But first, a correction...

So I'm trying to get on through Chapter 3 but, I have to say honestly, it's a slog. I'm trying to read with an open mind but so much of what is being said is so blatantly, cynically dishonest that my poor insulted intellect recoils at just about every paragraph. You'll see what I mean when I finally get through, but it's slow going.

In the meantime, I have to take back something I said early on about Strobel's use of the term "Darwinism." What I said about objecting to its use, since evolutionary scientists are not bound to Darwin's statements because they are Darwin's in the same way that Christians are bound to Christ's statements because they are Christ's, I still contend and uphold.

I cannot, however, say that Strobel is being dishonest or misleading in his use of the term, as in doing some review of various written and spoken works, I've discovered that Richard Dawkins, of all people, also refers to the theory of evolution by way of natural selection as "Darwinism." So while I think it is a dangerous and misleading term, I can't fault Strobel for using it, and if I'm going to be demanding the journalistic high ground from Strobel, I need to reach for it myself.

As the papers say, I regret the error.

How to Convert an Atheist

Before moving forward with Case for a Creator, I want to address a question that I have a feeling will come up. In fact it already sort of has. I don't know (despite having read two chapters of the book) what evidence Strobel intends to give, so now is the time to establish what kind of evidence I would be willing to accept for the existence of a deity, and more specifically a particular deity as espoused by a particular religion.

Ebon Musings has two great articles that I read through on this subject that I think are just about perfect. Since I got on Strobel's case about not properly citing sources, I'll link you directly to the source so you can read it at your leisure.

The first is, How to Convert an Atheist. The article proposes a list of evidence that would convince him that a given religion was true. I'll summarize the bullet points here, but head over to the page for a full explication of each one.

I agree absolutely with the list, which is why I am duplicating it here.

First, things that would convince the author (and me) immediately of a given religion's truth:

- Verified, specific prophecies that couldn't have been contrived.
- Scientific knowledge, in holy books, that wasn't available at the time [of their writing].
- Miraculous occurrences, especially if brought about through prayer.
- Any direct manifestation of the divine.
- Aliens who believed in the exact same religion.

Next, a list of anecdotal evidence that, while not eligible for insta-conversion, would get the author (and me) to think there might just be something to a particular religion:

- A genuinely flawless and consistent holy book.
- A religion without internal disputes or factions.
- A religion whose followers have never committed or taken part in atrocities.
- A religion that had a consistent record of winning its jihads and holy wars.

And third, the list of items that will not be seen as convincing, by the author or myself:

- Speaking in tongues or other pseudo-miracles.
- People's conversion stories.
- Any subjective experience.
- The Bible Code or similar numerological feats.

He also lists "Creationism of any sort," but I'll take that one off the table. Strobel gets his shot at convincing me, as long as his evidence is solid. Worth noting, though, that disproving evolution does not inherently prove creationism or intelligent design.

I would add to that list that I do not find arguments from personal incredulity to be compelling. If you say to me "I can't see how [blank] could be true without God," my answer is "Do some research." Nor do I find the argument from beauty to be compelling. A gorgeous sunset, the intricacy of a snowflake, or other astounding elements of natural beauty are not valid evidence of God.

As I said, there is a second article about how NOT to convert an atheist. This one interests me because, looking through, this is like a checklist of exactly the tactics Strobel seems to be employing:

- Don't tell atheists what they think; let them tell you what they think.
- Don't assume that atheists aren't familiar with the beliefs of your religion.
- Don't make assertions you're not prepared or willing to defend.
- Don't ignore sincere questions.
- Don't use threats, personal insults, or ad hominem attacks.
- Don't try to be an armchair psychologist.
- Don't ask atheists to do something for you if you're not prepared to offer the same courtesy in return.¹
- Don't refuse to acknowledge your mistakes.
- Don't assume that any one atheist speaks for all atheists.
- Don't refuse to consider the atheist viewpoint honestly and seriously.

So, let's see how Strobel approaches this.

---

1. Drew may well find a gift of an alternative viewpoint in his mailbox after I've finished Case for a Creator, unless of course Strobel manages to convince me. The God Delusion is, after all, in paperback now.↩

The Case for a Creator: Chapter Two

Remember yesterday, when I said that it seems that Strobel seems very concerned with telling us about himself, and how very very atheist he was? Chapter Two begins thusly:

Rewind history to 1966. The big hit on the radio was Paul McCartney crooning "Michelle." On a television show called I Spy, Bill Cosby was becoming the first African-American to share the lead in a dramatic series. Bread was nineteen cents a loaf; a new Ford Fairlane cost $1,600.
As a fourteen-year-old freshman at Prospect High School in northwest suburban Chicago, I was sitting in a third-floor science classroom overlooking the asphalt parking lot, second row from the window, third seat from the front, when I first heard the liberating information that propelled me toward a life of atheism. [page 17]

I check the cover to make sure the subtitle is, in fact, "A Journalist Investigates Scientific Evidence That Points Toward God," and not "The Pointlessly Detailed Life of Lee Strobel." Maybe they teach you to pad your word count with "colorful details" in the papers, Lee, but I was told that this was going to be an investigation of scientific evidence that points toward God. It would be great if you could get on with that.

It's clear throughout this chapter that Strobel really wants to hammer home just how he was "toooooootally atheist, guys! Like seriously!" Like Durin pointed out yesterday, I can't shake the feeling that this is setting up an implicit Argument from Authority. I mean, if someone THAT atheist could be convinced, this MUST be good evidence.

It in fact has the opposite effect -- I begin to wonder if Strobel was actually ever an atheist at all. The atheism Strobel describes is a standard Christian caricature of atheism, as evidenced below:

I reveled in my newly achieved freedom from God's moral strictures. For me, living without God meant living one hundred percent for myself. Freed from someday being held accountable for my actions, I felt unleashed to pursue personal happiness and pleasure at all costs. [page 25]

It is this statement in particular that leads me to think that Strobel was never actually an atheist; rather, he is attempting to convince me that he was an atheist so that, as I said above, I will be compelled by his radical conversion. Having never been an atheist, he instead describes how he thinks atheists think, which will convince those who already believe (also having likely not been atheists themselves), but actual non-believers will have to conclude that if he ever was an atheist, he was a grotesquely stupid one.

The subject of morality without God deserves a post of its own (and even that is probably selling the subject short; books have been written), so I won't sidetrack this one with the subject. Suffice it to say that no atheist I know actually sees it as an "excuse" to misbehave -- the fact that so many of the religious seem to think that the only thing keeping them from raping and/or murdering every man, woman, child and pet they come across is the threat of God's punishment only belies the fact that they are not good or moral people at all.¹ The moral person does good because it is good; the man who does good because he's afraid of what will happen to him if he does bad is not moral, he is merely a coward.

Buuuut, that's getting off the subject a bit. My point is that Strobel's attempts to convince me that he was an atheist have in fact convinced me of the polar opposite, and I will have trouble putting aside the fact that I believe he is being dishonest with me. Fascinatingly, he even describes himself as being "smugly arrogant" -- exactly the two words I used yesterday to describe the atheist characterization he was laying on so thick.

Ultimately, however, it doesn't necessarily matter if Strobel was or wasn't an atheist (which makes it yet more annoying that he spends so much time on the subject). The more important question is, does the scientific evidence he presents indeed point toward a Creator? Well, I'd like to tell you, but at this point he still hasn't presented any.

Actually, I take that back. In this chapter, Strobel presents the evidence that led to his apparent atheism when he learned it in his science class. This chapter is called "The Images of Evolution," and he refers to several iconic concepts (or "images") that, to him, represent(ed) the undeniable fact of evolution:

Image 1: The Miller-Urey Experiment -- in which scientist Stanley Miller reproduced, under laboratory conditions, an approximation of the atmosphere of the early Earth, and via application of electricity was able to spontaneously produce amino acids, the building blocks of life.

It should be noted, before moving on, that the Miller experiment is one testing the abiogenesis hypothesis -- the notion of life arising from non-life on the early Earth. Abiogenesis is a separate theory from evolution; evolution does not concern itself with how life started, only with explaining the diversity of life that arose after the moment that life began.

Image 2: Darwin's "Tree of Life" -- referring to an illustration in On The Origin of Species, showing life's theoretical common ancestor as the bottom of the tree, and all the diversity of life growing and diverging and blossoming upwards from there.

It's here that Strobel again tips his hand to, if not intentionally misrepresenting evolution, at the very least misunderstanding it:

It seemed obvious to me that there's such a phenomenon as microevolution, or variation within different kinds of animals. I could see this illustrated in my own neighborhood, where we had dozens of different varieties of dogs. But I was captivated by the more ambitious claim of macroevolution -- that natural selection acting on random variation can explain how primitive cells morphed over long periods of time into every species of creatures, including human beings. [page 20]

See, the creationist folk realized some time ago that they could not deny that evolution does occur. It is, as he points out, an observable fact. So instead they have inserted an arbitrary designation between microevolution and macroevolution -- two terms that, in a scientific context, do not exist. There is only evolution.

All evolution is small changes within a population of organisms.² As he says, over time the sum of those small changes can result in organisms so totally different that they are scientifically classified as different species.

As an analogy, imagine that you are five feet tall at the age of fifteen. Every day for a year you measure your height, and on a day to day basis you will see little difference between one day and the day immediately before or after. Yet at the end of that year you find you are six feet tall. Even though the changes were small, at the end it resulted in the need to recategorize you (from "five foot tall person" to "six foot tall person").

Evolution is this concept writ large, with billions of organisms over billions of years. The notion of a separation between "micro" and "macro" is a semantical dodge, designed to allow creationist (or intelligent design) proponents to admit to what they can no longer deny, while continuing to deny what they don't wish to admit.

Image 3: Ernst Haeckl's Drawings of Embryos -- up to a certain point, the embryos of vastly different organisms can look almost totally indistinguishable. This is taken as demonstrating how similar we all are genetically, and by extension the likelihood that we share common genetics, since that would logically result in common development up to the point where our genetics diverge.

Fast-forwarding back to 2008 (we're in 1966, remember), it's worth noting that we now have pictures of these various embryos and their striking similarities, not just taking an artist's word for it.

Image #4: The Missing Link -- referring to archaeopetryx, the famous transitional form between reptile and bird.

Strobel spends the rest of the chapter establishing his argument, which is that you've got to take a stand and choose between evolution or God. He acknowledges that there are some who believe that evolution and God are compatible, but he immediately determines that because evolution leaves no need for God, it leaves no room for one.

And not just any God, mind you, but the Christian God specifically:

Certainly Christians would say that God is not a hidden and uninvolved deity who thoroughly conceals his activity, but rather that he has intervened in the world so much that the Bible says his qualities "have been clearly seen...from what has been made." [page 22]

But what would Muslims say, Mr. Strobel, and what does the Quran say about God's qualities? The Hindus and the Vedas? You haven't even proven that there is a God at all, let's not jump to conclusions about which God it is.

Of course, he isn't concerned with those other possible Gods, because Mr. Strobel has already determined for himself that the Christian God exists, and is seeking only to find and deliver validation for that belief.

If Strobel's intentions are becoming more plain, his methods are becoming more dubious:

I was experiencing on a personal level what philosopher Daniel Dennett has observed: Darwinism is a "universal acid" that "eats through just about every traditional concept and leaves in its wake a revolutionized worldview." [page 24]

Note, again, the selective quotation. Strobel puts the word "Darwinism" into Dennett's mouth to ingrain it further. More alarming, though, is the citation found if you follow this quote to the endnotes, which gives this source:

Quoted in: Phillip E. Johnson, "The Intelligent Design Movement: Challenging the Modernist Monopoly on Science," in: William A Dembski and James M. Kushiner, editors, Signs of Intelligence, 34. [page 308]

If the significance of that citation isn't immediately apparent, let me explain. Strobel has not quoted Dennett in his argument -- he has quoted ANOTHER person quoting Dennett, that other person being an Intelligent Design proponent, making the quote in a pro-ID essay.

Why cite the quote secondhand? If Johnson did not include a citation of his own so that it could be traced back to the source -- and context -- of Dennett's remark, then the use of the quotation in both Johnson and Strobel's works is highly suspect. If Johnson DID include a citation, and Strobel chose to cite from Johnson's essay instead of researching the quote directly himself -- and, in so doing, making it more difficult for a reader of his own work to trackback the quote -- then the use of the quote is, again, suspect.

Granted, Signs of Intelligence is readily available on Amazon, but why quote a quote instead of going directly to the source? As a journalist Strobel should know better, which leads me to believe he intentionally evaded properly citing Dennett's remark -- which may in fact have had nothing to do with "Darwinism" at all.

It's not that the quote even really affects the argument being made -- it is, at least as reported here, a statement in support of the non-ID view of things -- but it certainly does not instill confidence in Strobel's journalistic integrity, nor his devotion to "not only...ask questions...but to go wherever the answers would take me." [page 29]

None of this necessarily negates his argument -- good evidence is good evidence no matter the source -- but it certainly makes it clear that Strobel is not playing a fair game.

Nowhere does this become clearer than in the home stretch of the chapter, in which Strobel says:

My approach would be to cross-examine authorities in various scientific disciplines about the most current findings in their fields. In selecting these experts, I sought doctorate-level professors who have unquestioned expertise, are able to communicate in accessible language, and who refuse to limit themselves only to the politically correct world of naturalism or materialism. [page 28]

Emphasis mine. The problem with this approach is that, despite Strobel's attempt to couch it as "politically correct," or previous attempts he's made within to characterize "naturalism" as only a particular "sect" of scientific study, the fact is that science by its very nature concerns itself with the natural, material, measurable world. Once you introduce supernatural hypotheses, science goes out the window because they cannot be tested and are therefore not scientific.

In choosing his "experts," Strobel has in fact chosen specifically only those who are already sympathetic to his beliefs. A truly neutral, journalistic approach would be to talk to people on both sides of the issue and let the facts speak for themselves. Strobel instead reveals his bias by limiting his conversation to those he knows will agree with his pre-ordained conclusion, silencing the opposition by simply not speaking to them.

Astonishingly, he follows that declaration with this one:

After all, it wouldn't make sense to rule out any hypothesis at the outset. I wanted the freedom to pursue all possibilities. [ibid]

So. He didn't want to rule out any hypothesis -- except the natural or material ones -- and wanted to pursue all possibilities -- except the natural or material ones.

...

I...

...

Wow.

Strobel cautions the reader that "getting beyond our prejudices can be difficult. At least, it was for me...I didn't want there to be a God who would hold me responsible for my immoral lifestyle." [page 29]

Again with that. I can't speak for other atheists, but I don't lead an immoral lifestyle -- even by Christian standards. I don't lie to people, I don't cheat people, I am not sexually promiscuous, I don't get shitfaced-drunk or hurt people or do any other "immoral" things, certainly no more than your average Christian and I would bet, pound for pound, less so than most of them.

Strobel wants to assert that I'm afraid to admit God exists; I'm not. I live a good life, I am a decent person, and I'm confident that any God worth worshipping would take that into account when the time comes. If God exists and he/she/it is truly righteous, then I'll shrug, say "my bad, good to meet you," we'll have a laugh and move on with eternity. And if God exists and is not righteous, then fuck him/her/it anyway.

Either way I'm unafraid of the notion that God might be real. But if I'm going to believe, I'm going to need evidence -- and despite the book's subtitle, Strobel still hasn't given any. Instead he's written two "chapters," really glorified forewords or prefaces, which combined have made me more wary of his claims, and more likely to do due diligence on what's being said and who is saying it, than I think they were intended to do.

That being the case, future installments of my analysis may not be daily. I need research time, and I'm doing this around After Effects renders, so that time doesn't come easy. The next chapter is called "Doubts about Darwinism." I'm doing my best to approach this openly and without bias, but when the author refuses to do so, when he announces his prejudices in the same breath as he asks me to set aside my own, it makes it much more difficult.

---

1. Nor does it make much sense, since -- at least in Christianity -- all they have to do, whatever the transgression, is be genuinely sorry afterward and all is forgiven. But that is also a topic for another day. ↩


2. I notice he uses the word "kinds" of animals rather than "species," "kind" being the Biblical designation; another flash of the cards he seems to be stacking.↩

The Case for a Creator: Chapter One

I begin my reading of Strobel's The Case for a Creator with, appropriately, Chapter One: "White Coated Scientists versus Black-Robed Preachers."

My first impression upon reading this book is one of surprise. Considering Strobel is supposed to be a journalist, he doesn't strike me as a very good writer (in the very first sentence, he describes the atmosphere of a newsroom as being "carbonated with activity"). But maybe he's just being overzealous in trying to create a narrative and draw the reader in; after all, this book is presumably more about factual evidence than anecdotal experiences.

The first portion of the chapter is devoted to descriptions of said newsroom, filled with newspaper jargon that I guess is intended to reassure me that he did, in fact, work at the Chicago Tribune. He talks about how his boss sends him, a fresh-faced new-to-the-beat reporter, to West Virginia to cover a brouhaha:

"Crazy stuff..." he said. "People getting shot at, schools getting bombed, all because some hillbillies are mad about the textbooks" [page 8]

Strobel -- the one in the narrative -- demonstrates significant contempt for Christians and Christianity. On the back of the book is a quote by Strobel which I suppose will be in the text: "My road to atheism was paved by science...but ironically, so was my later journey to God."¹

The back cover also provides me with the first red flag as to what I'm reading here, where it says the following:

In recent years, a diverse and impressive body of research has increasingly supported the conclusion that the universe was intelligently designed. At the same time, Darwinism has faltered in the face of concrete facts and hard reason.

I suppose from the title it should have been obvious that this was a creationist tome, and it will apparently be playing the "intelligent design" concept. The flag, moreso, is referring to the theory of evolution as Darwinism.

The theory of evolution should no more be referred to as "Darwinism" than the theory of gravity should be referred to as "Newtonism." Appending "-ism" to the end of the name implies that it is -- like theism or atheism -- a dogmatic and rigid belief system. A religion, if you will.

But evolution is not a religion, having no central tenets of behavior and no ceremonial observations -- unless you include the scientific method, but every branch of science utilizes that, and I don't hear any of them being touted as religions. It's also worth noting that Darwin did not create the theory of evolution, as evolution had been observed for some time before he came on the scene. Darwin proposed the mechanism (natural selection) by which evolution occurs. Natural selection currently offers the best understanding of how evolution occurs, but scientists have no dogmatic loyalty to Darwin's theory, nor to Darwin himself. Should evidence arise that natural selection could not account for, natural selection would come into question and new explanations would be examined.²

Back into the book, and the subheading of the next section that sends up the next red flag: "Is Darwin Responsible?"

Strobel describes arriving in the West Virginian town and interviewing folks about why there was such violence and turmoil over what textbooks were teaching. Evolution, of course, but they also banned other books because students were being asked to analyze them and think critically.

To Strobel's credit, he is not the one blaming Darwin for what's going on in the town; that is the argument given by one of the townfolk he interviews, who says:

"If Darwin's right, were just sophisticated monkeys. The Bible is wrong. There is no God. And without God, there's no right or wrong. We can just make up our morals as we go." [page 11]

Since this is not Strobel's argument (at this point) I won't address the glaring holes in it (at this point). In fact, Strobel articulates -- at least in part -- what was going through my mind as I read this and other quotes he puts down:

In the last part of the twentieth century, in an era when we had split the atom and put people on the moon and found fossils that prove evolution beyond all doubt, a bunch of religious zealots were tying a county into knots because they couldn't let go of religious folklore. It simply defied all reason. [page 12]

He next describes a religious rally that he and an accompanying photojournalist were nearly tossed out of until the local preacher calmed the crowd and let them stay. (The detail of using KFC buckets as collection baskets is a nice touch.) He finishes off the chapter still "in character" as an atheist, looking forward to the day that the concrete facts of evolution show those lot that their whole basis of faith is ridiculous, that miracles are impossible.

I feel the need to point out that the fact of evolution actually proves nothing of the sort. The truth of evolution does nothing to demonstrate that miracles are impossible, as they are two completely different things. It's here that Strobel tips his hand as to perhaps not being entirely truthful about his approach. Strobel protests a bit too much, characterizing himself as smug and arrogantly anti-religious -- going so far as to insult the believers specifically, rather than just their beliefs. I'm sure they exist, but the characterization of atheists as thinking "haha jesus w/e noob grr i hate everyone" constantly is not accurate to most of the atheists I know, least of all myself, and seems to be more of a common Christian caricature of what they seem to think must go through the minds of atheists, than anything like atheists actually think.

So overall, a lot of groundwork laid that Strobel is, at this point in the tale, a non-believer of religion ("just like you," is the implication), but no arguments yet in the case for a creator. I guess in a sense that made this first chapter the foreword. Presumably he will begin making the book's eponymous case in chapter two, which we'll look at next time.

---

1. I can give that to him as irony, in case you're wondering.↩


2. In fact, my example of Newton is a prime one, as the established system of Newtonian physics is insufficient in certain situations, such as "at very small scales, very high speeds, or very strong gravitational fields" (from Wikipedia). This has required new models of understanding, like general relativity and quantum mechanics, and not a dogmatic adherence to the use of Newtonian equations.↩

Book Reading: "The Case for a Creator"

So, interesting development. One of my readers/a fellow I know from TFN and other places has sent me a book of apologetics, Lee Strobel's The Case for a Creator, subtitled "A Journalist Investigates Scientific Evidence That Points Toward God."

I've been meaning to read some more apologetics, Christian and otherwise (I'm very interested in reading some Muslim apologetics, and of course the Quran itself), and this is a fair enough place to start, especially since Drew went out of his way to send me this book as a gift (nicely wrapped by Amazon and everything!). This will also give me an excuse to do more blogging -- as I go through the book, I'll discuss my impressions of Strobel's argument. If they're convincing, you'll get to see a real-time conversion right here! Won't that be exciting!

The book is relatively brief, with short (~30 pages) chapters, so I should be able to get through a chapter and my impressions every, or every-other day. There's eleven chapters, so this should get me through the next few weeks, assuming I intersperse it with other stuff as it comes up. Maybe I'll even get one up later today.

Thanks Drew!

I never did follow-up...

At Comic-Con, RvD2 won the Star Wars Fan Movie Award for Best Visual Effects, which is a previously non-existent category apparently created solely to award us for it.¹

Not to look a gift horse in the mouth; MC Steve Sansweet had some amazingly kind things to say about both RvD and RvD2. I'm paraphrasing here, but it was to the effect of "When they announced that they were going to do a second one, we all wondered how they could possibly top themselves. But they did. Great work."

I may be reading into things, but that very brief kudos holds a lot of information between the lines. To wit:

-I assume that the "we" means, generally, "folks at Lucasfilm," potentially up to and including Lucas himself (to whom Sansweet has a direct line)

-They were aware of -- and apparently liked -- RvD well before RvD2 hit the scene

-They were paying enough attention to us to notice that we had announced a sequel in the works. This also means:

-They were aware of our call for donations before the film, and are almost certainly fully aware of the fact that we are selling DVDs. Regardless of the fact that the donations were true, voluntary donations, and the content being sold is legally ours to sell, both could have raised some hackles, and the fact that LFL has not only turned a blind eye to our activities but actively praised those activities' product is worth my gratitude.

I may be cynical about what LFL is offering the fans these days, but there can be no denying that they do know how valuable those fans are.

So thank you, Steve Sansweet, Atom, and Lucasfilm. I probably wouldn't have given two shakes if you didn't like the films, but it does mean something to me that you did.

---

1. Oddly, a category that did exist in previous years, and the one for which I actually thought we would be in the running -- Best Action -- was omitted from this year's competition. ↩

Everyone Can Relax, I've Seen The Godfather

Hello, everyone. My name is Michael "Dorkman" Scott, I'm 25 years old, a filmmaker, and until earlier today I had not seen Francis Ford Coppola's The Godfather.

I have lost count of how many times someone has nearly leapt across a table and wang-chung'd me after I have been forced to make that confession in conversation. Even those who were kind about it treated me like the filmgoing equivalent of the 40 Year Old Virgin: they were nice about it to the level of slight condescension, assuring me that I'd see it "when I was ready."

Well, as the subject line says, everyone can relax. I've seen the fucking movie.

Obviously, with the kind of reaction people would have to my not having seen the flick, I went in with some pretty high expectations. Some films, like Pulp Fiction, and more recently The Dark Knight, manage to live up to and even, miraculously, sometimes surpass even the highest of expectations. The aforementioned Pulp Fiction was another on the list of "You mean you HAVEN'T SEEN -- ?!" reactions until finally I did see it about five years ago -- and understood what all the fuss was about.

On the other end of the spectrum, there are films like 2001, Blade Runner, and recently the obscenely-lauded Pan's Labyrinth, for which, for the life of me and even with multiple viewings, I cannot begin to understand the hype and passionate love people have.

So it was up in the air as to what I might think of Godfather now that I've had a quarter century of people telling me I'd better see it if I knew what was good for me. Fortunately, I liked it.

There's very little I can say about the film that hasn't already been said, so I won't bother to review or analyze it here. I think I need time for it to sink in before I can say I love the film, but I do think it's a great film. I wasn't blown away by it like I was by Pulp Fiction; it fits into a rarer category of a film that exactly hits my expectations, neither falling short nor exceeding. Another film to do that was The Shawshank Redemption. Didn't blow my mind, but I didn't get bored, and in a three-hour film that's always noteworthy. And of course the performances were flawless.

Now I guess I'd better see Godfather II, if I know what's good for me.

So what's this Sandrima Rising thing?

Over the years since RvD, and especially following RvD2, Ryan and I have gotten numerous proposals to be involved with other peoples' fan films. Generally speaking, we've said no. Fan films take a lot of time, even if it's "just a saber fight," and if we're going to spend that kind of time on a project it'll be our own.

Then I got an e-mail about Sandrima Rising. As I mentioned before, the actual complete title of the project is The Renaissance Chronicles: Sandrima Rising. The idea was that they were going to pitch it, to George Lucas, as an ongoing Star Wars series about the adventures of this freighter, the Renaissance, and her crew. I'm already on record on several occasions saying that I don't think that'll happen, and I don't, but as I said yesterday, that doesn't mean I think the project is without value.

One thing that intrigued me about the project is that it followed the Han Solo characters. In point of fact, it's basically Firefly with lightsabers and wookiees -- which is fine by me. I loved Firefly, I love lightsabers, and I can live with wookiees (though dealing with the costume is a nightmare), so it seemed like something that would be a lot of fun.

It was (and is) also an extremely ambitious project. I think everyone who gets into the fan film world -- myself included -- gets it into their head to do a feature-length fan film, but only a few have been able to see it through. Sandrima Rising is shortly going to join their ranks.

I'm going to skip over the story of the film's production, because I've only recently stopped having nightmares about it; I will probably talk about it someday, but I need a little bit more hindsight on it all before I can really say anything. I will say that some good came of it for me, even from the bad. I learned a lot about what can go wrong on a feature film project, and I learned that I can take it and still want to make movies at the end of the day. I met one of my best friends on the set, and walked away with many other good friends.

The original plan was for me and Ryan to choreograph the fight scenes, train the actors, and shoot the fight scenes as "action directors". Ryan wound up being unable to get away from work to come out to the shoot, but we did still choreograph the fight scenes and I showed them to the actors. As I mentioned in a previous post, I wound up doing far more than just choreographing and shooting the fight scenes. And I'm not the only one -- almost everyone on set was taking on multiple roles to make this happen. Jeremy, who played Jacen the captain of the Renaissance, became our AD about halfway through. Andrew, one of the Renaissance crew, built the sets alongside Ed, who played Kyp, a rival captain. Our producer filled a role as a Sabacc player, and even I wound up in front of camera as an ill-fated archaeologist.

But I digress. I'm not here to talk about the production, I'm here to talk about the product. The film was shot last summer, edited in the fall, and since the New Year has been in post-production.

By way of introduction to the project, there are a couple of videos available on YouTube. The first is a "placeholder trailer" for the film. The scheduling for the project was a bit ambitious and they had said that they would have a trailer available as of December last year. None of the effects were completed at that time, but they made good on their promise and put together a trailer from the raw footage (greenscreen galore), and lifted the CG shots from Serenity.

Dwight, the director of the project, spends a little while introducing the project in this video. If you want to go straight to the trailer itself, let it load to skip forward; the trailer starts exactly two minutes in.



Additionally, you can see a work-in-progress version of one of the lightsaber fights Ryan and I created for the film. I say work-in-progress because the sounds and music are temporary, and were put together for a screening at a recent convention.



As I mentioned yesterday, I haven't talked much about this project before. A large portion of that is the fact that I didn't want to overhype it, but there's also the fact that I didn't know exactly how it was going to turn out. I didn't want to stick my neck out for something that could have turned out to be an incoherent pile. The shoot was so messy that I didn't know if the movie would come together at all. But against all odds, it did, and I think it's going to really be something special.

The trailer includes shots from Serenity, but the finished film will have completely original visuals created for the film by Dastoli Digital. They happened to release their film "Omega 35" just as we were wrapping up Sandrima and looking toward post-production. The CG work in their film was great and the producer Moe called them up to get them on board, and they've been doing a bang-up job, delivering professional visuals for the film.

The film is feature-length, but it's cut together in such a way that it can be released in 10-minute chunks. While a feature would be difficult to sit down and watch in a go on the web, I think the staggered release is a great idea. The characters are interesting, the visuals are coming together powerfully, and I think each chapter is going to leave the audience wanting more, and the chapter after is going to give it to them.

As I've said before, I think Sandrima Rising will be the last fan film project I do, aside from RvD3, and I think it is fitting to go out with a bang. If the success of the recent Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog is any indication, I think audiences will really flock to Sandrima Rising. It's got some great performances, some great visuals, some great saber action, and I think the story -- especially in serialized chunks -- will really interest and entertain people. My experience in production aside, I think that the finished project is going to be one of the most popular fan films ever released. I really think this is the culmination of this generation of fan films -- everything so many other projects have wanted to be but couldn't quite cut it.

Is it perfect? Certainly not. There are things we could have done differently, equipment we could have used to enhance it (I wish we'd had the RED back then). But as a low-budget production, I think it'll blow people away.

Fingers crossed we can finish it soon, and find out if I'm right about that. I'll keep everyone posted as we get nearer to release.

Check in this weekend for the continuation of what has randomly become Fan Film Week here on my blog, and find out how RvD2 fared in the Star Wars Fan Movie Challenge.

My thoughts on Fan Films

So I've had some people actually asking me where I've been, why I haven't been updating my blog as much. Which is a little silly, seeing as how I frequently check in and explain, and the story never changes. However, while I'm sure it sounds like I've got a lot on my plate -- and I do -- one project in particular is the focal point of my time, around which the rest of the work I'm doing currently orbits. That project is the fan film, Sandrima Rising.

I know that I've been vague and avoided mentioning it too much until now, to the extent that it's more than likely sounded like a project happening somewhere in the background. The main reason being that I've seen too many fan films get destroyed by long-term hype, so I advised the producers that it would be good to wait until we're fairly far along into post before we start talking about it. But we're getting pretty deep into the final stages of post, and I've been given the go-ahead to talk a little about the project.

So I'm going to do so -- in my next post. Before that, though, I'd like to talk a little about fan films in general.

As I write this, I am counting down the days until Comic Con, and the Star Wars Fan Movie Challenge, formerly the Star Wars Fan Film Awards. I don't know why they changed the name, but they revamp the contest just about every time. As part of the contest, George Lucas himself views all the finalists and selects his favorite for a special award. RvD2 is entered in the competition as a finalist, and so whatever happens, we know for certain that by 8:30 PM on July 24, 2008, George Lucas has seen RvD2 at least once.

But I'm getting ahead of myself.

I'm not going to get into the broad history of fan films, because I don't know it. If you're interested in up-to-date as well as retrospective fan film news and postings, check out Clive Young's site Fan Cinema Today, as well as his upcoming book, Homemade Hollywood.

What I plan to talk about, instead, is how I wound up getting into fan films, and why I think they're important.

To some extent I've always been interested in filmmaking, although prior to the digital revolution it seemed totally inaccessible to the average person, and so the idea of becoming a filmmaker myself never actively entered my mind. Even when the modern breed of fan films first came along, with Troops, I didn't really think "Hey, I could do that." It wasn't until I saw my first fan-made lightsaber fight that I sat up and took notice.

As I mentioned back when I wrote my love letter to Ghostbusters, my first feature-length script was a fan script for Ghostbusters 3. After watching The Phantom Menace, I began to write another fan script, this one in the Star Wars milieu.¹

Like Ghostbusters 3, it was only intended to be a script. Some stories want to be told as short stories, some as novels, and some want to be screenplays. This one wanted to be a screenplay. Regardless, it never really occurred to me to make the film myself.

Until, that is, I saw "The New World," a lightsaber fight by the original saber master, Clay Kronke. To be more precise, what I saw was the effects test that preceded "The New World", which for some reason was called the "Matrix Test". I say for some reason because it bore no resemblance to The Matrix, other than I guess it was two guys sparring. The choreography was ripped directly off of Phantom Menace, the music was "Duel of the Fates", and it was sped up in post.

But the lightsabers looked awesome.

And it was at that moment that I realized: this script didn't have to stay a script. I could make this movie.

I won't bore you with the gory details of my ill-fated feature-length fan film -- another blog another day, perhaps -- but suffice it to say that by the time production folded indefinitely, I had spent money intended to buy a car on a camera², and racked up another $10,000 or so in debt besides, which I only recently paid off with the help of the next project I have said I will be discussing in my next post. I spent half of my high school and all of my college experience frequently sitting in front of a computer, more often than not rotoscoping lightsabers. There were points where I wouldn't -- months at a time -- but eventually I would get back to it. Not just the abandoned feature, but numerous other fan film projects with which I was involved.

And all in all, I think it was worth it.

The obvious reason for that would be RvD and RvD2, but this goes back beyond those films. What working on fan films did for me was to awaken in me the desire to make films -- and the understanding that I could make films. I didn't need anyone's permission. I didn't need anyone's money. Both things help, of course, but as long as I have a camera and a computer, I have a movie.

The fact of working within Star Wars specifically instilled me with (probably altogether too much) confidence. Here you have a world that hundreds of people spend thousands of hours and millions of dollars to create -- and I'm doing it from home. The scope is more limited, perhaps, and the effects not quite as polished, but the movie's getting made. The story is getting told.

RvD and RvD2 have gotten attention, and that attention has gotten both myself and Ryan careers doing what we want to do (mine admittedly a slower burn than his -- he was nominated for another Emmy this last week!), but I really count the less concrete impact of the confidence I mentioned earlier as the most important thing I have gained from working in fan films.

Now, as to why I believe that fan films are important just in general.

For one thing, they act as cinematic training wheels. The blank page can be daunting when attempting to write a script (or anything else --a blog post for instance). To have to create a world with its own internal rules, characters with history, situations, alliances and enmities...it all stacks up until one would rather just give up and go play Rock Band. But when the rules and designs and locations and broad-stroke characters are already defined for you, well then you're ahead of the curve. You can mold the clay without having to have dug it up yourself.

You still have to create new material -- conflict, new characters -- but you can do so in familiar territory. One doesn't want to spend an entire career doing this kind of thing, but as a start? A golden opportunity to start experimenting creatively. You've got boundaries that prevent you from screwing up too much, and you start to understand, if you decide you must break an established rule, why that rule is there and what purpose breaking it serves.

I've heard it said that if you want to learn to write well, sit down and copy a book you like. I did that when I was learning to write short stories (a few times unethically, as I believe my grade-school teachers suspected but could never confirm) and, ethical quandaries aside, I do believe it helped me out when I finally came to flying off on my own with my own writing. You learn by doing. Even without consciously thinking about it you get a sense of why things work when they are structured a certain way, why they ring hollow when structured another. It, to sound like a hippie for a moment, expands your mind.³

And that's what I believe fan films can accomplish for a filmmaker. Play with what already exists, get an understanding of why things are done the way they are. Make mistakes in a creatively "safe" environment. And learn, and grow.

We talk about fan films like they're some new, crazy, Web 2.0, Age of You Tube thing, but it seems to me like this has already always been the case. How many filmmakers talk about how they saw [movie that influenced them] and ran home and picked up the Super-8 camera and shot themselves and their little brother as Batman/Sam Spade/James Bond/Blob Victim #3/whatever? Sure, those projects were never widely shared in the pre-internet age, and probably long since have disappeared from the face of the Earth. But the fact is that it starts with imitation. Then it moves to innovation.

On top of that, fan films, quite frankly, make good business sense. You've got people who are so damned enthralled -- obsessed, even -- with something you've made that they have thrown their passion into creating an homage, into extending and engaging with your creation. That's publicity if it's nothing else. That's people being reminded of your product.

Some businesses don't get this. They send Cease and Desist orders to stop Little Jimmy from playing at Spider-Man (on camera) in his backyard.

But George Lucas, whatever else he may be, is a shrewd businessman. He knows fan films are out there, and he knows that they help him, not hurt him. He was the first to "officially" recognize them, initially only the safe-under-fair-use parodies, but recently even then infringement-grey-area "serious fan fiction" films. He could C&D -- even sue -- any one of them if he really wanted to. But you catch more flies with honey...

In fact, Lucasfilm even made an unprecedented move earlier this year in SUPPORTING, essentially, infringement of their copyright. Lucasfilm discovered that material from Hyperspace -- the official site's "Exclusive Content" subscription service -- had been posted to YouTube. They asked YouTube to remove said content, and YouTube, in a fit of pique brought on by way too many other active or threatened lawsuits circling at the time, proceeded to remove all content that had anything at all to do with Star Wars. The outcry from fans was massive -- and Lucasfilm actually stepped up and said "No no, only the Hyperspace stuff. The rest is okay. Put it back."

Say what you will about Lucas the filmmaker (as I have been known to do), but he "gets it" when it comes to fan films. Although I do think there is still a line.

Which will bring us, tomorrow, to Sandrima Rising.

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1. As one of the regulars over at TheForce.net recently posted: "I was just asked an interesting question - "What film changed your life?". The answer horrifies me - the film that has quite literally changed my life is The Phantom Menace." I, too, am horrified that any interview for the rest of my career that asks me that question, that's how I'll have to answer, and then spend five minutes making it clear that I do not in any way consider it a good movie, nor one that actively influences my filmmaking. ↩
2. I got in an accident and the car was written off as totalled. I got $7000 from the insurance company. $5500 went to a PAL-standard Canon XL-1, in order to get close to a 24p image (this was about a year before the DVX100 hit the market), $1500 went to a death-trap of a car that nonetheless lasted me about 5 years before eventually the engine fell out on the freeway.↩
3. Even still, I find that if I am stuck for writing, I will pick up a book whose prose I admire and just copy the text from page to processor. I will of course immediately erase it all, but it gets the juices flowing without expending creative energy ramming up against a wall.↩

Lots to mention...

Been hard at work on everything in the world these last few weeks, seems like. Some of the highlights:

Kung Fu Red: The first of many collaborations to come between myself and Anthony, we shot this the very first weekend we got our brand-spankin-new RED camera. I wanted to shoot a fight scene and he obliged. It was originally just supposed to be a camera test but we wound up liking the edit so much that we finished it out with sound, music, and color grading.

I've embedded the YouTube for your convenience and viewing pleasure. If you want to see it in higher quality, check it out on Vimeo.



The Descendants: Turned in the latest, and IMO greatest, draft. I'm super happy with it, I'm waiting on Dark Horse to see what they have to say.

Sandrima Rising: Working with the Dastolis and churning out finals. Some of the CG work in this is really top-notch. There's a "city chase" sequence in the middle that I think will knock people's socks off. My hat's off to those guys.

fxphd: I've mentioned fxphd in the past, but this time around it's even more special: Ryan and I are teaching a course this term! So if you can afford it (and for the level of training phd offers, aside from us, it's an amazing deal), come sign up and we'll drop some knowledge on you.

48 Hour Film Project: Already kind of addressed this. We really wound up liking the film we made, with the exception of the opening scene. We re-shot the scene and will be posting the revised version on YouTube probably in a couple weeks (I have too much going on to finish it right now). We will also probably post the 48 Hour version after that, just for comparison.

Troika: This is a project that Anthony wrote and directed a selection of scenes from in order to pitch it to financiers. As a writer I'm super-critical of my own work, and that of others, and there's not a lot of scripts that really entertain or interest me. I like reading good scripts, but a lot of scripts just don't cut it.

I have to say, Troika is a great script.

Among the scenes shot are a fight scene, a dialogue scene, and a car chase. The car chase was shot on greenscreen, and there are plusses and minuses to that. On the plus side, the fact that they were shooting green is the reason Anthony called me to be on-set, and that led me to being on-set for all of the subsequent shoots, and ultimately concluding that not only did I want to make movies with those guys, I didn't want to make movies without them.

On the minus side, it was my first day on-set and I wasn't totally committed to the project, or to them, at that point, so I came on board as a consultant for the first half of the day and then buggered out. I did have something else to do, but I can't remember what it was and it doesn't matter; I should have stayed there all day. So while I consulted and gave them advice, once I was gone they were on their own in a foreign land, and mistakes were made. Now, in between Sandrima renders, I'm working on the car chase stuff, and its difficulty is my punishment for leaving that day. Karma!

Still, it's nice to have something that isn't lightsabers to put on my reel.

He's also written another script that he's working on developing and may shoot in the next few months, and which I also think is great.

So that's where I've been the last few weeks and why my posts have been scarce, and will probably continue to be scarce through July. I am still active on Twitter, and will be getting more active back here once all of these projects -- which have bottlenecked into July -- are completed.

Oh, also, Ryan and I will be at Comic Con this year, as is swiftly becoming traditional. If you see us, do say hi.

RvD2 in the Atomfilms Contest

For those not familiar, Lucasfilm got wise to the fan film phenomenon about five years ago and started an official contest for the best in fan films. At the time it was something of a joke, since they only allowed parody fan films and not serious, and many of the fan films submitted were created for the contest and in no way representative of actual fan filmmaking.

The rules (and rewards) have gone through several permutations, including changing from their insistence that content be exclusive to allowing non-exclusive content, as well as allowing, for the first time last year, "serious" fan fiction films to be submitted. So this year we decided to enter the contest.

So if you have a few minutes, pop over to the official Atomfilms site (now simply Atom.com¹), register if you haven't already, and give us a vote or two if you liked our stuff. You have to be registered and signed in to vote.

NOTE: If you have a pop-up blocker, you have to disable it in order to get the voting option. Also, the site seems to not play nice with Safari, but Firefox is fine.

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1. I apologize in advance for subjecting you to the profoundly shitty experience that is the new Atom. Apparently they've been turned into an offshoot of Comedy Central, so everything on there has to be "funny". Which, like most "comedy" sites, only means that it's tedious.↩

Stuck

So this is the 48 Hour Film that won Audience Choice in our group, wrenching the validation I so crave from my small, girlish hands.

*sob*

Seriously though, you can see why it won -- and again, why I voted for it. The Steadicam shot is extremely well-executed, smooth all the way through with no bumps; throughout the film the camera and blocking are creating new frames that are all very nice.

Also worth noting, I never saw a camera shadow. And the actors did a really good job of not shadowing each other. For a shoot at a time with such long shadows (I'm guessing it was around 4PM), that's pretty impressive.

There are no "clunkers" in the dialogue, at least nothing that can't be excused for the short writing window, and the performances are all really strong. You'd expect a line or two to be below par but it got into the film because the rest of the take was good; but here, all the performances are solid.

The music toes the line between "catchy" and "repetitive", but I think it stays on the right side of "catchy", and gives a good pace to the film. It's also a very active film, without any real dead time. Which is pretty impressive since it covers a lot of ground and it's mostly just following a guy walking.

It gets a little cute at the end, but it's forgivable. All in all, you can tell the director knows what he's doing. It's worth studying -- and for a 48 Hour Film, that's damn impressive.

I liked it when it screened, I'm glad it won Audience Choice, and I'm glad it's up on YouTube so I can share it with you guys. Enjoy.

48 Hour Film Project: Live Interview

Right, so. I haven't posted about the 48 hour film project even though it went on two weeks ago. Couple reasons.

First, the usual excuse about having lots of work to do on Descendants, Sandrima, etc.

Secondly, I wanted to wait and see if we won the Audience Choice award before posting, because what a great end to the story that would have been. But we didn't, so there you go.¹

did a podcast interview about the experience that I thought covered the bases nicely, plus it's much nicer for both of us if it's audio instead of text -- you can do other things while you listen, and I don't have to type the thing in the first place.

So, instead of writing it up, you can listen to my interview over at Filmmaking Central.

And if you found my blog via Filmmaking Central in the first place, hi! Feel free to peruse the archives, and I hope to see you around here again.

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1. The one that did win was a film called "Stuck", a detective story executed in a single unbroken Steadicam shot. I heart unbroken Steadicam shots, especially when well-executed -- and this one was great, especially for such a short timeframe to orchestrate the thing -- so I can't begrudge them for winning. Hell, I voted for them.↩

Can all the cool people please stop dying

First we lost Stan Winston...and now George Carlin.

We all know celebrity deaths come in threes. I don't even want to think about who might be next.

Where the Hell is Matt

I know I said I'd blog about the 48 Hour Film Project. And I will. But this came to my attention and I couldn't not share it.



Maybe I'm just a sentimental bitch of a man, but I thought this video was really moving -- in part because of the triumphant music, but mostly because of the triumph of the video itself. It's one thing to watch a guy dance badly on the internet. It's another to watch him dance badly around the world. But it's really something else entirely to watch hundreds of people from around the world, of all difference countries and cultures and ages and races and genders and backgrounds, lay all that aside and dance badly with him.

I'm sure most people watch this video and see a neato little viral. I watch this video and I see hope that human beings might just make it, after all.

48 Hour Film Project: Intro

The 48 Hour Film Project (48HFP) has been around for 8 years now -- pretty much as long as I've been involved in filmmaking. It's grown from a local thing (according to Wikipedia, it started in Washington, D.C.) and grown into a worldwide, year-round touring event.

For those who don't know, here's how it works: You are given a genre, a character, a prop, and a line of dialogue, and you are told to make a film that contains all of those elements.¹ The film must be produced, from start to finish, in 48 hours.²

I've basically wanted to do this ever since I started doing films, but never been able to for whatever reason. I lacked resources, a team, the confidence, the time. But this year I knew it was coming up and I thought "Goddammit, I want to do it." We had just teamed up with Ski-ter and Anthony and I was jazzed to fucking shoot, so I checked with them, they were all down with it, and I entered us in the competition.

This is going to be a couple of blogs, and I think I'm actually likely to make it happen. 48HFP is like an anti-procrastination boot camp; I'm a lazy guy in general, truth be told, and I need to get my ass kicked sometimes to keep moving. I never work better than under a deadline. So every time I thought "Ehh, I'll do this later" I immediately thought back "Motherfucker, there is no later. Cut the fucking scene!"

I remember reading a screenwriting book once that carried that message, essentially. It was talking about how writers used to be contract employees at a studio, who went in from 9 to 5 and just wrote for 8 hours. None of the pansy artistic whims we get away with now, where as long as you finish sort of near the deadline you're okay. You sit your ass down and you write every day if you want your paycheck.

Ultimately the message is: saying you don't want to do it now is stupid, because you're not going to want to do it later either. You're never really going to want to do it. So man up and just fucking do it. That's something I knew but it's good to be reminded every so often.

I will be writing more and talking about this weekend's journey in the days to come. Be sure to tune in.

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1. I'm pretty sure that the early iterations of the project only provided genre and either a prop or a line, but not all of the above. Also, previously I think everyone competed in the same genre, now everyone has different ones that they draw from a hat.↩
2. You are allowed to cast performers and lock down locations beforehand, and you are also allowed to use pre-existing music and sound effects provided you own the rights and/or they are royalty-free. But the writing and shooting and finishing must all be within the 48 hour period. ↩

Thoughts on the new iPhone: Moore's Law in Action

As we have been hearing and anticipating for the last six months (if not more), Apple has been developing and is finally ready to release their 3G iPhone, with GPS.

Last year I bought an 8GB, first-generation iPhone the day they were released. It cost me $599, although they later dropped the price and gave me $100 in Apple Buxx¹ for being an early adopter. 8GB was as big as they came, and the EDGE network was sort of like dial-up speed-wise.

Today they announced their 16GB iPhone, with 3G (technically almost 3 times faster than EDGE, though we'll see what happens when a half-billion iPhone users are all checking Twitter at the same time), true GPS (none of this cell-tower triangulation ghetto-ness), and a $299 price tag -- as they say, twice the speed, twice the storage, half the price.

This follows perfectly with Moore's Law and, as such, I'm perfectly sanguine with it. As a matter of fact I think this is a little faster -- Moore's Law, depending on the version, is either 18 months to two years -- but the point is the same. I knew exactly what I was getting into when I bought the first gen iPhone. I knew that I was spending way more money than if I waited a year, for fewer features than if I waited a year.

But my iPhone has been so valuable to me over the last year, I would have made the same choice knowing what I know. The ability to load videos on the phone has been huge for me, both as a filmmaker and a film watcher. The touch screen was, as expected, a revelation, and the ability to check the web anywhere, at any time, has changed everything. Sure, it was slow, but it was available where it wasn't before.

I would not part with my iPhone for the world, and with the new generation coming in at half the price, it feels more like a bonus than a slight. I was prepared to pay what I consider "full price" for it, and now I'm paying half that.

Keep it up, Apple. I'm happy with it as it is and it will only get better.

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1. That's not really what they called it, but they should have. Fire your marketing, Apple. What have they done for YOU besides brought you back from the brink of obsolescence and bankruptcy to take back a significant share in both the professional and consumer computer and electronics markets? I said besides that.↩

Orson Scott Card is an Asshole

I was going to write a whole long thing telling Orson Scott Card to go fuck himself, but I realized that going through it point by point is not worth my time.

So I'll keep it brief: I haven't read the Lexicon, so maybe Rowling's lawsuit IS groundless, but Card's argument is complete horseshit and I can barely stand it; as part of the article, he brings up court cases that found in favor of Rowling (as in the case of Nancy Stouffer, whose case was dismissed and who was fined for committing fraud against the court), peppers in little self-promotional "the brilliance of MY work..." comments, and takes credit for a story structure that predates the ancient fucking Greeks in drawing the comparison between the broad strokes of Ender's Game and those of Harry Potter.

Orson Scott Card is a pompous jackass, Ender's Game was completely predictable and self-indulgent, and his work will be a footnote in literary history at best, when Rowling's is venerated by each new generation.

Oh, and also, basing stories on the same general literary structure -- a literary structure made famous in the work of Joseph Campbell, not yours -- is not the same as actively plagiarizing your work verbatim, republishing it, and reselling it for profit. You moron.

And that's all I have to say about that.

Indy IV in Summary

I like his beanie.

Thoughts on Indy IV

So this post is a week later than is probably relevant, but a full and busy week it's been. Shot a bunch on the RED last weekend, and shooting some more starting tomorrow. I've been cutting this and keying that and sitting down to talk about Descendants with several folks who took the time to read and review the latest draft. Busy busy.

This is actually a re-post of a post I made over at the fxphd forums, when asked what my "likes and dislikes" were with the film. I wound up covering everything I wanted to say, so while it's less of a structured "movie review" (which is why I didn't call this post a review), I think it's pretty much all there.

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Oh man, where to begin. Well, I'll start with likes:

Some of the FX were really top-notch. The mushroom cloud (despite its logistical problems that I'll get into below) was phenomenal, as was the climactic shot of the UFO lifting off and the rocks whirling around it. The water filling the canyon looked great too.

Unlike a lot of others, I actually liked the concept of an alien movie. Look, if I can accept God as a McGuffin -- twice! -- and another movie where people are pulling other peoples' hearts out of their chests, I can accept aliens.

And I even like the reasoning Lucas had for it -- the movies set in the 40s were made like movies from the 40s, so a movie set in the 50s should be like a movie from the 50s. The 40s were action-adventure serials, the 50s were science-gone-wrong and alien invasion tales.

The skulls looked really cool and the room of the crystal skeletons was like something out of classical mythology -- powerful stuff.

Now the dislikes:

As an FX artist and a filmmaker, I have a lot of friends who are filmmakers but not so savvy on FX, and they tend to want to do a lot of stuff with FX that isn't necessary. One of my favorite stories to tell them is that Spielberg always appreciated the fact that the limitations on Jaws ultimately made it a better movie, forced him to be more creative, and he kept that lesson with him even as he became STEVEN SPIELBERG. Even though he could get any budget to do anything he wanted, for a long time he would limit himself to 400 VFX shots in a film. If there was a shot that put him over the limit, he had to either figure out a way to do it without VFX, or figure out how to do another moment without relying on FX. In keeping himself limited he ultimately kept his creativity strong by thinking around "we can do it with CG."

As I said, I've told all my filmmaking friends about this, so sitting in the theatre and watching CG gopher shot after Tarzan Shia shot made me feel like an asshole, because obviously that's gone totally out the window.

Spielberg made a big deal about how he and the DP swallowed their pride and watched all three movies, so SS could go back to his early style, and the DP could duplicate the previous DP's style. I didn't see any of that. It felt like a modern movie trying too hard -- is it so much to ask not to throw a diffusion filter on the camera, Kaminski? The original films are very simply shot, straightforward but powerful, the lighting naturalistic. This one had cuts where there would have been camera moves, and heavy heavy HEAVY filtering where there should have been none at all. As far as matching the originals stylistically, I give it an F.

Now one of my biggest issues. These days your MOVIE heroes are always total badasses who know how to handle any situation you throw at them. Your Vin Diesel characters, your Angelina Jolie characters. They're always calm, cool, collected, and there's never a question that they're going to come out on top of any situation.

In pitching the direction I want to take Descendants, I've always said that I don't want Charlie, the main character, to be That Guy. I want him to be Indiana Jones.

Indiana Jones has a tendency to get in over his head, in situations for which he's not wholly prepared. When he gets into a situation where he's pretty much fucked, you can see on his face that he knows he's pretty much fucked, and only by sheer luck or cleverness does he manage to escape. When the hero clearly thinks that he might be about to die, the audience thinks that maybe he's about to die. We're there with him and when he gets out by the skin of his teeth, we cheer our fool heads off.

So imagine my disappointment when Indiana Jones turned out to be That Guy this time around.

First off, the fridge. There's so much logistically wrong with it my head might explode. I mean:

-Even generously assuming that the lead lining is enough to protect him from the radiation, it protects him from the shockwave AND the heat as well?
-Even generously assuming that the lead lining saves him from all three, he would have been killed multiple times bouncing about the desert on landing.
-Even generously assuming he survives that, the lead lining only protects him while he's in the fridge. If he got out as close to the blast as he would have to in order to get the iconic mushroom cloud shot that they did, he's dying of radiation poisoning. I don't care how hard they scrubbed him down at FBI HQ.
-Where's the hail of all the other fridges that were also thrown clear totally intact? He happened to be in the only one?
-You could have totally removed that scene and it would have changed nothing in the story.

There's a movement starting to make the term Nuking the Fridge the film franchise equivalent of Jumping the Shark. I think that's appropriate. That's shit you pull in a Jason Statham vehicle, it's not something that happens to Indiana Jones.

Indiana Jones doesn't survive the plunge over three waterfalls. The bad guys die going over the waterfall, and Indy uses his cleverness and luck to avoid going over the falls at all.

I never once felt like Indy was in any genuine danger. You have him survive a nuclear blast in the first ten minutes of the film, and then you expect me to worry about him in a fistfight? Sorry, no.

None of the actors felt like they had anything to do. I really like Shia in general but a big part of that is the wit and personality he brings to his characters, very little of which was present here. Great to have Karen Allen back, but so little was actually done with her character that it felt superfluous and fanwanky.

Then there were all the great ideas that were brought up and then dropped just as quickly, almost every scene. It seriously felt like they'd just taken one scene from each draft they'd done over the last 20 years and grafted them together in semi-chronological order.

For example, Cate Blanchette's character is supposed to be a freaking psychic. That's established in the very first scene where she tries to read Indy's mind. There's even implications that maybe she's telekinetic. That disappears totally after the opening scene. Sure, she mentions mind control later when infodumping about the importance of the skulls, but her own psychic abilities are nonexistent. It makes her seem more like that weird emo girl at your high school that no one wanted to eat lunch with, than a genuinely threatening villainess. And her first-year acting school Soviet accent didn't help, either. I love Cate, I would think she could do no wrong, but man.

Or how about the next scene, where Indy finds the crate by throwing gunpowder in the air? Where's the moment where they all point their guns at him only to realize that he's destroyed all their ammo, enabling his escape? And if not ALL their ammo, at least make them have to reload.

Or how about the interrogation scene, where Indy is subjected to McCarthyist paranoia? Sure, he loses his job, but come on. You could build a whole subplot around the idea that Indiana Jones is declared an Enemy of the State, and have the Russians AND the Americans trying to stop him from doing what he's gotta do. But no, Janitor gives him a few of his favorite Scrubs lines and that plotline is dropped entirely.

On and on and on.

I think what upset me most, though, is how little Spielberg seemed to trust the audience. Damn near every scene was an expository infodump that just screamed "Look how much research we did on the subject!" and advanced the story very, very little.

But the most egregious examples are when Indy spoon fed us exactly what we were supposed to understand.

"Damn, I thought that was closer." Come on. That same moment in Raiders would have been totally silent. Indy crashes into the truck. He and the two bad guys sit in stunned silence for a second, then he grins sheepishly at the driver before elbowing them both in the face and shoving them out. Nothing need be said.

"Those darts are poison!" Okay, seriously, blowdarts are always poisoned. That's what blowdarts are for. I think it's safe to assume that we get it.

"Their treasure wasn't gold, it was knowledge. Knowledge was their treasure." He seriously said the same thing twice, phrased in reverse, just to make sure we didn't miss it.

And of course, one of the most shocking dialogue choices to me: "What am I being accused of -- besides surviving a nuclear blast?" The script has the audacity to remind us of how ludicrous the preceding scene was.

Overall I could do a DVD commentary, scene-by-scene regarding how absurd it all is, and that's not the case with the other Indy pictures. Okay, maybe Temple of Doom. But you'd think after almost twenty years they could do better than that. It had all the elements of an Indy movie, all the characters -- again, almost to the extent of fanwankery with all the nods to Raiders -- but it never actually felt to me like I was watching an Indy movie. It was just another of the long list of movies trying to capture the Indy magic, but failing. The tragedy is that this time, it was official.