Cráig-jà vu: a pictoral Skyfall review

“Some men are coming to kill us. We’re going to kill them first”

I sat down over the course of a few nights and put down a thousand or so words about Skyfall’s shockingly simplistic plot, its redeemability as a satire, and whether or not long-running properties’ camp traditions can coexist with Nolanesque gritty reboots. Soon I realized that all this critique was getting longer and longer, but less and less cohesive.

The first night, I even tried to write a feminist review (haha women can’t shoot). But then I realized that any feminist review of this franchise would boil down to “Duh, it’s Bond. What did you expect?”

So instead I got you some nice pictures which illustrate the weird feelings of déjà vu that I had over the course of the movie.

[spoilers, clearly]

 

Cráig-jà vu: The feeling that you’ve seen this movie before

The X-Files!



Mission Impossible! (Note also that they're fighting over a NOC list)


Indiana Jones! 


Men in Black!

Silence of the Lambs!




Ferris Bueller's Day Off!


Return of the Jedi! (battle with the Rancor in a sand pit)


Titanic! 


Kung Fu Hustle! (really disappointed there wasn't any Kung Fu that happened here)


X-Men 2!


Wayne Manor Batman Begins! 



Home Alone!


Apocalypse Now!



Famous franchise sidekick pointlessly reveals name right before closing credits?



Man they really wish this movie was Dark Knight, don't they?

The Vagina Dress Collection

The last time I posted about this topic was three years ago, but it has remained near and dear to my heart (and high in pageviews). Tonight I would like to share with you the fruits of my labor, the mementos of my travels...my Vagina Dress collection

The first Google search result for "vagina dress" 

This is the vagina dress that started it all. Prom 2009, never forget. It's literal, but also graphic and chic with the choice of black. The peekaboo pink lining is another subtle callback to the overall theme.

Color is of course a classic supporting feature of any vagina dress. A pink might trend too childlike or vulgar, but a deep red sends a powerful message

The strong shoulders and shiny pleather detail reinforce the message here: this particular vagina is closed for business.

Vaginas shouldn't be limited to the lower torso. If you love something, set it free.

When your silhouette is this obvious, you don't need to fall back on cliches like pink.

Rosanna Arquette here is sporting a modernist vagina. Very op-art. Her boots, meanwhile, are a tribute to sheepskin condoms.

The vagina dress knows no cultural bounds. Here are two Asian examples, from China's fashion week.

Sometimes the dress isn't itself a vagina, but is instead a stage upon which the vagina is presented. The curtains spread and there she is in all her glory. 

I can't believe this is the only Versace piece I have in the Vagina Dress collection. 

The vagina dress often has trouble integrating itself with its peers.

 

Love the vagina dress or hate it, you have to acknowledge the balls it takes to present such a thing as this and announce to the world that it is your vision. A denim vagina is thoroughly in the ironic/postmodern territory

Even more postmodern is a vagina dress without a vagina on it. This one leaves us dripping with the anticipation of our next cycle. 

With vagina dentata this big, one might easily miss the bathing suit's true theme: ironic or crippling expressions of movie nostalgia among Gen X.

And lastly, no collection of vagina dresses would be complete without the ultimate feminist commentary on our phallocentric coming-of-age rites. They could pass as prom dresses or wedding dresses, but either way, these yonis are a breath of fresh, direct air in a world increasingly buried under the weight of nuance and irony. 

Angry about the Olympics

I am angry about the Olympics.

I don’t mean about the police state, or the disturbing corporatism, or the brand policing, or the evictions, or the even the blank cheque stolen from the British taxpayers to fund this circus during the height of austerity protests.

No, I am angry about content delivery.

In the year of our lord two thousand and twelve, there is no reason why I should still be subjected to a trickle of NBC-curated content, at premium cost and maximum inconvenience.

This Olympics, I am interested mainly in Flipsports: Gymnastics, Diving, Trampoline. In order to view the flipsports, I should not have to purchase premium cable, purchase a TiVo, cross reference the schedule, record 4 hour chunks of unrelated sports, and fast forward through 3.75 hours of “inspirational” packages, Visa commercials, and inane commentary to get to maybe 10-20 minutes of actual Trampolining. I also shouldn’t be tethered to my local NBC affiliate for a whole hour and a half before they deign to replay 10 minutes of gymnastics, only to be interrupted by another 2 swimming races. (These events already happened. Why are you flipping back and forth and pretending they’re simultaneous?)

What smart providers like Netflix and Hulu (and to a certain extent iTunes) have recognized is that the people demand content-on-demand. This is the age of the user, of personalization, and people will pay reasonable fees for access to the media they want. NBC’s forays into the 21^st century, meanwhile, are largely failures. For example, an Olympics app that has 7,000+ “1” ratings on the Playstore (twice the number of “5” ratings).

But wait, you say: NBC is streaming live, uncut feeds on their Gold website. No commentary, just a Twitter feed posting what is happening on the sidebar. Doesn’t this sound like the glorious content-driven programming we all desire? Where pure sport wins out over all weepy sentimentality and corporate hucksterism?

Yes, and all you need to access the internet stream is…a cable TV account. I’m sure you see the irony of having to purchase a bloated, terrible service that I never wanted in order to access a streamlined internet service that I do. And so NBC insists on forcing us all to their 20^th century cable TV model instead of embracing the fact that their market has changed.

To NBC, I say, if you want to continue to be a mercenary, profit-driven megacorp about it (as is the American Way), there are still ways we can both get everything we want. I would pay a premium fee (equal to a month of package cable) for unlimited streaming access to every sport on demand. For more casual viewers, let them pay by-sport for content. Or let them pay for hourly access—I’m sure you could soak a lot of people out of more money than they intended to spend on that.

And what do I expect to receive for my money?

This is the New Deal, NBC. This is what I expect for all future Olympics cycles:

• Complete access to all competition content (every video of every competitor at every sport.)
• Streaming internet video access (sorted by sport, or day of competition)
• Access to completed competitions on demand, with full fast forward/rewind/slow mo control

And that’s just the basic standards. Imagine what great content you could provide if you actually put some effort into it!

• Program-your-own coverage by selecting from a list of events beforehand. They automatically record to your save file, or ping you when they’re going live.
• Database access for info about every competitor, searchable by sport and country, previous scores, everything. Oh, and while we’re here, why not a constant running scoreboard?
• Auto-display of file info for whichever athlete is currently competing or on screen
• Public guest commentary channels, where members of the public can broadcast their own commentary for the onscreen action. Eliminate inane NBC commentators entirely! 

When providers insist on a stranglehold over their media (and the Olympics are one of the most obvious abusers of this), everyone suffers. The viewers suffer. Innovation suffers. Yes, even corporate profits suffer. The RIAA and the MPAA and NBC can bitch and moan about “stealing,” but the fact is that none of these megacorps provide access to the content that 21^st century people want.

I wish we could be talking here about dismantling the runaway corporatism that ruins culture and economies worldwide. I wish we could even entertain notions that having the Olympics in town is a Bad Thing, and that—far from stimulating the economy and being an “inspiration,” the Olympics destroys infrastructure, bankrupts, and general leeches the lifeblood out of a city, its treasury, and its people.

But if we have to accept corporatism and its eternal faceboot as an overall positive, then at the very least I demand that NBC provide me with a modicum of quality in the entertainment that is supposed to be anesthetizing me to the whole system.

At the very least, shut up and take my money.

Photo from Business Insider/NBC

"Trevor Gets Shot" at The Fiction Desk

I’m going to make a confession. Maybe this will seem shocking to some people, or obvious to others, but here it is:

I don’t read Literary Journals.

I know I’m supposed to: I have my MFA, I’m actively trying to get my stories published… heck, according to some people I should be reading every journal I’m thinking of submitting to. But I’m not. Never mind the cost and the time sink: they just don’t hold my interest. So few short stories these days do. Sure, I’ll pick up one here and there, from friends who play the game, or a textbook manuscript that crosses my desk. But I have only once actively purchased a literary journal, and that was One Story, in which the one story was one that I’d already heard at a reading and loved.

I don’t read literary journals, and I definitely don’t read them cover to cover. Exception: I read The Maginot Line cover to cover.

The Maginot Line is the third volume of UK based The Fiction Desk, edited by Rob Redman. I was honored to have my story “Trevor Gets Shot” published in this particular volume, with 8 other authors from the US to the UK to New Zealand.  Fiction Desk runs a rather ingenious contest. Upon publication, all of the contributing authors vote for their favorite story (excluding their own of course). The winner of the vote gets an extra 100 quid. Not too shabby!

Because I read it cover to cover, and because I am reviewing every book I read this year, it follows that I must review The Maginot Line. Since I’ve never read an entire Literary Journal it’s hard to know how to review one. Do I workshop each story individually? (That seems moot, since they’ve already achieved the elusive goal of publication.) Do I comment on the composition of the volume as a whole? (Which relies heavily on critiquing editorial decisions that I was not privy to. ) Can I reasonably ask the editor of any given journal to share my aesthetic? Heck, when I was on the staff of Redivider, explicitly voting on nonfiction submissions for publication, I still didn’t feel like the published product matched my aesthetic. So I’ll go with some general impressions, remembering that this is a personal blog review and not a submission for the Pulitzer Prize in literary criticism.

The story which got my vote was Mandy Taggart’s “The Man of the House.” It’s a horror story told from the point of view of the house ghost . Jack. Jack haunts the kids and scares the mother enough for her to consult a medium, but there is a greater danger lurking. A danger only Jack can see, that Jack tries to warn them about. “The Man of the House” is well-crafted, suspenseful, and best of all, It has a chilling twist ending. Delightful all around.

“The Pest” likewise has a twist ending, though not as masterfully done. In this story by Shari Aarlton, we follow the trials of protagonist’s sister and her young daughter Andy, living next door to a nasty, despicable dog breeder named Ms. Boothman.  I loved the breadth of the antagonist’s depravity, and the satisfying revenge the neighbors take at the end. 

I mention endings specifically because they are important in a short story. I admire a good ending above all else. (And I struggle at achieving it in my own work.) When it is done right, the impact is substantial. Several of these Maginot Line stories just didn’t have endings at all. They set up excellent premises, establish some conflict, then drop off suddenly. Often before the main event. Imagine if I had ended “Trevor Gets Shot“ before he gets shot.  These stories don’t make the promise right in the title, but the promise is there nonetheless. I wanted to stick around to see it. Leaving the story on a beautiful or disturbing piece of imagery is fashionable these days, but the foundation of any story is a good plot. Let those conflicts play out!

I was pleased not to find a lot of the standard tropes of literary short fiction. No staring out the window, no deceased babies, no quietly falling out of love. Though I have my criticisms, all of the Fiction Desk stories had interesting premises and concrete conflicts. The writing was of good quality. Most importantly, I was never bored or frustrated with the stories. Reading The Maginot Line was enjoyable, and I’m glad I did it.

So if you’re looking for a solid, classy literary journal that could benefit from a few readers (or good writers!), then I definitely recommend Fiction Desk.

Or if you just want to read Trevor Gets Shot in some nice bound paperback action.

Link:

http://www.thefictiondesk.com/anthologies/the-maginot-line.php

FAKE EDIT: Between my writing and posting this review, Fiction Desk announced the winner of the writers’ choice award. It went to Matt Plass for the title story ("The Maginot Line"), about a son who visits his elderly father, who opines about a haunted line of trees and how we will be remembered. So congratulations to Matt!