.  If you let them, your work can even outlive you.



Okay, so let me review his book.  I've gone on and on about how I disagree with several of Bickham's points, but the fact of the matter is, he's very intelligent.  He knows the basic structures of how to write, and he does have things to teach.  There are so many good exercises in his book that it will be helpful to the people that can get over Bickham's negativity.  It's just so sad the guy threw me off early on.  Later in the book he gets much more helpful, and there's a lot of things a person can learn from him.

Another trouble with this book is the words "and selling".  This book has all of four chapters on selling books, and the first three are about editing your story and say practically nothing about actually selling.  The last chapter does not go in depth about actually selling the book.  It states a few vague principles without bothering to discuss strategies or working on sales pitch.  There is no reason to buy this book if your primary concern is selling your novel.

Honestly, Bickham should have catered more towards his artist audience by not putting in his anti-artistic and reader insulting statements.  He also should have not bothered talking about selling at all.  It's clear he has more opinions and advice to give on the actual construction of the novel, so he should have renamed his work to reflect this.  Maybe, "The Writer's Classroom" or something like that.

Now, you might think I'm missing the points that Bickham is trying to make in his contrary statements.  Yes, that's exactly right.  I am missing his points, precisely because he goes out of his way to confront "old fashioned" ideas and say they are wrong.  In reality, they are merely different.  Bickham is so confrontational about it that I am extemely reluctant to view things from his perspective.

For example, J.R.R. Tolkien and his friends wrote stories precisely because they didn't want to read contemporary literature.  They wanted to write something different, something they wanted to read.  They weren't focused so much on modernity that they forgot other eras could write.  And now Tolkien is the father of today's fantasy.  It's Tolkien's influence that resulted in things like Drizzt Do'Urden, Warcraft, and all the plethora of elvish/"historical" fantasy books that are out there today.

The lesson to learn here is that you are a good writer when you write what you want, not what is "modern" or "today".  You should always know the basic principles of writing and do your research, and at the end of the day if you enjoy what you wrote, chances are you have an audience, and they'll like it too.

Nitpickery --- Starcraft 2

So, I just watched an SC2 let's play on the net.  I don't own the game yet, as I am a cheapskate, but I wanted to see what happened.  I must say, I'm both giddy and appalled.  Giddy because I love the presentation and gameplay.  Playing the game isn't too different from the first so you don't have to learn a whole new setup.  The presentation is magnificent, and the characters look mostly creative (what is the deal with Raynor's arm?), and I love being able to explore the Hyperion as well access Zeratul's memories.  It's a great game that's got both dark elements, goofy elements, and yet an overall very satisfying experience.  I enjoy it very much.

That being said, my inner writer is going "GRRRRR..." because I like to nitpick.  Some of the writing in this game is absolutely weird.  Starting with:

Zeratul.  Now, in vanilla, Zeratul was great.  He was smart, cool, and hung out with the Templar with no problem.  Then in Brood War he suddenly became kinda stupid.  I mean, if Kerrigan was talking to me and said. "I'll be seeing you again, real soon", the first thing I would do is shoot her in the face.  She's the friggin' Queen of Blades and she's threatening you, and you're just going to ignore her?  Besides, Zeratul never even asked himself why a former human would appeal to the Protoss if her mind was free from the newly dead Overmind.  I mean, wouldn't she try to find her old human friends?  Well, to be fair, the other 'Toss didn't ask themselves that either.  

So now in SC2, Zer seems completely different.  He was previously dark and brooding, and towards the end of Brood War very depressed.  He was cool.  Now he's amazingly generic.  His voice isn't as cool, nothing he says really means anything, and he kinda just comes and goes without speaking much to Raynor.  Raynor is supposed to be his friend, and Zer just shows up, goes "DOOOOMM!", hands him the memory crystal, then disappears.  Can't Zer at least hang around for a mission?  Maybe at least talk to Raynor like a real person would?

It's a good thing the cinematic where Zer and Kerrigan were fighting looked dang awesome, because not a thing they said had any relevance.  It was like "Doom!", "Hope!",  "Fate", and "Prophecy!" without really saying anything the audience would understand or care.  

For that matter, nothing Kerrigan says in the entire game was interesting. In vanilla and BW, she spoke a little melodramatic but always in a more or less human, real fashion.  Listening to her gloat was actually kinda funny.  Now....just more of the Zer disease.  I can't really judge the new voice actor she has, because the lines themselves are just too dumb to really compare her to Glynnis Talken.  It's not her fault.

So yeah, I found those two characters to be the weakest part of the plot.  My other complaints are closer to nitpickery.  Next is Raynor.  Now, I really like the Raynor character.  For the most part, he was really good and enjoyable, and there's a cinematic where he's taking down Tychus that's pure awesome.  For the most part I enjoyed watching Raynor do stuff, and went along with his struggles, protesting, "Hey, Jimmy, don't you drink so much!"

My main complaint with Raynor is the lack of connection between his SC2 counterpart and his BW one.  He's the same character for the most part, only for his behavior concerning Kerrigan.  At the end of BW, we last see Raynor when Fenix has been killed, and Raynor swears that he's going to be the one to kill Kerrigan.  

How does he go from that to being "ooh, I'm gonna risk the lives of all my followers to go save her"?  It's really, really odd.  If they could have made some sort of logical transition, like having Raynor really freaked out about having to save her when he doesn't want to but then later realizing that he does need her to save the universe, that would have been a better way to go.

While this may be a lesser point, it's one I feel the most strongly about.  Mengsk.  While I would never like such a person in real life, as a character I found him strongly interesting in the original.  I loved watching his hypocrisy and how being forced to work for infested Kerrigan started showing off some of his true, more cowardly/crafty/selfish colors.  He was so rich and deep as a character that he was the character so dang fun to despise.

Now?  Nope.  In some ways he's just a generic bad leader who uses propaganda, and in other ways he's a replacement for the Confederacy.  While the propaganda storyline was actually pretty good, it tore down Mengsk by making the things he said pretty dull and trite.  He was actually good at making speeches in SC1.  Now he says stuff like "humans are great" and "I love everyone" and blah blah, all that bullcrap.  C'mon, where's he making his riveting speeches and stuff?  Can't it actually look like he's a decent leader so humans don't look like complete idiots for following him?

Now, for the other half, that he's a replacement for the Confederacy, you have to think a little.  Now, in one sense he's a bad leader who replaced a bad government: the Confederacy.  That's entirely fine.  What's not fine is him being note for note exactly like him.  He's his own type of dictator, not a carbon copy of them.  

Specifically, I don't like that he's behind doing experiments with Zerg/Protoss hybrids (which, if you recall one of the maps that came out between SC1 and 2, was actually something the Confederacy was previously doing).  I do expect him to want to fight and to improve the Dominion's standing in the universe, but come on.  I always liked the notion that Duran, the "former Confederate", was the one who initiated the experiments during that government, then abandoned them when the events of vanilla's Terran missions took place.  I really should give this plotline more time, but it really irks me.

And so Arcturus has his son, Valerian, who is okay in my opinion.  I look forward to seeing more of him and whatever he's up to.  However, I read that Valerian was created because "Arcturus' story had already been told".  This says one thing to me: that I liked Arcturus far better than the writers of Starcraft did.

Note how I hate these not as a gamer, but as a writer.  Writing Starcraft fanfiction was what gave me my start at learning to become a fantasy/sci fi writer, and I'm better off for it today.  That being said, I had a lot in my head of potential for all the characters that exist, and the only character in the franchise whose story has been properly told is Tassadar.  We know what motivates him and how his life turned out because of it.  Even characters like DuGalle or my personal favorite Judicator Aldaris probably have really great backstories worth getting into.

Crap, I should write a novel for Aldaris and see if Blizzard lets me publish it....

Anyway, to get to my point, I saw Mengsk with a lot of potential.  Like Raynor, he too had a moment where he hated Kerrigan enough to ally with the UED (his competitors for power) and the Protoss to try to get rid of her.  And she pwned him, allowing him to live only because she wanted him to see her taking over the universe.  This to me leads to a great storyline for him, especially since Mengsk previously allied with her to retake his home planet from the UED.  I see him something like "I sold my soul to give my worst enemy control of the K sector...I really need to ramp things up for when she comes back.  She's not taking my empire away from me again".

I really see this as leading to a change in Mengsk.  He becomes darker, more sensible, and less willing to make mistakes or disregard people ever again.  Honestly, it makes more sense for him to go Kerry-hunting rather than trying to run down Raynor all the time.  That way he could use his anti-Zerg policies for propaganda.  

Another thing about the whole having to have the rebellion, though this might be more subjective.  I always saw Mengsk as someone who would treat his subjects well enough if they just did what he said.  It's like in the first Terran missions: he was cool to Raynor and Kerrigan as long as they obeyed him.  He even showed some measure of grace to Duke by saving him from the Zerg.  Even in Mengsk's megalomaniacal selfishness, he didn't try to harm the people that made him a ruler for no reason.  He's willing to do things to make himself look good, unlike the Confederacy.  They were generic bad guys, and Mengsk isn't.  He's artistically evil.  Like Shang Tsung from Mortal Kombat, in a way.

I'll admit that's a personal problem, but it just seems that Mengsk can do more than be a prop baddie.  I just hope Valerian gets to do more later on and isn't treated as shallowly as his dad.

Okay, final rant point.  What's the deal with the Zerg?  I understand Kerry having to be an important character.  But I know I'm not the only person who thinks it's weird that the Zerg "aren't bad guys, just misunderstood".  I mean, at the end of BW everyone finally seems to understand that it's better to fight the Zerg than each other, and oops!  The evil race of critters that infest and destroy any species they come across is really just misunderstood.  How dandy.  How friggin' dandy.  Way to undercut the franchise.  I take it back.  This is the plot point that irritates me the most.

The King's Speech: Beyond Nitpickery

I just want to point out something. I rant and rave and nitpick all about The King's Speech, but at the end of the day I haven't said the real problem with it. I've pointed out details, at flaws in storytelling, but the real problem of this movie is not storytelling. It's certainly not acting, nor is it writing. Well, actually it sort of is writing, but bigger than that.

It's symbolism. So think to yourself. What is a king's speech? What's anybody's speech? It's a symbol, more so because it comes from a king. It's a symbol of strength of a country, of belief in the future of a nation, or of the belief in the people of that nation. Specifically, the speech in the movie was a symbol that England was not going to roll over and let the Nazis defeat them. It was a symbol that England was going to fight and prevail, and if not prevail, then fill the Nazis with horror at the memory of having had to fight them.

Doesn't that sound nice? Doesn't it sound wonderfully strong and relentless? Deliciously barbarian and yet completely noble? Well, that's how it should have gone. The King's Speech had good actors and a good historical background, yet we can't judge a movie on its background, but what it presents. Yes, we all know that the King of Britain gave speeches, and it's true he was a stutterer that had to overcome it. Nevertheless, when you present the king in the movie as an overbearing emo kid that can't see out of his own personal sphere, you lose touch with the historical aspect of the movie.  Notedly, I've learned to be fine with embellishing history in movies. I love Braveheart, even though Robert the Bruce was decidedly more hardcore in real life and the Princess of Wales was a child when William Wallace was running about.

Actually, the movie I'm going to compare King's Speech to is The Stone of Destiny, a movie that came out not too long ago that was also about historical events at only a few years later setting: Scottish college student Ian Hamilton is upset with his countrymen and with Scotland's situation in general because everyone seems to have given up on being independent from Britain. He and three friends go to Westminister Abbey and steal the Stone of Destiny (AKA the Stone of Scone) to show Scotland that she is just as proud and independent as ever.

You will note that the Stone is the exact same thing as the speech: a symbol. It's a symbol of Scotland's kings and freedom. Okay, so we've got two movies side by side that are more or less historically accurate and both concern a symbol. Why then do I claim that Stone of Destiny is a far better movie than The King's Speech?

For the most part I find that the characters in Stone of Destiny are more endearing. They feel like real people. Each of them goes to steal the Stone for their own personal reasons, but also for Scotland: they feel this intangible, inexpressible love for their home, and even though it's the most silly thing in the world to think that stealing a dang rock from England will do much in the end, it's such a passionate thing to do. I understand their reasoning completely, even though they never explain this out. Moreover, their individual reasonings are perfectly human. Ian is tired of his country giving up and calling themselves "North England".  One compatriot wants to do something and be more than just a little nobody that everyone underestimates.  Another conspirator is a happy, humorous and entirely given to passion person, but at the end of the day he wants to be more than a joke. Kay is more sensible than the boys, but she too is swayed by her love of country. Everyone's reasoning is human and understandible. There's nothing fake about them.

Now, the lead actor from The King's Speech did a good job acting, and in many ways he was sympathetic. None of the other characters really are. I mean, you might think Geoffrey Rush's character was interesting, but I found it hard to sympathize with him. The primary reason for all of this is that all of them feel like stereotypes. You've got your "unorthodox" teacher-type, your wimpy and whiny preacher (some church dude none of the writers gave a crap about), your angry and ill-defined father type (the previous king), the "I must live my own life!" guy (elder brother David), and so on and so forth. How identifiable. Even the two cute girls that are supposed to be the current Queen of England and her sister are very dull and aren't given anything unique to do.

Of course, it's not all just about characters. My primary point is something else. It's symbolism. Okay, now in The King's Speech, they're about to get into the craziest war ever, involving the three most evil human beings to ever exist: Adolf Hitler, Josef Stalin, and Mao Tse Tung. They're going to be bombed, they're going to see the horrors of prison camps, children will be sent out of cities, and they're going to fight and die for their country. This is no joke. They're embarking on a crazy journey to save all of dang Europe! I hope Europe remembers to this day that much of it would not exist if it weren't for England.

This is quite a weighty matter, to say the least. What the crap is stealing a stone compared to it? A stone doesn't matter. Who in their right mind would trade victory over evil for a heavy chunk of sandstone? Why in the world do I dare believe that a story of stealing a symbol is better than a story of preparing for World War II?

It's all in the symbolism. In Stone of Destiny, all of them believed in Scotland. They loved her. While they had their own motives for going to steal the Stone of Destiny, at the end of the day they did it for their country. Even in the face of Kay getting sick or Ian getting caught, they refused to give up, because the symbolism of the Stone was important. They treasured the symbolism with genuine love.

Okay, so how did they treat symbols in The King's Speech? First of all, the king himself is one. He is a symbol of England's...something. I actually don't get why England still has royalty even though the Prime Minister is the guy doing everything, but if a royal is important to England, well, let them have one. It's their business. Anyway, he's a symbol of England's heritage. Rush's character insists that he and the king be treated as equals, and refuses to treat the king if they can't be on a first name basis. Thus, symbolism takes a hit. If kings aren't something "above" the normal populace (not in value, simply position), or at the very least people entrusted with the spirit of England, then what good are they? Aren't they just fancy-pants people supported by taxpayers, then?

Now, this alone I'd be fine with, as one can say it was necessary for the King's healing that he have a more casual relationship with his speech therapist. Perfectly fine. But then they start doing other things wrong. First, they don't show the two most relevant groups that show how important the king is as a symbol: there's the positive group, namely the people of England that need protecting/encouragement, and there's the negative group, the enemy. If there's no one to protect, why does the king matter? And if there's no one to defend against, same question? They show a scene comparing Bertie's oral skills to Hitler's, and that was a good scene, but other than that we never feel terror at the Nazis, or at least at war in general. People are consumed in meddling politics, David's trangressions, and Bertie's emo whining. So....ain't there like a war or somethin' about to go on then? You have to look at the bigger picture, Donna.

Then there's the coronation. I hate the preparation part the worst of all. At one point, Rush's character is running through the coronation vows, looking through it to see how much the King actually has to say during the ceremony. As he's going through the long parts that the administrator of the vows says to the King, he goes, "Rubbish, rubbish, rubbish". He could have easily said, "blah, blah, blah" or whatever. By directly insulting the words of this vow, he's attacking and diminishing a symbol. Likewise, Rush is trying to provoke the King in another bit by sitting in the ancient throne of British kings, which is normally reserved only for ceremony and no non-royal posterior dare touch. Ironically, the Stone of Scone is actually inside this throne under the seat, at which my heart turned angry. I'm Irish, not Scottish, but they are my family. We're the only true Celts left in the world. Leave the Celtic symbols alone!

So thus Rush disrespects another symbol. His excuse for this is he's trying to piss Bertie off, because Bertie talks better when he's mad. This is a very materialist view: symbols don't matter because they aren't physically real. The vow is nothing but words strung together and the throne is a dang old chair with somebody else's rock in it. If disrespecting these is what it takes to make the King talk better, then it's worth it, right?

Wrong. After all, what is all this speech therapy for? For Bertie, the next King George, to give a speech which inspires his nation and encourages them as they embark on a crazy war. The speech, of course, is likewise a symbol. It's just a bunch of words strung together, just like that "rubbish, rubbish, rubbish" vow. Wait, if the speech isn't important, why bother giving it? It's meaningless words. Why bother having a king at all? He's some emo kid on the public dime.

See, the value of symbols lies in your treatment of them. Speeches inspire because they are like song. They touch upon our innermost being and communicate to us the things we hold dear. They reach past the boundaries of language and past the daily grind to reach us at our core, where our deepest emotions and most well set beliefs lie. The Stone of Scone isn't worth anything because it's a stone, it's worth something because there's a whole bunch of Scots out there that love their country and believe better things for Scotland. It's worth something because the people of Scotland give it worth. It's terrible to destroy the Stone or disrespect it because then you would be simultaneously disrespecting the Scots. If we adopt a materialist view and see things as only worth what they phsically are, then we will never see anything better. After all, if Bertie's worth only lay in his ability at the beginning of the movie, by what right would we have to believe anything better for him?

You say I'm missing the point. You say that The King's Speech is about a man learning to become a symbol and his emotional journey along the way. Whatever. It is difficult for me to sympathize with someone who can't see outside his own problem. He doesn't persue a good voice out of love, but out of obligation. This symbol has failed. It gave a speech, but in the end, it was not for England. The end of the movie swells with triumph, happy for the king. There isn't even a hint at the darkness that is to face England for the next six years.

Because of the way England does its monarchs, a king's value is only in his symbolism. If a king stands only for himself, what good is he? Maybe you feel weak. Maybe you feel like the world has caught you in its clutches and you don't have the ability to proceed, just like Bertie. The easiest way to cure yourself is to remember that life is about everyone else. Forget yourself, and remember them. Then you will be happy.

Nitpickery -- Science Fiction

Hey y'all.  I just wanted to get nerdy for a minute.   You know how everybody like to compare Star Wars and Star Trek?  I sort of disagree with this notion.  I mean, it's fun and nerdy and all to talk about which is better, but at the end of the day these two universes aren't really that comparable.  They serve two different purposes and reach two different audiences, similar though they might be.

So what's the deal with them being uncomparable?  Well, just think about it.  Here you have Star Trek, which is forever going on about the idealization of the future and how people should deal with moral conflict.  It includes a lot of technobabble and histories.  On the other side of the coin is Star Wars, which is about becoming a hero, following the story of adventurers, and awesome ship and laser sword battles.

They're really two different things.  If someone says they like Star Wars better, then this person is action oriented.  Star Trek?  Thought oriented.  Another difference between the two is their treatment of spirituality.  Wars sees the universe as very spiritual, and no matter how sciencey things get, there is always the mystical and magical Force that makes all the planets go round.  Trek tends to ignore spirituality, in one sense.  All myths are nothing more than myths, and while certain barbaric traditions are treated with respect (vulcan mating rituals, Klingon pain stick thing, bizarre bring-Spock-back-to-life ceremonies), no spiritual creature, god, or demon is treated as anything more than somebody's legend.  Even the Q are nothing more than superior beings that feel like they have the right to judge all lesser species for some reason.

I should like to point out that in saying "Star Wars", I am only referencing the three original movies.  I categorically deny any and all sequels to these three movies.  Go to youtube and search for Red Letter Media if you want to know why.  Actually, I really do like those old shows that had these Ewoks and little kids running around...haven't seen them in years.  I won't deny the existence of those, just the prequels and that animated thingermajigger.  Be aware.

Poor, poor Star Wars.  Brutally murdered by your own creator.  It really makes me wonder how much George Lucas actually did make the original ones.  I mean, in the prequels a lot of things went wrong.  None of the actors do a good job, you don't know who Darth Maul is or why he's fighting, the love story between Anakin and Padme sucks, the dialogue falls flat, and the battle scenes are so crowded and messy that no one really knows what the crap is going on.  Red Letter Media goes into all of this with stern detail, but I wanted to mention it briefly.  Oh, while I'm at it, I'll warn you that RLM makes tasteless jokes at times that can be really disturbing.

This isn't really on topic, but I'd just like to mention that I don't really get all the hate for Jar Jar Binks.  I mean, he's lame and gets too much screentime, but the films have so many other flaws, it's just pointless to mention him.  I guess because he's so overt he takes a lot of the blame for the suckitude of the prequels.  People notice subconsciously all the other problems, but take it out on the obvious guy.

The single most devastating thing Lucas did to Star Wars was explain the Force.  That was the knife in Star Wars' chest, and all the rest is just turning the blade.  Mitochlorians?  The Force is microscopic thingamadoodles that infest people?  What the crap?  Star Wars is spiritual, magical.  It's not about science, at least not to a larger extent.  Explaining it is bad.

Star Trek, on the other hand, is all about explanation.  In the original film cantina scene in Star Wars, the costume and props guys just hauled out a bunch of random costumes and puppets to serve as aliens.  We don't know any of those species, and there's no need for us to.  Not so for the Trekkers (yes, it's Trekkers and not Trekkies).  They have races with their own histories, complex plotlines, and a massive plot that extends from the original series all the way to Voyager.   Technology is complex, and so are all their dialogues.

Let me briefly explain the history of Star Trek, which naturally has far more material than Wars.  It all started with the original series, a cheesy and happy show that came out in 1966.  It failed its five year mission and only lasted three seasons.  After several years of nothing, there was a short-lived attempt at an animated show, which didn't last long.  Star Trek: the Next Generation takes place a century later, and came out at about this time.  As this series went on, the original cast started to produce films, making Star Treks 1-6.  While the show was cheesy and took a bit to catch on, the films were actually very good (besides 5) and were the things that first encouraged me as a kid to like Star Trek.  And then I saw some original series episodes and understood fully why Paramount was always trying to cancel the original series throughout its run.

Gene Roddenberry died shortly after Star Trek 6, and this began to mark the end of Star Trek.  Sure, there was life in the series left.  They made Babylon 5 (regarded as a flop), Deep Space Nine (pretty good, but too dark-spirited for the Star Trek feel), Voyager (preeeetentious), and a few Next Generation movies that RLM gives his harsh treatment to in the same vein as his Star Wars reviews.

Then there's the latest Star Trek, that completely betrays everything we know and love about Trek: they're very gratuitous in killings, it's more individual focused, the bad guys are mostly unexplained and entirely worthless, the plot is full of cliches, Uhura is too skinny and kind of trashy (maybe this is just me, but in this role Zoe Saldana seemed to come across as any given generic white girl from California),

Mostly, the morality of the two are different.  Star Wars focuses more on the individual.  As an audience member, you follow along with the brave but inexperienced Luke, the determined Princess Leia trying to save her allies, and the brutish but dashing Han Solo in his quest for cash.   While the characters in Star Trek are generally likable, the feel of the show concerns the survival of species, the unity of all races, and the quest for humanity to purge itself of its "barbarian ways" (the worldly version of what is barbarian versus what barbarianism really means is a conflict I'll get into one day).

In other words, Star Trek has different ideals in mind.  Star Wars, I'm sure, was produced more to entertain and excite people with its laser swords and fun universe.  Trek, on the other hand, was produced by Gene Roddenberry for the specific purpose of improving the world's outlook on life.  It's suppose to touch on our inner desires for exploration and "unity of mankind" to help us create a better future.  Thus, Trek and Wars aren't that comparable.  They're in different catagories.

Now, what you can compare Star Trek to is the British science fiction series Dr. Who.  Dr. Who has run since 1963, and follows along the story of a human looking alien named "The Doctor" who runs around time and space in a flying police box (it's bigger on the inside) solving various problems and stopping various bad guys throughout his adventures.  He comes from the planet Gallifrey and is of the species Time Lord, long lived people who regenerate when they die.  They can do this up to 12 times, barring some effort to cheat death, which has been done before by one of the villains known as The Master.  This is the gimmick used to allow them to continue the series with different actors and still keep the plotline going.

What makes this a closer match to Star Trek, despite the fact that the police box (known as the TARDIS) is a  time vessel rather than a space vessel, is its heart.  Like Trek, it concerns itself with technobabble and pop morality.  Like Trek, in its earlier years it actually tried to be more scientfic.  And also like Trek, it has lost its way.

I'm not sure right at the moment which one has lost its way more, but yeah, they both have lost something of their original spirit.  In the case of Trek, the loss was very slow.  When Gene Roddenberry died, bits his idealistic futureview still remained with people still working on the universe.  However, over time Star Trek has become muddle, particularly since Trek nerds have been demonized and no one in popular culture seems too concerned about it.  Also, there is no current television show going on with Trek.

The last movie with JJ Abrams...guh.  I mean, I knew Hollywood was dying, but dang, Trek is supposed to be filled with nerds that can actually write.  Add to that Abram's general lack of understanding in matters of the human mind, and buh.  Red Letter Media did a review of this movie as well, citing all the things Abrams and company did wrong with this film...and then says he actually likes it.  He compared it to the music genre rock and roll, saying that it's just different and something to be appreciated by the masses.

I think that's an insult to rock.  Most of the characters in the newer Trek were bland and boring.  You can tell me that this movie was supposed to be the one that sets up Abram's franchise by setting up the characters, but even though we were staring at these guys for two hours (the Kirk character in particular) we really don't learn anything about them.  Kirk's character does stuff, but is merely a young stereotype running around and getting beat up by everyone and their moms.

The young Spock would have been okay, except that they had to go the extremely predictable route and have him be the half-human oddity without really adding anything of worth to the character.  The scene where his schoolmates are making fun of him is like a slightly Vulcan-ish parody of the Hollywood high school stereotype.  I will, however, say that Spock's character problems come less from acting and more from writing.  I feel that the actor did pretty good, and with better plot he could be a good Spock.

I was actually surprised at Karl Urban for being so good, like everyone else.  In other movies he tended to suffer from "reading lines syndrome" where he just sounds like he's reading, particularly in Lord of the Rings.  His character disappears after a while.  It's like the writers went, "okay, Doctor McCoy showed up and people saw him, so let's move on to the next thing now".  Sheesh.  How about letting him have a real part that actually does stuff and has depth?

They did this with Sulu, Chekov, and a little bit Uhura.  Scotty's part was a proper length for an engine guy who comes in at the middle of the film.  Sulu swings a katana (hello!  Sulu's supposed to be a fencer!) before disappearing, and Chekov does a really bad accent before he goes away.  Apparently the actor Anton Yelchin really is Russian, but you wouldn't believe it listening to him.  They actually tried to give Uhura more plot and skills than her original series counterpart, but these guys are nobodies that I guess the writers just wanted to get out of the way.  We don't actually learn anything new about them.

Also, I wish they would have hired a different actor for Sulu.  It's really hard to take an actor seriously when they're best known for being in a stoner movie.  This next comment may be weird, but...he's too white looking.  Maybe it's a lighting problem on the set, but I always loved how nice and dark George Takei's skin was on the original show.  Asian people are really beautiful to me, and it's annoying that the Asian guy on the ship looks like a white guy.  Isn't this supposed to be an interracial cast?

I'm gonna make a weirder comment on Uhura.  Zoe Saldana has a huge case of boring white woman disorder.  It's quite common in Hollywood these days.  This disorder generally has the biggest effect on white or black women.  For some reason Hispanic women generally avoid it.

What is this disorder, you ask?  It's a creation of Hollywood sexists and feminists (hence feminist stereotypes 1 and 2 that I've mentioned before) that basically says there is only one way to be beautiful.  In my opinion, there are as many ways to be beautiful as there are women in the world.  Skin color, hair color, body shape, and culture all determine what makes a particular women gorgeous.  Certain colors and shapes look better on certain people.  It's a matter of individuality.

Hollywood has it stuck in its head that for a woman to be beautiful, she must conform to the standard of a white woman.  Not just any white woman (we Irish are not in the running, lemme tell you), but the scientifically determined most boring white woman in existence.  Many women, celebrities or not, fall for this flawed belief and try to make themselves conform.  It effects celebrities the most, as they have to be "beautiful" on a fantasy scale.  Hence horrors like girls starving themselves to death and black woman bleaching their skin.  Come on, black people, there's nothing at all wrong with your skin.  All it means is that you can wear better colors than white people.  You know what color I look good in?  Brown.  No, not rich chocolate brown, but dull, dusty brown.  Y'all get to wear richer reds and yellows.  I get pale yellow at best.  I'd look so dang weird in stronger yellows. Oh well, at least I have green.

It's not in looks, but personalities too.  Women in movies have to be either Feminist Stereotype #1 (women have no flaws and are better than men and are boring), or Feminist Stereotype #2 (I'm actually an insult to my gender because I objectify us but I'm going to pretend that since my character beats everyone up or outsmarts everyone I'm actually helping women's dignity).

Zoe's Uhura...it's actually a little of both.  Nichelle Nichols, the original actor for Uhura, was very black and very beautiful (FS1 and FS2 are mostly modern concoctions).  They didn't feel the excessive need to make her look like any of the likewise beautiful white women around the show. Sure, maybe the part wasn't as big as it should have been, but at least when you did see her she got to be herself.

I give props to Abrams for letting the new Uhura be more talented with language, but other than that....ew.  He wrote a very weird and not at all Uhura character.  This one...well, it's pretty much summed up in the scene where she insists that Spock let her on the Enterprise only to have it turn out that Spock is her boyfriend.  It's like the character is struggling between being an independent woman stereotype or a woman who's too clingy to her dude.  It's just weird.

This is completely beside the point, but I was kinda hoping that Spock would get with Nurse Chapel.  It never happened on the original show, even though Chapel really liked him.  That's just a nerdy complaint, and not a genuine criticism, though.

Speaking of Uhura getting on the Enterprise in a ghetto way, what about everyone else?  Sulu and Chekov are young nobodies who got really lucky, McCoy ends up in charge of the medical staff because the guy above him died, Scotty gets found completely by luck and invents a new way of teleporting just to get there, and Kirk...his was the worst.  First, McCoy smuggles him onto the ship, then the captain makes him third in command on a whim, then after being dumped on a planet he randomly finds old Spock, randomly runs into the guy that can get him back, and then does a stupid thing to manipulate young Spock and take over.  I can only suspend my belief so many times, movie.

Wow, I really went on a rant.  Okay, let's talk about Dr. Who now.  I'll try not to rant.  Okay, so the original Dr. Who show ran from '63 to '89, using up seven doctors in the process.  The eighth doctor only did a movie, in which all of his people die off in the great time wars.  He is the lone survivor.  After that, the eventually made a new series in the '00s, one that is currently on the air.

Dr. Who has always been pretty wonky, so at the end of the day I have to give it a little more room than Star Trek, particularly since I know less about it.  However, the new series went a much different direction than the original.  At the first, they never really showed the Doctor being romantic or even eating regular food.  It betrayed the concept of the Doctor that they had going.  Now, everything from episode one of the new series is all about romance.

You'll forgive me a bit of bitterness, please, if I say that romance is best used as a spice rather than a main plot.  No offense to people who disagree, but nowadays it's way overdone and it leads to moral quandries, cheap plots, and burns out a series really quickly when there isn't enough other substance to the storyline.  I'm a writer nerd, I know these things.  Besides, all writers have to be careful about their works so that they don't end up making their books turn out like romance novels.  I write over in the Mega Man fanfiction part of fanfiction.net, and you wouldn't believe how many stories are just really lame soap opera pairings, yaoi, shojo ai, and all that other stuff I'm nowhere near curious enough to know much about.  It's gotten to the point where it's a lot of sex fantasy, and this is especially weird since most of the characters there are robots.  Substance, people, substance!

In the interest of not being too ranty, I'll just try to sum it up.  I really liked season 1 of Dr. Who, and even in season 2 when David Tennant became the doctor, I was all on board.  It really annoyed me that all these chicks (Madame du Pompadour especially) kept flirting with him even though his romance situation with companion Rose was actually pretty cute.

Tennant was really fun during the second season, but as soon as Rose disappeared from his life at the end of the season, he stopped smiling, and the show devolved into melodramatic, "let's stab the doctor in the heart as many times as we can" plot.  I swear, there were like two episodes total in both of these seasons where he doesn't make a dumb emo kid face.  Some depressing episodes are fine, but sheesh, this used to be a fun adventure show.

To make it worse, they kept having chicks flirt with him, though thankfully this was turned down, except in the case of next companion Martha.  I might blame the actress a little, but really it's the writers' fault that she turned out to throw herself at the doctor even though it's painfully obvious he isn't ready for any relationship.  Worst of all, Martha was training to be a doctor.  I expected her to be a lot smarter and keep up with the doctor better than Rose.  Didn't happy.

Now, if you're a doctor, you're the sort of person that's willing to (1) spend a lot of time working, (2) not see your family so much, (3) put up with more gore and gross stuff than the average person, and (4) learn to look for the source of the problem.  All of these naturally go along with the job.  Trouble is, Martha turns out to be a Rose Tyler analogue.  She comes at everything from a more naiive perspective and doesn't appear to be much more intelligent than Rose.  They don't even give her a lot of doctor stuff to do.

Season 3 ends with a horribly bad "I do believe in fairies!" moment where the doctor is healed of hyper-aging by everyone on earth just thinking about him.  That pretty much doomed Doctor Who's next season.  The Christmas special alone showed every single problem that developed in the series: needless deaths, the nearest chick falling for him, implausible disasters, and "victories" that amount to maybe one or two people surviving.

The first episode was actually kinda fun, with him meeting Donna again and her joining him.  Not to be!  It became "Adventures of Emo Kid and the Chick that At Least Tried a Little!".  My favorite episode of the season is actually Turn Left, which David Tennant is barely in and Donna spends the whole episode finding out what would have happened if she never met the doctor.  She at least was hilarious and tenaciously stubborn in a really depressing situation.

Tennant's regeneration into the next Doctor, Matt Smith, was so dumb.  He didn't have to say goodbye to every dang person in the series.  That just ruined what should have been a really touching moment.  But I'm glad emo boy is gone, and I'm glad there's new writers.  I'm not particularly impressed with Matt Smith, particularly because he just seems like a less expressive version of Tennant, but I'm reserving judgement until I see more of him.

So, in any case, yes, all three of these science fiction series are far removed from the original vision that was had for them.  Star Wars used to be about spirituality and individuals, and now it's about selling toys and dumb dialogue (I hear tell the games are good though).  Trek used to be about working together to create a better future, but I understand why this one dissolved into a boring, generic space adventure thing: humans are naturally a lot more sinful than Roddenberry believed we are.  Dr. Who used to be about science and explaining it to younger people, and it has since become...modern.  Trite.  A little trashy.

Can these series be saved?  Not Star Wars, not unless fans suddenly decide that they want to do a fan-based version of the prequels which they will count as canon.  I'm totally in on writing for that, by the way.  Trek might be saved, if we do something about JJ Abrams.  Dr. Who probably has the best potential right now, but who knows what will happen to it?

This is my nitpick: science fiction, be about science again.  I miss you.

Nitpickery --- The Blood Waters of Dr. Z versus Alien vs. Ninja

Hey y'all.  I haven't seen Robocop 2 in years, and I just saw it again.  It stinks.  Apparently Robocop 3 is supposed to be worse, so my interest in the series is officially ended.  The first was good, though.

Anyway, the other night I was looking through Netflix when I saw the movie Alien vs. Ninja.  I figured this might at least be cute to watch, but no.  Absolutely not.  In fact, this is a contender for the worst movie I have ever seen.  The other contender is The Blood Waters of Dr. Z, a movie I saw during one episode of Mystery Science Theater 3000 (the only way to watch that stinker, if then).  I shall now compare the two and decide which is worse.  I will compare the different parts of movie making and rate which "wins" out of each category to find out which of our movies is the worst ever.

Category 1: Plot/Dialogue

Okay, so Aliens vs. Ninja had this plot to where a comet comes down, bringing with it murderous aliens.  Yeah.  There's not really much other plot to this.  I mean, there's some nonsense about this other tribe of ninjas or whatever, but they get them out of the way quickly.  Just plot dressing.  Nothing really that interesting happens.  It's just like you expect the plot to be: the ninjas are taken by surprise by the alien and several die, then the good guys go and after a big struggle take them down, also taking down the ninjas being mind-controlled by the alien growing in their throats.

Yeah.  I'm not spoiling the plot for you.  The least of all writers could write exactly this.  In fact, the ninjas don't even have to be ninjas; there's nothing specifically ninja-ish about these guys, other than their costumes.  You could replace them with modern day soldiers and the plot would be exactly the same.  At no point is the writing in this crappy movie interesting, unique, or makes you believe in the movie's world.  Worst of all, they offer no reason why the aliens are bothering to murder everyone.  And if they can brainwash people, why go on murdering sprees so soon?  Why not just take over as many people as possible and then take over the world?

As for The Blood Waters of Dr. Z, the plot in one sense was better: it actually tried.  I mean, it failed miserably, but at least it tried to be a science fiction horror movie.  It's about Dr. Leopold (that's right, his name is not Dr. Z like in the title), who is, for no reason they bother to explain, obsessed with marine life, and he wants to take vengeance on the land dwellers for being cruel to them.  His plan is to turn himself into a water creature, find a mate, and then genetically alter fish so that they can come on land and kill everyone.

If they actually made it about the killing everyone, this movie might have at least been hilarious.  Oh no, they focus on Dr. Leopold's internal monologuing and his early, boring attempts at finding a mate once he has become a monster.  So boring...insanely boring.  All of the doctor's lines are voiceover monologues!  He doesn't even make weird monster sounds or something.

Oh yeah, there's also some good guys. Their dialogue is generic, and if they had any background of any importance, I have no clue.  Nothing they said was interesting or anything much other than a reaction to the monster.  Other than the chubby cop, none of them were interesting as people.  They were just sort of there.  I'll get to that in the next category when I deal with characters, but I will say here that none of these guys added any significant plot.

Honestly, the plot doesn't explain why Dr. Leopold is so infatuated with fish, or how exactly he intends to make them all have legs.  How exactly are fish repressed?  Is it pollution?  Is it people building underwater cities?  Or is it just plain insanity?  Nobody who watches this movie will understand what the crap is going on.  And why do they spend so much time talking about what Dr. Leopold does rather than show him doing more bad things?  Oh wait, or was him going around with that squirt bottle spreading the radiation they kept going on about?  I don't understand....

Okay, so AvN's boring genericness versus Dr.Z's incomprehensible and uninteresting nonsense.  It's a hard contest, but I'm actually going to give a tie.  Honestly, AvN never tried, which is why its plot is boring and generic.  Dr. Z's plot could have been made better, or at least funnier, with better handling.  On the other hand, AvN's screen writing, while bad and boring, was nowhere near as horrible as Dr. Z's constant monologuing and lack of backstory.  So, a point for bad plot to AvN, and a point to Dr. Z for bad screenwriting.

Category 2: Characters

AvN's characters.  Wow.  These guys were such stereotypes that I can't tell if they're Japanese or American ones.  They could be either.  You've got the really skilled lead character, a ninja named Yamata.  Apparently he's like a half-blood or an outcast or something, but since they don't bother at any point to explain what that is or why it's relevant, I don't care.  Then there's the feminist stereotype #2, the bungling cowardly idiot (why the crap don't they kick him out of the ninja order?!  Tell me!!), the side character/best friend who gets his brain taken over, the gay guy, and a crap ton of redshirts.

In case you're wondering, a feminist stereotype #1 is your generic action hero girl who is out to prove that women are always "equal to" (better than) men, and doesn't need a man's help to do anything, including open a jar of pickles.  A feminist stereotype #2 is a strong chick who is there to support women in name only; she's either trashy and/or treated as a mere sex object by the director.  Crap, there's this one fight scene where the chick fought an alien, and it was disgusting how much unnecessary innuendo was in that.  I mean, they were trying hard to make it disgusting.  This is the kind of thing that makes me hate feminists.  Where the crap are they when you need them?

I hated all the characters in this, other than the cool master.  The master of the ninjas was actually a pretty good actor, though he was only in the movie a short time before the entire village was murdered off and their body parts spread all over the ground randomly.  The movie at no point gave us enough background or interest in the characters, so when they died we had no real reason to care about them.  In fact, besides the three main characters, everyone was pretty annoying.  Either that or had no lines.

Like I said before, in Dr. Z, none of the good guys were interesting.  They didn't have anything to say that was relevant.  The marine biologist Rex has a plot as a black guy who went to college and is now doing pretty well for himself, but that backstory only serves to give probably racist Sheriff Krantz some hilariously bad lines.  Actually, it's to Dr. Z's credit that Krantz has these lines, because it means he's pretty much the only interesting character in the story.  There's also Martha Walsh and Walker Stevens, who play these scientists who come in and investigate.  They apparently have like a romance or something going on, but this is only explained in one scene where they kiss.  In other scenes, no romantic actions at all are ever taken: no looking at each other, no showing concern, and no flirting.

Worst of all is the mad scientist himself.  Most of the time he just kinda wanders around, doing weird stuff.  He offs a few people he had pictures of on his wall, takes drugs, kills a kid, watches the scientists kissing, and stumbles around.  Oh, and this story has a feminist stereotype #2 as well: a random chick that swims around in a bikini until she's kidnapped and forced into becoming another fish monster, only it doesn't work and she dies.

So, yeah.  To be honest, AvN's characters annoyed me more.  Then again, Dr. Z's characters were so boring.  Hm.  Well, boring isn't as bad as annoying (in this particular case), and the sheriff was funny to laugh at.  The marine biologist was okay.  It looks like AvN gets the point here.

Category 3: Set and Sound

I guess the sounds were okay in AvN.  Actually, they had lots of gross and disgusting sounds, but they matched the general action/gore of the film so if I'm going to complain about that I'll do it in a different category.  The music was good, except for this song with weird lyrics.  It was one of those ones that only makes sense in Japanese, but I like those.  Nothing in this department to criticize.

In Dr. Z, the soundtrack was so dang weird.  Some parts it made sense, but other parts it was just off.  Some parts just had really annoying bleeps and bloops going on.  Z gets the point on this one.

Category 4: Costumes

I cannot stand any of the costumes in AvN.  First of all, the ninja outfits look cheap.  Secondly, the girl's costume is only there to emphasize her woman parts.  The helmet they stuck on the annoying guy was so stupid.  I have to admit, I really like the master's costume, and he actually looks pretty cool in it.  Everyone else?  They look like extras on live action Sailor Moon episodes.  That's not a compliment.  The alien costumes were fine for the apparently limited budget they had.

Dr. Leopold looks like a clumsy, furry, sea horse-ish thing in his costume.  It's so dang lame.  As bad as it is, it doesn't really bother me that much because I enjoy ghetto things.  It's sort of like Godzilla in a way.  Then again, this costume is far worse than the Godzilla puppet.

Thing is, the other costumes were just regular clothes.  In fact, the girl in there wore a dress that I very much want for myself.  No big deal.

So, cheap crap versus one bad monster suit.  AvN gets the point, simply because most of the characters are affected.

Category 5: Cinematography/Editing

AvN is mostly fine in this category.  You can tell that the film was cheap, and it's sort of annoying at first, but it's not that big a deal in the end.  The editing for FS2's fight with the alien was garbage.  Generally though, you can tell what's going on.  Since there's virtually no backstory at all, you don't even need to bother it having it dubbed in english.  Just watch the mind-numbing action and try not to be bored/grossed out of your mind.

This is the category which takes Dr. Z from a horrible movie to the worst movie ever.  Monster Leopold is constantly jumping from place to place doing random things.  At one point he's watching that film's FS2, then he kills a guy, then he suddenly is back with the girl, deciding to kidnap her.  The rest of the movie is edited just as badly, and you don't even have a clue what happens when or why it matter.  And then, for some stupid reason, there are random videos of sea creature faces at several points.  Crab, fish, shark...they just show up when Leopold is killing somebody or monologuing or changing himself into the monster in the first place.

Dr. Z gets the point.  It gets five points.  Holy Crap.

Category 6: Action

If you like stupid action, you might actually like AvN's action.  It was, however, very stupid.  Admittedly, I have a hard time caring about normal action. Unless I care about who is on screen, I don't care about fighting.  It's boring to me.  Given that AvN has no backstory at all, I care nothing about the fight or who is fighting.  It says I should care because the aliens are baddies, but honestly, I can't relate to anyone in the movie at all.

Also, it's cheesy.  AvN goes for the lowest, cheapest fighting.  It's the kind of fighting that's not about actual skill, but the grossest kills and the biggest computer generated stunts.  Boring!  That's one reason why the Star Wars prequels were such bullcrap when it came to fight scenes.  There was so much computer crap and so little reality that it was pretty much impossible to give a crap about what was going on.  I've seen a food fight more interesting than this mess.  They might as well be dancing ballet or something.

Dr. Z, on the other hand, has very little action at all.  It shows Leopold kidnapping the bikini clad FS2, him killing a couple of guys that pissed him off, and some dumb fighting with the good guys near the end.  Not only is there very actual fighting, what fighting there is remains dull, awkward, and nowhere near as scary as the movie needed.

Dr. Z gets the point here.  As worthless as AvN's fighting was, at least they tried to make the aliens and ninjas intimidating.

Category 7: Sensitivity and Offensiveness

This is a weird category.  First of all, by sensitivity, I mean how negatively sensitive people are affected by the movie.  Certain people, myself included, can't watch or read just anything.  Some people are just more sensitive to plot than others.  I mean, all fiction impacts every mind in one way or another, but some people are just less affected.  It can be because they're more stubborn, less artistic, or not particularly spiritual.

I'll explain it another way.  Have you ever read something, watched something, or listened to some music that just made you feel dirty or disgusted?  Did you ever see a show that just creeped you out and got stuck in your head, refusing to go away?  If you answered yes to these, you're likely a more sensitive person.

If you say no, this doesn't apply to you as much.  I will say movies and such do affect even you because they get you to think about certain issues or ideas, but you're probably not going to have serious problems from watching weird stuff.

That being said, I felt pretty sick after watching both of these.  Just the sheer, disgusting gore of AvN made me want to puke.  Like I said, it went for the cheapest gore and scares, all while not at all taking life seriously. Crap, if you want me to care about these ninjas, don't treat them like alien chew toys.  I realize that movies are a visual medium, but some things are perfectly appropriate to be left to the imagination.  It's even better that way. For the movie UHF, this one crazy guy decided to teach poodles to fly by throwing them out the window.  The movie was funnier without showing the poodles hit the ground (no poodles were harmed in the making of that movie).

As for Dr. Z, I felt pretty sick after watching that the first time too.  This movie has a depressing view on life, particularly the horrible ending, which I will get into later.  Neither does this movie value life, as all of the main cast ends up dead.  I think a couple of extras lived, but that's about it.

A lot of people mistake sensitivity for being offended.  I'm not particularly offended by AvN's action, it just makes me want to vomit and...hurts me on the inside.  I don't know how to explain it other than to say it's like pollution in my heart.  That sounds nuts, doesn't it?  Anyway, be graceful if some people don't like movie violence.  It's not bad because people are offended, people are offended because it's bad.

AvN gets the point here.  As sick and freaky as Dr. Z was, there's just about no way it could compare to the gorefest and cheapness of the ninja movie.

Category 8: Acting

AvN's acting was atrocious.  Everything was overacted and extremely hammy.  Good acting makes a person forget that they're watching a movie.  That being said, the only actor who pulled me into the worthless and inch deep plot of this mess was the master, and he was only there (and indeed alive) for one scene.  Everyone else was a stereotype, without even bothering to try to give their character depth.  This is the essence of "paint by numbers" plot.  Everything is laid out.  Can't the actors at least try to give their characters depth?  Pretty please?

I actually think that writing was a worse problem in Dr. Z than acting.  Dr. Leopold's actor has no excuse, however.  He did a terrible job.  Before he changed, he was unconvincing as a scientist, and afterwards he was weak portraying a monster.  Atrocious.

The other actors weren't that bad.  If the writing was better, Rex's and the Sheriff's actors would have done just fine.  The other scientists were dull, but again for them it's more the fault of the writing.  Well, I can't excuse them much, because they were pretty awkward and boring.  Every other actor in this stinker was a glorified extra, including the scientists Dr. Z actually wanted revenge on, so it has at least that in common with AvN.

AvN gets the point here.  Dr. Z almost earns it through Dr. Leopold's actor alone (the movie does depend on him), but that movie at least has two non-annoying actors in it.  Can't be said for AvN.

Category 9: The Ending

This is the category that separates the crap from the extreme crap.

So Alien vs. Ninja's ending.  Well, can't you guess it?  Everything else about the movie is perfectly predictable and cheap.  Likewise is the ending.  First of all, the lone survivor of a alien-destroyed village is a young boy, and he is rescued.  At the ending, the ninjas finally kill off all the aliens, and the three of them go arm and arm through the woods, happily disregarding the facts that they no longer have a home, their clan is completely slaughtered, and those three ninjas are the only three left in their order.  The other clan of ninjas will probably end up taking over.

They are being followed by a young boy that found them after his village was destroyed.  We find out that he is being mind controlled by the aliens, or possibly just allied with them, or maybe is one of them in disguise.  The alien thingie that's supposed to be down his throat is in a bag.  Still pretending to be a good guy, the boy tags along with the ninjas, then the credits roll.

I can't say "meh" enough times so I'm not going to try.

Dr. Z's ending....wow.  This is the extreme crap I was talking about.  First of all, the Sheriff ends up being killed by Dr. Z, and so does Rex.   Rex was trying to save Marsha from being turned into a monster, but while her body remains human, her mind is still messed up.  Rex dies without knowing what happens to her or anyone else.

Walker, who was chasing Dr. Z and is bit by a snake as he does so, ends up finally shooting Dr. Leopold.  Leopold was at the beach with these two unexplained capsule thingies that were supposed to do something that the audience isn't told.  These things get pulled into the water.  As Walker is on the beach trying not to die, Marsha passes him by, walking into the water like a zombie.  No matter how much Walker calls her name, she just keeps on going, presumably drowning.  In fact, the only people who survive this movie are random extras.

The ending point goes to Dr. Z.  Not only can you not figure out what's going on, but when you kill off the entire cast in the most tortuous way plot allows....dang.  Just dang.

So anyway, which of these movies earns the title of "Worst Movie As Yet Seen by GrimMoody"?  The "winner" is...

*drumroll*


...Tropic Thunder!  This movie is about as funny as dog poop, with shoddy acting, bad plot, and nobody who deserves to die actually dies.  I was hoping that the producer would get killed, but he never did.  It's a bunch of stupid, perverted mess that thinks it's something because it's got big namers in it.  The previews had me fooled, but the one joke that was all over the previews ended up petering out and being lame.

Honestly, the other movies may be bad, but nobody actually likes those.  How many of you heard of Blood Waters of Dr. Z before reading this or watching the Mystery Science Theater episode?  No one who has seen it thinks it's good.  Aliens vs, Ninjas is just one of those little niche movies that only nerdier people who actually enjoy stupid violence will watch.  Even those people don't think AvN is necessarily a good movie.  They just like it for what it is, fully aware of its stupidity and shortcomings.

Tropic Thunder, however, makes me ashamed of humanity.  I'm very sorry that such a movie was made at all, and that so many people actually liked it.  Those people have no taste whatsoever.  This movie has no redeeming qualities, but is simply a collection of the dumbest, lowest of all jokes.  Doesn't Hollywood know that the world judges us by our stupid movies?

I hope that the Hollywood movie machine gets a serious rehaul.  It sucks.  So many things produced today are throwaway movies only made for quick cash.  There's not going to be a "Gone with the Wind" or "Terminator" any time soon.  They're too busy making "The Last Avatar" and "Suckerpunch", as well as other stupid bullcrap that has no depth and never should have seen the light of day, other than on Mystery Science Theater.

I wish people wouldn't like all that crap.  Geez, humanity, what's your deal?