Star Wars Episode 1: The Phantom Menace in 3D

As I'm sure you know, Episode 1 was released last Friday to 3D theaters.  I debated for quite a while about whether I was going to see it.  There are two main reasons why I debated so long.  The first is that I really don't care for the movie because it has always felt to me like George Lucas couldn't make up his mind who his audience was going to be.  There is too much Jar-Jar Binks, too many poop and fart jokes, and really bad slapstick for adults to enjoy.  On top of that is a totally-incomprehensible-to-children story about trade agreements.  In addition to that, two of the main characters are played by horrible actors, in the forms of Natalie Portman and Jake Lloyd.  The other reason I debated, besides my dislike of the movie itself, is that I have always thought that 3D is overly-hyped, and that there's no way that paying extra for 3D would ever be worth it.

Having said all that, I'm a died-in-the-wool Star Wars fan, and I can't pass up the opportunity to see that universe back on the big screen.  So I got tickets online for my local theater.  And that's where my distaste for modern theaters is proven correct again.  They service-charged me for getting my tickets early.  Except that I didn't really get them early.  I had to print the email, bring it with me to the theater, along with the credit card I used to buy the tickets.  How is that worth the service charge?  And they didn't tell me that I had to do all that until after I "purchased" the tickets.

We arrived at the theater, got our commemorative glasses, and got our seats.  It turns out I shouldn't have bothered to get my tickets early, because there were only about 10 of us in the theater, and we were the first ones there anyway.  The trailers eventually started, and I expected to get blown away by the 3D on those movies that were designed with it in mind, but I really wasn't.  It could have been our theater, but there was a slight background "echo" of the image that was distracting.  We saw trailers for The Lorax, Paranorman, and the new Spider-Man, and while there were a couple moments that gave me the "wow" feeling that I wanted, they were few and far between.  In reality, the things I liked most about those trailers would have worked perfectly well in 2D, such as using Spider-Man's point of view while working his way across the city, including flipping the view upside-down when he was walking on a ceiling.

Then the feature started. My feelings about the movie itself are unchanged.  It's still a confused mess.  The 3D worked okay for things like the space battles, the pod race, and the final battle between the Jedis and Darth Maul.  In fact, the shot of Obi-Wan hanging in the tube made for a wonderful perspective shot.  They also did some interesting things in order to accentuate the perspective from the flat, 2D film, such as adding window frames to the foreground to add depth to long-shots.  Unfortunately, though, one of the ways they did this in medium and close-up shots was to blur the background, which gave the background a "rear-projection" feel, so that it seemed as if the background wasn't really there (which it wasn't in most of the shots, since they were doing green-screen, but the green-screen work in the original still felt present, rather than added later).

At any rate, the conversion was at least partly successful, but I'm still not impressed with the 3D technology.  I suspect that it was a combination of my theater and the hype and recommendations I've gotten that got my expectations too high.  I will probably see the other five movies in 3D, because how can I not?  But I have to console myself with the fact that I'm not seeing them for the 3D, I'm seeing them because I love Star Wars, and I prefer it on the big screen.

Asimov's Elijah Baley stories

Thanks to the advent of electronic books, I've been reading more now than ever before...well, more books, that is. And saying that I've been reading more is an exaggeration, even then. I've actually been rereading more. I find myself buying and reading books I already own more often than I'm buying new books.

Case in point, I was ecstatic to find that they were finally releasing Asimov's Elijah Baley books. I preordered them so that they would show up on my Nook as soon as they were available. I remembered reading and loving these books as a teenager, and I was actively watching for their release.

Having reread them, I'm not sure why I was so taken with them.

Basically, they are science-fiction mystery books. The main character, Elijah Baley, is a detective on Earth. Assigned to solve various mysteries, he is accompanied by his unwelcome (at least, at first) partner, R. Daneel Olivaw. The R stands for robot. But Daneel is a special robot, even by robot standards, as he is almost unmistakably human-like.

The first book, The Caves of Steel, introduces the characters and their world, where Earth has been left behind by those who have settled fifty other worlds. Those settlers, referred to as Spacers, consider themselves vastly superior to their forebears on Earth, who have consolidated themselves in massive city complexes where thing like weather and even sunlight are all but forgotten. Baley, with Olivaw's help, must solve the murder of a Spacer with Earth's position in the galaxy in the balance.

The second book, The Naked Sun, takes Baley off Earth to the planet Solaria to solve the murder of another Spacer, reuniting him with Olivaw and introducing the dead Spacer's wife, Gladia. Once again, Earth's position in the galaxy rides on Baley's ability to solve what is essentially a locked room mystery.

Lastly, the third book, which I've been reading this week, is The Robots of Dawn, which takes Baley off-world again to solve another "murder", this time of a human-like robot in the service of a relocated Gladia. Not to sound like a broken record (shouldn't that phrase really be a scratched record?), but Earth's position in the galaxy depends on Baley's ability to solve the murder, as does his own position within Earth's police force.

In the first two books, quite a bit of time is spent with Baley making bad guesses about what was going on. For example, in the first book, he spends an entire chapter detailing Baley's supposition that Olivaw wasn't really a robot, when simply having Baley, a supposedly good detective, ask Olivaw, who must obey orders from humans, to prove his robotic nature would have shortened the book considerably.

The second book also spends quite a bit of time dealing with Baley's newly-discovered agoraphobia. Having been raised in the all-encompassing City on Earth, Baley hasn't spent any time out in the open. Asimov constructs many contrived situations that force Baley into the open, only to spend needless pages on the consequences. Baley supposedly can't solve the case without traveling to interview the witnesses instead of using a three-dimensional video phone, yet there's nothing in what he discovers that proves him right in that respect.

The worst, by far, is the third book. Firstly, Asimov uses this book as an opportunity to tie together all his previous robot books and short stories, by referring to Susan Calvin, and his Foundation novels thanks to continual references to psychohistory. In addition, there is a secret, mostly unimportant to the story, but leading up to the reveal, Asimov can't resist making little off-hand references to it, which on rereading come off as smug, almost as if Asimov needed to point out how much smarter he was than the reader. Lastly, he also breaks one of my cardinal rules of writing by making many references to a hard-to-find short story starring the pair. If you intend to spend pages referring to a short story, you might be better served just including the story.

These books are fine for what they are, but now I'd be hard-pressed to give them more than a passing grade. The first two are better than the third, but not by much.

Stumptown 2011

Last weekend found me making my way to Portland, Oregon, for the Stumptown 2011 comic convention. The main reason was due to the fact the Larry Marder, creator of Tales of the Beanworld, was going to be there signing books and giving a talk about the origins of the Beanworld and where he's going to be taking the series in the next couple of years.

Recently, the series has been reprinted in smaller hardcovers, and a whole new story was also released in the same format. The next book in the series had been previously announced, but at the talk he revealed plans to publish a thinner volume collecting missing stories including the story from Asylum, his online-only story, and his holiday special.

While I was there I also had him sign my copies of the hardcovers (I had him sign my issues and trade paperbacks a couple years ago at a previous Stumptown) and also bought a couple pieces of art, including a Mr. Spook that I requested since he didn't already have one for sale. You can see those above, along with the piece I bought at the earlier Stumptown.

I also bought a couple books from some other creators, including one by Phil Foglio. I always enjoyed his work at DC and it was great getting to meet him.

What I read: October 3, 2010

Incredible Hercules: Assault on New Olympus TPB: Herc and Amadeus Cho reunite to take on Hera and her plans to recreate the world.  This has been a great series written by Greg Pak with art by Fred Van Lente.  My only complaint is that toward the end of the trade, Pak seems to have forgotten that Herc brought heroes with him, as they aren't mentioned for about two or three issues.  I also wish Pak would get a gig on Spider-Man.  He definitely has the correct "voice" for him.

Daredevil: The Devil's Hand TPB: It seems like forever since the last trade came out.  This one tells the tale of Daredevil's taking over the Hand (a group of assassins who have plagued his life for years) and his first couple of "missions" leading them. This was the first storyline written and drawn by the new team of Andy Diggle and Roberto De La Torre, respectively, and I certainly enjoyed it.  I would have preferred there to have been a bit more movement in the story, as there was quite a bit of political machinations by the Kingpin, and some obvious contrivances with repect to Matt Murdock's support team of Foggy Nelson and Dakota North.  However, the story itself was interesting and the art ranged from good to excellent.

Ms. Marvel: Best You Can Be TPB: In this book, Ms. Marvel tracks down Mystique because she believes that Mystique is impersonating Captain Marvel and attacking Kree-religion churches, but discovers she has a much larger plot.  While the first issue in this book has extremely uneven art, the rest of the art in the book was stunning, and the writing was great.  However, the editor should be replaced.  In one issue, Ms. Marvel supposedly takes someone 500 miles in 5 minutes, but in the next she claims that she can fly 700 miles in 2 hours if she's going flat out.  In showing that flight from San Francisco to Seattle, they show her flying north with Mount Rainier behind her.  For those Pacific-Northwest-impaired, that would mean she's in Eastern Washington, and couldn't be a straight-line flight as she said it was.  Otherwise, it was a great book in a great series.

The New Avengers: Luke Cage TPB: This book covers three stories.  In the first, Luke Cage goes to Philadelphia to help an old friend stop an incoming drug shipment.  This story was okay, but the art by Eric Canete was awful, and I'm not a big fan of stories where a superhero faces off against normal thugs.  It seems like a waste of a super-hero story.  After all, how big a hero can they be when they really have no possibility of losing?  The other two were fun, meaningless, one-off stories.  It also includes a reprint of the first issue of Luke Cage's original series, Hero for Hire.

 Captain America Reborn TPB: This is another that I was looking forward to, much like Wolverine: Old Man Logan.  Thankfully, this one was much better.  It tells the story of the return of Steve Rogers, who was killed at the end of the sort-of-recent Civil War series.  I did feel that too much of Ed Brubaker's story was spent telling snippets of Steve Rogers's past, but the art by Bryan Hitch and Butch Guice was good and, overall, the story was entertaining and held my interest throughout.

That's it for today.  I should be back later this week with more books I've read.  I still have a couple of Marvel TPBs to go, as well as three (soon to be four) weeks of regular issues.

What I read yesterday

Old Man Logan TPB: This was a book I was very excited to read, as I had heard so many good things about it while it was coming out.  Unfortunately, it didn't live up to the hype for me.  Written by Mark Millar and drawn by Steve McNiven, it tells of a futuristic Hawkeye and Wolverine crossing a country controlled by various super-villains.  Wolverine has been broken, becoming a pacifist (which annoyingly he reminds you every four pages or so) and Hawkeye is blind due to cataracts.  Hawkeye coerces Wolverine to become his navigator on this cross-country trip, so that Hawkeye can try to create a place for himself in the new society.  Unfortunately, Millar makes Hawkeye and Wolverine sound exactly the same, and he continually uses the same phrasing over and over.  By the end of this book, if I never hear the phrase "pop his claws" again, I will die a happy man.  Also, there was very little new in the story.  It followed many of the same tropes as every other "future of the super-heroes you know and love" story.  We run into Spider-Man's daughter, who coincidentally was Hawkeye's wife once, and Spidey's grand-daughter (Hawkeye's daughter).  We see what happened to each of the major heroes as the main characters fight their way across country.  And the ending was telegraphed from nearly the first page.  The art was good, but there were many things where artistic license overrode realism and that took me out of the story for a panel or two each time.  For example, in the scene of Hank Pym's gigantic skeleton, it showed that his finger bones were apparently fused together, as his fingers were pointing upright into the sky.  Once the skin, muscle and tendons had gone, the bones should have fallen apart.  At any rate, this book didn't live up to the excitement with which I anticipated it.