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Author: Violette Malan

‘Til Death Do Us Part

‘Til Death Do Us Part

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Firefly I need this manI recently had a wedding anniversary, so that naturally led me to think about married characters. There don’t seem to be many of them.

I should make it clear that by married characters I don’t mean those who happen to have a spouse somewhere. Rather, I mean narratives where the protagonists are essentially a married couple.

They don’t have to have been “churched” but they do have to be a committed couple, living their lives together, participating in everything the narrative throws at them. They’re not just partners, or associates.

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It’s A Group Effort

It’s A Group Effort

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stargate_sg-1I think we can all remember a time when, with the possible exception of soap operas, TV shows had one lead character. Even when it was a sitcom, and the lead character was married, there was still only one lead. Often these shows were easy to spot because they identified the character in the title of the show. I Love Lucy. The Dick van Dyke Show. The Rifleman.

The first show I remember having an ensemble cast is Hill Street Blues (1981-1987). It was also the first show I remember having ongoing narratives that spanned episodes, something else we see a lot of today. It was closely followed by St. Elsewhere (1982-1988). More recently, sort of between then and now, we’ve got The West Wing, Sports Night (thank you Aaron Sorkin) and the CSI and NCIS franchises. Though we could argue that in these last two shows what we have is an anchor character, in the person of the better known actor, surrounded by the rest of the ensemble.

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My Top Five Sword-Fight Movies

My Top Five Sword-Fight Movies

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You don’t have to read many of my posts to know that The Princess Bride is pretty well my favorite movie. And though I love the sword fighting scene between Wesley and Iñigo, and the later one between Iñigo and Count Rugen, they are not actually my favorite sword fighting scenes. In both cases, it’s really the dialogue that makes the scenes memorable. So what movies would I rank above The Princess Bride in sword fighting wonderfulness?

Here they are, in the order in which I thought of them.

AramisThe Three Musketeers (1973, directed by Richard Lester)

One of the great things about this movie, along with its sequels The Four Musketeers, and The Return of the Musketeers, is that they all feature the same cast. There are good fight scenes in all the films (Oliver Reed is more impressive in the sequels), but it’s the first one I know the best. I particularly like the fantastic opening sequence, where D’Artagnan’s father teaches him the “secret thrust.” Anything between D’Artagnan (Michael York) and Rochefort (Christopher Lee) is well worth watching. There’s also some terrific ensemble fighting, notably the scene between the four leads and the Cardinals’ Guard in the convent courtyard. It should be noted that Christopher Lee was a fencer IRL as well.

The fencing instructor and fight choreographer was Bob Anderson.

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Retrofitting, And When It Doesn’t Work

Retrofitting, And When It Doesn’t Work

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starwarsI don’t know if I’ve mentioned it before, but I’m married to a builder. Over the years I’ve observed (judging by the level of bitching) that it’s easier to start from scratch than it is to retrofit. Still, there’s a way to do it well, and a way to screw it up.

I think that’s true of writing as well. I’ve already talked about sequels, and how genre writers in particular have to be careful to remember the details of the worlds they’ve created previously. However, when an author who’s twenty years into a series gets the colour of someone’s eyes wrong, or forgets that they’ve once said their protagonist was an only child, you have to figure that’s an honest mistake, and cut the writer some slack.

But what about conscious, deliberate changes? I’m not talking about reboots, or spin offs. They have their own problems. And I’m not talking about the changes that naturally occur when you’re adapting one media to another. No, I’m talking about sequels where the writer/creator seems to think that no one will remember what’s already been established. You know, where the writer/creator says “Oh yeah, I know I said she was an only child, but now I need her to have a brother, so she does.”

Yes, I’m talking to you, George Lucas.

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So, What Time Is It?

So, What Time Is It?

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timelessIt’s not often that we in the Fantasy and SF community get two time-travel related productions – the movie Arrival, and the TV series Timeless – at once. Even better, we’re being served two different theories of time, and time travel. (There might be some spoilers for those of you who haven’t seen either film or TV show, so watch out.)

I’ve talked about time as a literary device before, and I’ve looked at time travel specifically as well. In the earlier piece I mentioned the 17th-century English philosopher John Locke, and his Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690), in which he suggests that humans don’t experience time (or any other abstraction) directly. What we experience is actually a sequence of events, which he calls “duration.” One thing follows another, in one direction, which give us the idea that time is linear.

Aside, Fun Experiment: ask someone to point at yesterday. As a general rule, they’ll do one of two things. They’ll point behind them, or they’ll point to the left (or maybe to the right, if their culture reads that way)

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Always Winter, Never Christmas?

Always Winter, Never Christmas?

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narnia-christmas-small

Just a short post this week, since I’m sure we all want to get back to our holiday celebrations.

And speaking of which, I’m sure that everyone who remembers The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe as well as I do knows where today’s title comes from. The first time that Lucy finds herself in in Narnia, she meets Tumnus the faun, who tells her that because of the power of the White Queen, in Narnia it’s always winter, but never Christmas.

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No Adaptations?

No Adaptations?

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bondLately I’ve been looking at adaptations, both novel-to-movie, and novel or movie to TV series. I been talking about them in terms of what I thought was successfully done, and occasionally pointed at my favourites. In their comments people observed that while they agreed, for the most part, with my suggestions, they had suggestions of their own. All of us had to admit, however, that we were sometimes unfamiliar with either the source work, or the adaptation, or even both.

Have a look for yourself, here, and here.

One of the things I didn’t look at was movies or TV series adapted from story cycles, or from book series. The most successful of the latter has to be the Bond franchise, from the novels by Ian Fleming. How many movies have been made? 26? 27? Edgar Rice Burroughs’ character Tarzan has appeared in both movies and TV series. It seems there’s a new Tarzan film every 20 years or so, but none have been as successful as the Johnny Weismuller/Margaret O’Sullivan films of the 1930’s and 40’s. Do we need to mention Perry Mason?

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My Top Ten TV Series Adaptations

My Top Ten TV Series Adaptations

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true-bloodNot long ago I posted about my top ten novel-to-movie adaptations, (see here) and it spurred a flurry of opinions and alternate suggestions. Today I’m thinking about TV series and the difference here is that TV are just as frequently adapted movies as they are from novels. The requirements of this kind of adaptation are different from those of novel-to-movie. For one, the source material has to provide an ongoing story line, what’s called “series potential.” Obviously, that’s most easily done from something that’s already a series to begin with. But there are other criteria.

huff-debtAs Goldman says about adapting novels for film, the TV series should retain the intention of the original material, but perhaps the issue of length isn’t as problematic. On the contrary, the more of the original source’s complexity that can be kept, the better, as TV adaptations can explore avenues and characters in ways a movie can’t. On the other hand, series requirements sometimes lead to unexpected changes to the source material.

Here, in no particular order, are my choices.

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Two New Canadian SF Anthologies

Two New Canadian SF Anthologies

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lazarusI know I’ve mentioned before that I’m a big fan of the original anthology, and I’d like to take the opportunity to draw your attention to two new ones that have crossed my table in the last month or so.

The first is Lazarus Risen, edited by Hayden Trenholm and Mike Rimar. Here’s how the editors describe the premise:

Lazarus Risen presents sixteen stories from around the world that explore the economic, political, social and psychological consequences of life extension, human cloning, the hard upload and other forms of The Biological Singularity.

It’s very rare that I find an anthology where I thought every single story was a winner, but this is one of them. Here are some of my favourites: Sean McMullen’s “The Life and Soul of the Party” tells us about the steampunk-style resurrection of Oscar Wilde. Matthew Shean’s “Sylvia and Larry,” where a woman needs a new body before her husband’s Alzeimers makes it impossible for him to recognize her new self, is vaguely reminiscent of Spider Robinson’s “Antimony” but hits harder, I think.

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My Top Ten Novel-to-Movie Adaptations

My Top Ten Novel-to-Movie Adaptations

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3-musketeers-posterLast time I was having a look at William Goldman, both his screen and novel writing. You can see the whole post here, but for my review of my top ten movie adaptations, I’d like to repeat what Goldman says about writing screenplays:

Here is one of the main rules of adaptation: you cannot be literally faithful to the source material.

Here’s another that critics never get: you should not be literally faithful to the source material. It is in a different form, a form that does not have the camera.

Here is the most important rule of adaptation: you must be totally faithful to the intention of the source material.

— from Which Lie Did I Tell?

In another spot, and I’m paraphrasing here, because now I can’t find the quotation, he tells us how a book has maybe 400 pages, and a screenplay has around 135 pages, and not full pages at that, so what do you think happens between one version and the other?

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