Friday, October 07, 2005
New News
My day job is at night, as you know if you've been reading my postings for a while, but my "real" job is as a writer. Speaking of writers, we went to see Josh Wheedon's new movie, Serenity, which is really an extended episode of the short-lived series Firefly. Josh Wheedon is a very good writer, technically, with a very recognizable style of drawing characters and dialogue. He's going to be at the Screenwriting Expo in Los Angeles next month, and so am I. Maybe I can get close enough for some of his talent to rub off. He created and wrote Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Angel, which is where you might be familiar with his work.
While I'm on the topic of writing, you might be interested to know that my wife's first novel is now out. It's called Cruising for Love, out in hardcover from Avalon Books. It's what they call a "sweet" romantic comedy. "Sweet" means that somebody who thinks W. Bush is a bit too liberal could enjoy reading it. It's a good story, a bit light, but very well crafted. And the hero is named Steve so how could it miss? It's available from Amazon among other places.
The movie we saw features an obsessed idealist bent on destruction. There are two ways of neutralizing someone like that: kill him or undermine his arguments. In the movie the hero undermines his arguments and the bad guy simply goes away once his ideological fire has been put out. The other way is more popular in the American group consciousness, but actually less effective and more costly. To seque directly into current politics, I notice that to date since we were attacked in 2001, over four years ago, we have failed to kill the zealot Bin Laden, and far from undermining his arguments we seem hell-bent on making them seem reasonable. They aren't, of course, but when we take over an Arab state and then let things seemingly get worse and worse we make it easier and easier for Bin Laden to get benighted fools to believe the lies he tells about us. Isn't that something? Instead of doing something with an apparent positive effect on our relationship to the Arab world, we manage to sound like idiots changing our story to cover up lies, to look like destructive monsters who like to torture prisoners, and to seem absolutely ineffective in bringing in one old man hooked up to a dialysis machine in the mountains of Pakistan.
If I haven't said this before, I should have. Movies are just plain better than real life, and there's just no doubt at all about that. Where's President Palmer (of 24) when you really need him, huh?
While I'm on the topic of writing, you might be interested to know that my wife's first novel is now out. It's called Cruising for Love, out in hardcover from Avalon Books. It's what they call a "sweet" romantic comedy. "Sweet" means that somebody who thinks W. Bush is a bit too liberal could enjoy reading it. It's a good story, a bit light, but very well crafted. And the hero is named Steve so how could it miss? It's available from Amazon among other places.
The movie we saw features an obsessed idealist bent on destruction. There are two ways of neutralizing someone like that: kill him or undermine his arguments. In the movie the hero undermines his arguments and the bad guy simply goes away once his ideological fire has been put out. The other way is more popular in the American group consciousness, but actually less effective and more costly. To seque directly into current politics, I notice that to date since we were attacked in 2001, over four years ago, we have failed to kill the zealot Bin Laden, and far from undermining his arguments we seem hell-bent on making them seem reasonable. They aren't, of course, but when we take over an Arab state and then let things seemingly get worse and worse we make it easier and easier for Bin Laden to get benighted fools to believe the lies he tells about us. Isn't that something? Instead of doing something with an apparent positive effect on our relationship to the Arab world, we manage to sound like idiots changing our story to cover up lies, to look like destructive monsters who like to torture prisoners, and to seem absolutely ineffective in bringing in one old man hooked up to a dialysis machine in the mountains of Pakistan.
If I haven't said this before, I should have. Movies are just plain better than real life, and there's just no doubt at all about that. Where's President Palmer (of 24) when you really need him, huh?
