Conspicuous Acts of Cultural Consumption

Where I talk about books, movies, television, art, pro-wrestling and other forms of culture and pop-culture

They had me at “Horse Mounted Gatling Guns”, they lost me at “Megan Fox”

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So I sat down and watched the Jonah Hex movie over Christmas. This was a mistake.

Don’t get me wrong, I really wanted to like this movie. I mean, it has a bounty hunter who can speak to the dead and horse-mounted gatling guns in the first ten minutes, and that kind of absurdity is the kind of wrongness that I’m willing to roll with. And for the first first half-hour or so, things were looking pretty good – it wasn’t a great movie, but it was zany and weird and it had undead fucking cowboys and that kind of shit is awesome.

Then Megan Fox showed up.

A few years ago I had a friend who worked off the theory that Kate Beckinsale was the kiss of death for a film. As soon as she appeared on screen you were pretty much doomed to a cinematic experience that sucked. At best you’d get a film that achieved a kind of stylized aesthetic to try and cover for the lack of plot and continuity (see Underworld, and Van Halen), and at worst you got the kind of film that made you wish you could beat someone with a cluestick until they admitted their failings and gave you your two hours back (see Pearl Harbor).

Now Megan Fox seems to be performing the same function, ’cause I swear to god that every scene after her first appearance, even the ones she wasn’t actually in, the film made less sense and tried to cover it by shoehorning metaphors for terrorism and the atomic bomb into what was essentially an occult western. Plus evil confederate general John Malkovich did some crazy evil with a tattooed Irishman while beer leaked out the side of one-of-those-Quaid-chap’s mouth.

To my considerable dissapointment, they didn’t bring back the horse-mounted gatling guns.

They almost managed a stylized aesthetic that made me want to like the movie more than I did, but I got distracted by trying to figure out exactly how the not-really-an-atomic-bomb McGuffin worked. ‘Cause, seriously, I’m all about ignoring science in favour of awesome, even I thought that shit made no sense. I spent the last half hour of the film drinking scotch and screaming “seriously, what the fuck?” at the screen.

– sigh –

I wanted to like that film. I really did. If only they hadn’t made it so damn hard to like.

The Magic of Trent’s Book Corner

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1) This amuses me.

2) It’s also posted because my parents read my blog and sometime in the next month they’re going to start the yearly dance of “what do you want for Christmas
and I’m forced to give them a list of books and DVDs that are not easily available in their hometown of the Gold Coast with nothing but mall-spawn bookshops catering to tourist’s looking for a beach read. Now apparently I’m being unfair with that accusation, for they have a Border’s now, but after fifteen years as a reader in one of the least reader-friendly cities I’ve ever been in, I remain unaccountably bitter.

In any case, when they ask this year, I’m going to tell them “All I want for Christmas is a copy of Managing Death,” for it should be widely available on release and Trent is an awesome dude. And ’cause the first book, Death Most Definite, was a cracking read. And ’cause the video corner amuses me.

The Sunday Round-Up

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So this week I managed to finish reading Georgette Heyer’s Cotillion, start reading Kirstyn McDermott’s Madigan Mine, watched the third season of The Big Bangtheory, and went down to the Gold Coast to spend some time with my dad while he makes his way through the three months of rehabilitation that follow open heart surgery. I worked a whole bunch and got to play with the company website. I tried to write fiction without any real success: 2,500 words total for eight days of work. I had a long fight with my local vendor of mobile phones after the phone they sold me under the promise that it would do everything my old phone did proved to be false, yet this wasn’t deemed sufficient to replace the phone for something else. I managed to lose track of what day it was twice, getting messages from people asking “dude, where are you?” while I sat there going “what? Come on, it’s only Tuesday, isn’t it?”

All in all, the events of the last month have left me weary and my one-coffee-a-day regime is well and truly gone. So in lieu of actual content, let me recommend some stuff:

– The Writer and the Critic podcast – Author Kirstyn McDermott and critic Ian Mond recommend books to one-another and get together every month to talk about that. It’s just kicked off with a discussion of Marcus Zusak’s The Book Theif and Catherynne M. Valente’s Deathless, and given that its’ two smart and articulate people discussing books they love it’s immediately joined my list of weekly podcast listening.
– Elizabeth Bear discussing a trunk story and how it ended up there. This is a post from 2004 that I’ve had bookmarked forever because it’s a pretty damn useful discussion of why some stories just don’t work despite the fact that there’s nothing inherently wrong with them.
– Laura Goodin’s advice on Moderating Con Panels which she put together in the aftermath of Worldcon a few months ago, but I’ve been too slack busy to read until now.
– Review’s of Sprawl over on ASif, including some nice things said about my story One Saturday Night, With Angel.
– And I’m going recommend subscribing to Daily Science Fiction now, both because I’ve been enjoying a bunch of the stories they’ve been putting out lately and it’ll save time in the first half of 2011 when I’m all like “dudes, I’ve got this story coming out, and you need to go here to read it.”