There was also Civ V in here somewhere, but that's not as fun to recap, haha!

What a weekend! Let's see if I can remember it all.

Friday - So right after work, I headed on over to Derek's place Friday for the first session of Dustin's Pathfinder game. We were still getting some details worked out, including names for some of the characters.

( Here's the play by play: )

Saturday - We were determined to go see John Carter of Mars, and we did! It was great fun and I totally recommend it to anybody who has the cash on hand to go see a movie, and the desire to have a good time.

( My background is that I'd read one of the books many years ago, but forgotten the title for a while. )

I definitely want to recommend this movie as highly as possible to as many people as possible. I'll give you a spoilery list of reasons why if you want; but here I'm just trying to get people who might not have been thinking about it to give the film a go. Take it from me, I really don't like going to the movie theater lately. Being forced to sit with other people just doesn't appeal! But I was happy to go to the theater for this film, and didn't even mind paying 10$ to see it. It's fun, actiony, and it's got heart. If you like adventure, give it a shot!

Additionally, if you'd like to read these books and don't want to head down to your local library, Edgar Rice Burroughs's books are available on Project Gutenberg (even in ebook format, it looks like, for those who don't like reading the .html on their computer screen):

A Princess of Mars

The Gods of Mars

Warlord of Mars

Sunday - A lazy day; we had acquired the night before a copy of Ralph Bakshi's Wizards, as much because Danny was curious as for any other reason. We watched it after we'd been to the grocery store, and dissected it as thoroughly as we could.

Wizards I would not recommend, unless you are an enthusiast of animation and want to see something a little weird and unusual. Unlike Thief and the Cobbler, it's not much to look at. Bakshi's budget was low and to some degree, I think he liked the look of certain things that to me just look weird. What I had supposed was half-finished rotoscoping in his Lord of the Rings movies was apparently part of the completed project that is Wizards; the movement of the characters has a certain weirdness that sometimes you can point at and say 'I see what he's going for here' and sometimes you can watch and go 'what the hell is the internal structure of this thing, and how is it even moving?'

( Seriously, the film was interesting but it dropped the ball on most of the things I found genuinely intriguing about it, and glossed over the good vs. evil thing in that most generic fantasy of ways, which was crappy. )

Anyway, after that, we fetched us a Dustin and settled down to do the most awesome thing ever: a two-person module in basic D&D! Basic's fun because it's easy to roll up a character. The module's about a jousting tournament, so I made a thief who's squire to Dustin's awesome fighter. They are:

Dame Francesca Varnell, the elderly errant knight and proponent of good and just conduct. She much enjoys adventure, and helping others. She has a streak of gray but is otherwise quite vigorous and looks to be in great shape for her age.

And her squire is Farin "Whistler" Attar (whom the lady Varnell calls 'Adder', naturally, mispronouncing his last name). A young would-be thief, he has somehow ended up serving as the Lady's squire and follows her around. He is missing one of his front teeth and has a knife scar along his left cheek. Aside from being scruffy and somewhat scrawny, he is otherwise unremarkable in appearance.

We had a raucous good time together! Having received a mysterious invitation to the castle of the Black Knight, Dame Varnell seized on the opportunity to investigate the place. She had good reason to want to look, as a local maiden named Gertie had been recently kidnapped in a raid presumably by the Black Knight, and taken to his castle.

As soon as we entered the castle, the drawbridge began to rise, effectively trapping us within the keep. Whistler, leading Dame Varnell's horse, grew nervous.

Whistler: Are you sure this is a good idea, Lady Varnell? Because I don't think we're gonna be able to get out of here!
Dame Varnell: Oh, well, it would do us no good to leave before we've located Gertrude, Attar, you know that.
Whistler: But the gate--!
Dame Varnell: It's almost certainly a trap, after all.
Whistler: Why couldn't you have said that before we got here?
Dame Varnell: Don't be ridiculous! We must take care of Gertrude, in any case.
Whistler: You know, there's a reason nobody else wants to find her. She's mean.
Dame Varnell: Attar! That's no way to speak about a lady.

I will write up a bunch more, but for now there's work to do. Suffice it to say, we had a blast!

Edit: Hey! A more uplifting article about handling internet arguments in a way that turns them back into discussions. Very nice piece!

John Carter of Mars: So I was going to leave it at just that, but now I can't

So I already said my piece for John Carter of Mars. That piece is, essentially: This is based on some fun, epic fiction from the 1920's and 1930's. If you like fun, you should give it a shot.

Then I read up on how the film is doing, 'critically', and monetarily. Now, it's a sci-fi movie and it's not rated G, so I don't expect it'll be making an enormous profit. It's only been out for a little bit and it's not quite halfway to making back its budget. If it can make a little bit of a profit, I'd call that good. I'd be satisfied with that. (But on that note, I do want people to go see the movie, so why not do it in the theater?)

Here's the thing. Critics complain that the movie doesn't make sense, or is a jumble of non-explained things. They call it derivative, or they call it cheesy. They say it's too silly. Some even said it had no right to look so good because it's a B movie. Right now it's got about a 50% rating, because some critics can't stand anything that isn't a pretentious art film (or paying them to say nice things about the film), while others enjoyed the movie enough to say about the same thing I'm saying up top here.

Let's address the point that bothers me the most here.

Calling this movie derivative.

You may notice, if you care to look it up as I just did, that Avatar-- a film that richly deserves to be ripped apart for being so boring and long on top of not particularly imaginative, interesting, or good (see, I didn't even mention the racism and sexism! Oh, oops)-- has about an 83% critical rating. I'm not saying grr! I hate people who liked this movie! because that would be ridiculous. But the movie wasn't deserving of 'critical acclaim', yet critical acclaim it got!

There are movies that are popular (Terminator 2: Judgement Day) and there are movies that are Good and Probably Deserve An Award, (Silence of the Lambs), and it's presumably the job of critics to identify which is which and tell us why, and maybe give a good idea of their opinion on the movie in the process of explaining these things.

I don't think critics did that for Avatar. But, I also think critics don't play video games, so they were probably impressed by the visuals of the film. I spent most of the film going "this isn't as impressive as Final Fantasy X to me. This is definitely not as impressive as Final Fantasy XIII was to me, and I didn't even especially like Final Fantasy XIII." What I'm trying to say is, 'you want derivative? Avatar is ridiculously derivative.'

For these critics, the visuals of Avatar were so stunning that that made it okay to tell yet another noble savage story with flagrant sexism, the main character LITERALLY mind-raping everything on the planet as an accepted and encouraged plot device, space marines acting exactly as space marines do in every single movie ever made to date, and long, painfully slow scenes that reminded me of the meandering quality of oft-deplored movies from the eras of the 60's and 70's. Do I care that the worldwide audience was similarly bamboozled and wowed by the shiny graphics? Nah. It's not THEIR job to notice when something is derivative, or bad, or sexist, or racist, or just plain poorly edited. It's the job of critics.

Yet I watched John Carter of Mars, which was fun, surprisingly unracist for a science-fiction piece just screaming for some heavy-handed social commentary about the green people being primitive or the red-caped people being uncultured savages, and tied in rather nicely at the end without any undue plot contradictions, and the critics are hating it for being 'derivative'. What about it is derivative, I wonder? When the source material came about in the 1920's, what could it possibly be derivative of?

Burroughs wrote these books during an era when many theories about the other planets of the solar system were being bandied about. The one he liked best is the one that suggested that Mars is just a dying Earth, slowly fading now that it is ancient, compared to our world. (I prefer the one that says Mars is a planet with a red forest and white deserts, and that Venus is a jungle planet; but you know, there was a lot of cool theorizing going on back then, so it's all good.) The biggest problem I had with the movie was that at the very beginning, a narrator who I can only presume is supposed to be Burroughs or perhaps Carter himself, informs us that we may think Mars is a wasteland without life, that there is no breathable air, but that we'd be wrong. This doesn't fit the narrative of the rest of the film because guess what, the setting is framed in 1881. Neither Carter nor Burroughs would have any idea that in the modern day, we think of Mars as a cold, lifeless planet without air. Saying those words at all is basically meaningless, and the movie could have done without it. So, there's my two cents. The first thirty seconds, with the voiceover narration, those're stupid. The rest is great fun.

Anyway, so what's this derivative of? I suppose Burroughs is being derivative of the theory he based the books on. If we're not accusing Burroughs of being derivative, though, then what are we accusing the movie of being derivative of-- Burroughs' books? Isn't that the point of basing a movie on a novel?

Now, I can see how you might say the movie's visuals are derivative, in the sense that the costumes for the red-caped Martians were strikingly similar to the costumers for Spartans in 300. Or the design for White Apes being similar to other monster designs. Or the design for the Tharks being astonishingly similar to the design for the Grand Councilwoman in Lilo and Stitch. Or hey, I'll even give you that the whole arena scene? Was visually a lot like the terrible, terrible arena scene in Star Wars: Episode II - The Clone Wars.

But these derivative visuals are certainly no more derivative than everything else ever made that, likewise, drew creative inspiration from the past, instead of trying to start from scratch. And the story, well. I have trouble seeing how the story can be derivative when it pretty much follows the book, and the book is nearly a hundred years old. Is there some lesser-known work of Jules Verne's that Burroughs is ripping off, or something similar?

As far as I can tell, the claim that the movie is derivative is as baseless as any nutjob who will argue with you that Lord of the Rings: Fellowship of the Ring is derivative of Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone just because the latter film came out in in November of 2001, and the former in December of the same year. You can try to tell me that Dumbledore came first all you want, and Gandalf is based on Dumbledore, but you'd still be wrong. Lord of the Rings predates Harry Potter, and thus cannot be derivative of it. (And if you want to know what it is derivative of, check out Finnish epic poetry about a guy named Vainamoinen. Edit: Now spelled right and with a link! Anyway, THAT'S who Gandalf is probably based on.)

If you're a critic whose job it is to dissect movies, by all means, dissect them. All I want is that you do it legitimately, criticizing films for their actual shortcomings and not just because you hate a particular genre. Complaints that a B movie shouldn't look this good? Hey, guys, where have you been for the last forty years? Science-fiction and fantasy films are sold to people like you entirely based on their special effects, budget or no. Of course it looks good. Their budget went into special effects instead of paying far too much for name-brand actors.

Complaints that the movie was 'boring' or 'slow' or 'didn't make sense': I can tell that YOU, the critic, stopped paying attention for the simple reason that you don't like this film genre. What really annoys me about this is that a critic will moan that the plot was too complicated or poorly paced, or whatnot, without thinking of the film from the perspective of how the story is being told, and what the story is. This particular film is dealing with a pulp hero, but it's also dealing with political manipulation, and a plot for assassination. It handles all of these things fairly well by following the two main characters almost exclusively, and occasionally granting the audience information that the main characters do not have by following the people who are specifically trying to work against them. This is standard for movies in general, not just this genre, so I don't see how anyone could have a problem with it unless they dislike all movies for not making an effort to escape this tired old storytelling crutch. The only conclusion I can make, then, is that John Carter of Mars is a science fiction film, and critics just loathe that. Worse, it's not a depressing science fiction film because it ends on a hopeful note instead of a dreary, soul-draining one about the hopelessness of all life. Don't get me wrong, I appreciate a good sci-fi about how the greatest enemy humanity has is itself, but I don't want that every day. Variety is important even in good movies.

Now, to the heart of things. Is John Carter of Mars a movie deserving of an award? No. It's based on a piece of pulp fiction. And while it is not derivative, a lot of other, better, later stories are derivative of it.

Is it a good movie that people should totally go see because they will laugh, the characters are developed enough for you to care about, and even get to survive the movie? Yes. Yes it is. If you like science fiction, or you like adventure, please go see this movie. I really think you'll enjoy it.

And it's not my job to tell you so. I just want to share something that I enjoyed with you.

Edit: After the fact, I thought it might not be clear that I chose the example of Avatar because it is expressly a movie that is derivative of The Princess of Mars, so on and so forth, but the funniest thing is finding a totally unrelated Official Site interview with the main actor where they pointed out that fact in like, the first line where they're describing the whole thing. And I thought I was being so smooth! Ahahah. Also I'm as annoyed with the critics as I am because I just can't summon the will to be annoyed with Disney's lackluster, shoot-myself-in-the-face advertising problems. They have developed a history of just absolutely awful advertising over the last ten years. It's like they WANT to run the company into the ground if at all possible, which is just so childish and annoying. Rrrgh!