Where the Truth Lies (film vs book)

I tripped over Atom Egoyan’s film Where the Truth Lies via a Netflix recommendation.  I was massively disappointed.  The film stars Kevin Bacon and Colin Firth as a 1950s comedy-singing duo, who break up under mysterious circumstances after a dead girl is discovered in the hotel suite they are about to check into.  The point of view character is a young journalist who idolized them when she was a small child, and is writing a biography of one of them in the 1970s.  It wants to be a film noir mystery, but can’t quite get its act together to do so.  Fortunately, the credits note that the source material is a novel by Rupert Holmes (who you know for “The Pina Colada Song” and the plays Drood and Accomplice), and the novel is everything the movie should have been.  It's a send-up of Tom Wolfe-style “new journalism” and provides the full story of our intrepid girl journalist chasing down the reasons for the team’s break up, their sexual predilections, the quirks of their entourages, and surrounding oddness.  It is a fully formed story, rather than the cartoon Egoyan attempted to get past the censors at the MPAA.  We have a real whodunit plot with murder, blackmail, suicide, mistaken identity, and several interesting switchbacks in the path.  This is the story I would have expected from Holmes, who, in Accomplice, was a subtle and sneaky storyteller.

Hugo-nominated short fiction for 2014

Every year, over the summer, after the Hugo nominees are announced, I read at least all the short fiction nominees.  It's also been my habit to write short notes as I read the stories and rank them so I can vote, and I share those with you now, by category:

Novella

1. "The Butcher of Khardov" by Dan Wells: Sword and sorcery, with a Russian flavor. I was unimpressed through the first third, but then it turns into an interesting psychological portrait of a broken warrior, trying to maintain his humanity, and failing.
2. "Equoid" by Charles Stross: A novella in Stross's "Laundry" universe, taking yet another page out of HP Lovecraft. Unicorns are not cute and fluffy, but actually dangerous eaters of souls, and they're invading rural England. More of the same from Bob Howard's universe of eldritch horrors.
3. "The Chaplain's Legacy" by Brad Torgersen: A chaplain's assistant who was a prisoner of war holds the key to preventing a resumption of an alien war, except the powers-that-be want to fight on regardless. A rehash of CJ Cherryh's stunning 1986 nominee "The Scapegoat," crossed with a bit of CM Kornbluth's Not This August. 
4. "Wakulla Springs" by Andy Duncan and Ellen Klages: An excellent literary story, but there is no science fiction content here, until perhaps the last three paragraphs.
5. "Six-Gun Snow White" by Catherynne M Valente: Retelling Snow White with a western flavor, mashed up in a feminist narrative, dragging on for too many pages to drudge through.

Novelette

1. "The Lady Astronaut of Mars" by Mary Robinette Kowal: An astronaut wants one last long-range exploratory flight, but must leave her dying husband to do so. Lovely cross-references to L Frank Baum.
2. "The Exchange Officers" by Brad Torgersen: Space battle in low earth orbit between American and Chinese astronauts. Annoying political swipes, but well-told.
3. "The Waiting Stars" by Aliette de Bodard: Humans transplanted into cyborg starship-controlling minds, and one family rescuing their matriarch whose ship is lost, and her mind transplanted into another body.
4. "Opera Vita Aeterna" by Vox Day: An elf decides to explore human religion, and becomes a scribe in a monastery. Workmanlike, not stunning.
5. "The Truth of Fact, the Truth of Feeling" by Ted Chiang: What's the difference between recording our thoughts in writing or electronically taping everything around us? Like all Chiang stories the message is "life is shit and you have to live with it."

Short Story

These were uniformly bad. I only finished Olde Huevelt and Chu's stories, which were both pointless. The other two were unreadably bad, even the Swirsky which is only a thousand words.  How did these get nominated?  Is the good short fiction only in the longer two categories now?  I know that excellent stories can be written at less than 8000 words, as evidenced by last year's stunning Ken Liu story "Mono no Aware."

• "If You Were a Dinosaur, My Love" by Rachel Swirsky
• "The Ink Readers of Doi Saket" by Thomas Olde Heuvelt
• "Selkie Stories Are for Losers" by Sofia Samatar
• "The Water That Falls on You from Nowhere" by John Chu

If you've been following the controversy, you'll know that a number of nominees appear, in part, because of a concerted campaign by novelist Larry Correia and Vox Day.  Day (a penname for Theodore Beale) has been spouting some vile, misogynist, racist claptrap, which (when he posted it on the official Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America Twitter account) got him expelled from SFWA. However, I believe that's immaterial:  I think we need to read the nominees on their merits, not the views of their authors.  And, I'm not sure but that the "Vox Day" screeds are an act of self-promotion -- I can't believe that in this day and age anyone actually believes the crap he's been saying.

The Sessions

William Macy deserved an Oscar nomination for his work in The Sessions (2012), a movie for which Helen Hunt was nominated. John Hawke plays a man in an iron lung who wants to lose his virginity. His therapist points him at a sex surrogate, played by Hunt. Macy plays Hawke's priest with an amazing touch of humor. In fact, all of the characters in this movie face their challenges and emotional problems with humor, honesty, and poignancy. Even better, it was a delight to see Helen Hunt, on screen, naked, having clearly eschewed any kind of plastic surgery, unlike certain other Oscar-winning actresses younger than she is. Stunning performances all round, including by Adam Arkin as Hunt's husband, Moon Bloodgood and W Earl Brown as Hawke's caretakers. This was an hour and a half well worth spending.

Trouble With The Curve

A very funny bit in In & Out is where Glenn Close rattles off the names of the Oscar nominees: fellow best actor nominee Paul Newman for "Coot", Clint Eastwood for "Codger", Michael Douglas for "Primary Urges". In Trouble with the Curve, Eastwood does indeed play his stock codger character, this time in the guise of a baseball scout who's going blind. His lawyer daughter, up for a promotion to partner, played by Amy Adams, goes on the road with him to scout one last player that the computers claim is the next star. Except even a blind codger can figure out some stuff with his ears that a computer can't. Justin Timberlake appears as a pitcher Eastwood recruited years ago, who (now that he's blown out his arm) is the scout for another team and the potential romantic interest for the daughter. Lots of predictable repair of the relationship between father and daughter. Lots of baseball statistics thrown around. Net net, though, we should have spent the evening bingeing on season 1 of Kevin Spacey's House of Cards.

The Last Policeman & Countdown City

If you knew the world was going to end, how diligent would you be in continuing with your daily routines and responsibilities? Thus is the plot of Ben Winters's The Last Policeman. Our point of view character, Henry Palace, has just made detective in Concord, New Hampshire, when it is discovered that an asteroid is going to clobber Earth in nine months. And yet, he insists on finding who murdered the man he finds hanging by his belt in the restroom of the local McDonald's. As society collapses around him, he continues with his daily routines, attempts to corral his errant sister, starts a relationship with a woman he meets while investigating the murder, and tries not to take his fellow detectives' black humor too seriously. A wonderful character study, and a wonderful excuse to ask "what would I do if I was there?"

The immediate sequel to The Last Policeman, as society begins to break down, is Countdown City, in which Palace, now forcibly retired from the police force as local police departments are federalized, takes on a missing persons case. The husband of his childhood babysitter has gone missing, and he agrees to find him. He uncovers several plots larger than he expected and sees his sister off on her own last-ditch attempt to save the world. In the end, he is rescued from a tight corner by an old colleague from the Concord Police.

Through both books, the question kept coming up, "what would I do in those circumstances?" I'd like to believe that I'd carry on, as Henry does, doing what I could, continuing to discharge my responsibilities, even as those responsibilities changed with the world around me. To do otherwise would violate my sense of who I am, of what I'm about.

And now, World of Trouble, the third book in the series is due next week, on 7/15.  I'm very much looking forward to it.

The Amateurs & Zack and Miri Make a Porno

"The difference between an amateur and a professional is that the professional doesn't wait to be in the right mood."  --- William Arthur Herring

Picture a small town, where there's a guy who decides that the best way to get him out of his mid-life crisis and the town out of its doldrums is to make a porn movie. Thus, The Amateurs. Jeff Bridges stars as the guy who puts the town up to the project. Jeanne Tripplehorn as his ex-wife, Patrick Fugit (from Almost Famous) as the video store manager turned cinematographer, Tim Blake Nelson, Joe Pantoliano, Glenne Headly, Ted Danson and William Fichtner as the townspeople. I almost bailed out on this at about the 40 minute mark, but it's worth watching to the end. It doesn't come out as you might expect: though the good guys definitely win in the end.

This ended up on our screen because Netflix recommended it when I was on a Kevin Smith orgy and wanted to watch Zack and Miri Make a Porno.  Unfortunately, they should have recommended The Amateurs instead of Zack and Miri, not in addition to.  Kevin Smith's rendition of the story is inferior in every regard, from humor, to attractiveness of the actors, to good taste, to overall quality.

The Numbers Station

The Numbers Station was a little thriller last year which I'd wanted to see because it stars John Kusack and Malin Ackerman. It was massively disappointing. A completely predictable thriller with predictable tension, a predictable huge plot handwave, and a pre-ordained outcome. Kusack plays a nearly washed-up CIA agent who's put out to pasture babysitting a cryptographer (Ackerman) out in the boondocks at a "numbers station" which broadcasts encrypted instructions to spies in the field as seemingly random digits over-the-air. I was not impressed. They should both know better.