Alice

Tim Burton’s adaptation of Alice in Wonderland was only okay.  It was pretty, and had some cool and funny moments, but was generally just “meh”.  The plot didn’t make much sense, it had the same creepy Burton-esque imagery all of his films have, and the ending was uninspired.  Also, I saw the 3D version, which was crap—the movie wasn’t filmed in 3D, and the “conversion” process left a lot to be desired.  Anyway, this movie was passably entertaining, but there’s no need to seek it out.

She’s Out of My League

This movie is a bit out of my normal viewing habits, but it was that rarest of all creatures: a romantic comedy with a male protagonist.  This is not to be confused with the sex comedy, which is about guys trying to get laid and the wackiness that ensues.  This is an actual romantic comedy about a regular joe (played by Jay Baruchel, to whom I have been partial since seeing him in Fanboys and who is turning up all over the place these days) who ends up attracting the attention of a super-hot woman, and the wackiness that ensues as he tries to figure out how to get over his own insecurities so they can actually be together.

I enjoyed this one quite a bit.  It’s rare to find a modern romantic comedy that doesn’t irk me in some way, but this one worked for me overall.  If you’re looking for such fare, you could do worse than this one.

Clash of the Titans

I saw this movie in 2D after hearing that the 3D sucked.   (Experience with the “converted-to-3D” Alice suggested such conversions were no good, anyway.)  Though unfamiliar with the original movie, I had high hopes for this one—I figured, giant monsters fighting each other, how could it go wrong?

Alas, the title misled me, and the movie was a confusing jumble, with a demigod and his companions on a quest to stop the Kraken.  The visual effects were fine, and some of the battles were pretty sweet, but the hero and his companions were all stock characters without a lick of inventiveness about them, and you could pretty much predict the order they’d die in.

I think that this was possibly the most disappointing movie of the last two months, simply because it would have been so easy to make this better than it was.

Kick-Ass

Now this was a tremendously awesome movie.  The girlfriend described it as Kill Bill with an 11-year-old, and that’s damned accurate for parts of it.  The trailers made this look like as if it was a “teenage boy decides to become a superhero”, which does happen, but what the movie actually does is show how awful and horrifying such a life can be for everyone involved in it.  It pulls this off with a lot of profanity, graphic violence, and touching moments of humour and kindness.  This is certainly one of my favourites so far this year.

Iron Man 2

The original Iron Man movie was a tough act to follow.  It came out of nowhere, and was so good at balancing action and character depth and development.  Thus, I had a lot of trepidation about the sequel.  Thankfully, I wasn’t disappointed.

Iron Man 2 was a good movie.  Not as good as its predecessor, not quite becoming great.  But it was entertaining.  Lots of great action sequences.  It was fun.  I think, however, that they tried to cram in too much character development without giving enough screen time to do it right, leaving it feeling rushed and superficial.  I would have happily given up some of the action sequences in favour of the character depth.

My fondest hope is that the inevitable Iron Man 3 raises the bar again, rather than dropping the ball as all of Marvel’s other part threes have.

Gunless

This was a Canadian Western movie starring Paul Gross.  That may tell you everything you need to know.  Overall, it was pretty entertaining.  It had genuinely funny moments, but also its share of cliches.  It doesn’t redefine the Western genre or anything, but is well-produced and well-performed.  Fun, and worth watching if you come across it.

Robin Hood

This movie was much better than I expected, although it was severely lacking in Alan Rickman.  While it is supposedly an origin story of Robin Hood, there was very little about it that had any meaningful connection to various Robin Hood legends other than the character names.  Other people have referred to this as “Gladiator in England”, and they’re not wrong.  Still, the story was coherent and compelling (although my medievalist friends were less than enamored of certain aspects), the soundtrack was good, and—apart from some shaky-cam—the battle scenes were fun.  A quality movie overall.

Shrek Forever After

The fourth Shrek movie was another pleasant surprise.  I had felt that the second and third movies in the franchise veered a little too much into self-congratulation and knowing winks to the audience in the form of wall-to-wall pop culture references, but this movie was closer to the original in form.  It didn’t beat you over the head with pop culture references (though it still had them), it did beat you over the head with the character arc (as all of the others have done), and it worked as a fun, lighthearted movie.  I liked it almost as much as the first.

Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time

This may be the best movie ever made that was based on a video game.  By that comment, I certainly do mean to damn with faint praise.

Apart from the more general issues (none of the princes of Persia look especially Persian, for example), my major criticism relates to the action and parkour scenes.  Unlike Jenn, I found the parkour scenes uneven.  The sequence when he was a kid was great, with all the action and moves visible and easy to follow.  Once Jake Gyllenhaal takes the screen, the camera zooms in so all you can see are his rippling pecs, and none of the actual parkour.  Admittedly, Jenn and I are in different demographics, and so her appreciation of the “parkour” may have a different motive than mine.

Anyway, the movie was entertaining, even though a number of the characters acted in completely arbitrary and/or stupid ways in order to further the plot.  The rationale behind the ending was unclear, and the ending itself was a bit of a cop-out, undermining everything that happened in the movie itself.  I think this is best considered as the sort of movie that you might watch on late-night TV rather than seeking it out on purpose.

[Update 02 July 2010] How could I forget the best part of this movie?  The ostrich racing, ran by Alfred Molina’s character.  That was almost worth the price of admission itself.  (To clarify, this is ostrich racing where the ostriches have riders.  So like horse races, not dog races.  Awesome.)

The Karate Kid

I went to see this movie because, well, it was a cheap weekend morning  movie and nothing else was out at the time.  I was sort of appalled when I saw the trailers for a movie called The Karate Kid where they were clearly studying kung fu, and also that they were remaking a cheesy 80’s movie series.  I mean, I think Jackie Chan was a great choice for the mentor, but they turned it into a little kids’ movie.

But it turns out the movie wasn’t so bad.  I found it a little slow to begin with, but I was actually pretty impressed with the fight choreography when stuff started going down.  They gave Chan’s character a bit more depth than Mr. Miyagi got in his first movie, and had some nice training montages.  Jaden Smith did a good job as a lead, too, for such a young actor.  I was rather surprised to see full-contact martial arts tournament in a kid-oriented movie, too, but I certainly enjoyed it.  Perhaps not worth heading out to see, but not a bad watch.

The A-Team

This movie was delightful.  The cast was solid in taking over roles from the classic TV show, the plot was delightfully ridiculous, and the action non-stop.  In fact, my only criticism might be that there was too much action, and so the audience was left with little down time.  I think I would have enjoyed some longer, more in-depth planning sequences than we were treated to, but that’s a minor quibble.  The movie poked fun at itself and its origins, cleverly acknowledging how ridiculous their plans could get and mocking the action movie genre in general.

Oh, one other thing: the final action sequence was perhaps a bit too explosive.  Without giving anything away, let me just say that the same people who built the hotel in Quantum of Solace turned their hands to shipbuilding, leading to a climactic battle that was just a little too CGI-heavy and over-the-top (a.k.a. Michael Bay-like).  But the movie is super-fun overall.

Toy Story 3

I ended up seeing this movie twice, once in 3D and once in 2D, for two reasons: both showings were cheap, and it was really good.  Now, I’m not really a fan of the Toy Story franchise.  I’ve only watched the first one on TV while doing something else, and I don’t think I had seen the second at all.  (I came to Pixar around Monsters Inc. and Finding Nemo, and have been stuck with them ever since—except for Cars.)  I say this to clarify that I don’t have 15 years of history with these characters.

Nonetheless, the movie was tightly plotted, with well-paced plot and emotional arcs (as I have come to expect from Pixar) and an ending that left me teary-eyed both times.  (Not Up-weepy, but still not bad.)  It’s just a really well-done movie, and should be satisfying to fans of the other two.

Regarding the 2D versus 3D: I saw the 3D one first, and honestly didn’t notice it much, except for the two or three occasions where they did something up really high and I thought, “Now there’s a shot put in for 3D.”  More to the point, I didn’t miss anything at all in the 2D version—it seemed perfectly excellent to me.  So maybe saving your extra $3 is not a bad thing, but see this movie.  Highly recommended.

In the midst of all of this, however, I did manage to see a number of movies, and while it had never been my intent to make this a movie blog, they have come to dominate (as they are my most frequent and easily-ranted-about entertainment).  Without further ado, I present my thoughts on the three movies I saw in theatre in January.

Thoughts on Up in the Air

This movie is not the normal sort of movie I write about here.  (I do watch some movies outside of the science fiction/fantasy/action/comedy category—though not many—but I generally don’t hold  forth on them.)  However, this movie was good enough to warrant some public praise.

I guess it is technically a drama, though it has plenty of humour throughout.  George Clooney plays a likable jackass who fires people for a living, and lives to travel, with no ties, no connections, just freedom.  He is teamed up with a young woman who plans to revolutionize his business and tie him down, and the movie is about him realizing maybe connections aren’t so bad.

That description doesn’t really do it much justice; the movie just works on basically every level.  Tension, family conflict, and humour are all well balanced into a movie that is (mostly) unpredictable, clever, nice, and yet doesn’t end too neatly.  Up in the Air gets the Andrew House seal of approval.

Sherlock Holmes

Boom!  Now this was my usual kind of movie.  As most of my familiarity with Sherlock Holmes comes via Star Trek: The Next Generation, I’m not a stickler for accuracy to the source material, and so the obvious… liberties taken with it do not bother me.  Guy Ritchie put together a snappy, fast-paced action movie with highly entertaining characters and a fine cast.  I was worried a little bit in the middle that they were actually introducing mystical/occult stuff, but thankfully it all worked out in the end.  A very fun and ridiculous movie—though not one for Holmes purists—that I wholeheartedly recommend.

Legion

The girlfriend wanted to see this one, and it turned out to be better than I expected.  I guess it was a sort of horror movie, though thankfully not a part of the torture porn genre, which has a former angel protecting an unborn child from the possessed masses after the apocalypse.  There were some genuinely creepy bits, some nicely gross bits, some cool action scenes, and, well, that was mostly it.  The reason for the apocalypse was kind of unclear, and the reason the unborn child could stop it was even more unclear—the movie did not lend itself well to deep introspection.  But it had a bit of tension, creepiness, and coolness, and so it kind of worked, for the kind of movie it is.

And that’s all I’ve got.

* * *

Coraline

I already wrote about Coraline, which was a most excellent stop-motion movie based on the children’s book by Neil Gaiman.  Recommended for anyone who enjoys creepy fantasy, but perhaps not for very young (or especially wussy) children.

Watchmen

I wrote about this before, as well.  Watchmen was a good adaptation of the graphic novel that fell just shy of being great.  I enjoyed it nonetheless.

Dragonball: Evolution

I also wrote about this one.  (Clearly, I started the year with a bit more drive to do my movie blogging on time—or perhaps the summer movie season just overwhelmed me with frequency.)  This movie was not nearly as bad as it could have been, but it occupies some sort of weird zone between not being close enough to the source material to satisfy all the existing fans, and _too_ close to the source material to appeal to new viewers.  I had fun watching it, but I’m not sure who I’d recommend it to.  Perhaps my best endorsement is this: there is no need to avoid this movie.

Fanboys

I held forth on this film as well, and quite enjoyed it.  I’m not sure people who aren’t Star Wars fans would get quite as much enjoyment as I did, but it was still a funny road trip comedy, with a nicely dark vibe running through it too.

Monsters vs. Aliens

I also wrote about this one, which was okay.  It was an adequately entertaining CG movie.  I did not feel upset or angry after having seen it, or that I had wasted my money, so that’s a plus, I guess?

Star Trek

Despite my reservations with certain elements of the Star Trek reboot (see this previous entry), I loved this movie.  It was great fun, and was pretty successful at pulling together a young new cast to fill the shoes of the iconic classic actors.  ‘Nuff said.

X-Men Origins: Wolverine

I also had a number of issues with this movie (see this previous posting), but was still entertained by it. The story had some problems, but the action was all pretty entertaining, and it was far and away better than X-Men 3, so kudos for that.  An adequate action movie, but it failed to live up to its potential.

Terminator: Salvation

That’s pretty much all I can say about Terminator: Salvation.  It was a passable action movie, but it turned out to be a prequel to the original trilogy, rather than showing an end to the war with Skynet.  So there was some combat sequences, and cool giant robots, and… well, that was sort of it.  Once we understood the timeframe, we kind of knew how things would end, since we’ve seen the other movies.  As a result, it was a rather disappointing conclusion to the Terminator movie saga, but in its own context it was reasonably entertaining.

Up

Pixar’s Up was fantastic, despite (or perhaps because of) the incredibly sad first ten or fifteen minutes.  As usual, Pixar hit on all cylinders, with excellent voice actors, a great script that had a perfectly-paced story, nice humour, and wonderful visuals.  Up was another example of why Pixar movies aren’t great because of their computer animation, but because they do everything else right, too.

The Hangover

This movie diverges somewhat from the overall science fiction and fantasy skew of my general movie watching, but I do enjoy my comedies, so long as they’re funny.  Thankfully, The Hangover fit the bill, and was a fun entry into the wacky night they can’t remember/road trip genre that defied convention in a few clever ways and yet didn’t refrain from toilet humour.  Highly enjoyable.

Moon

I had almost forgotten about Moon, which is unfortunate, because it was one of the better proper science fiction movies I have seen in a long time.  A (comparatively) low-budget movie about a miner on the moon, most of the movie has only one actor on screen, unless you count Kevin Spacey as the voice of the robot companion.

That makes it sound a bit claustrophobic and corny, I know, but the lead actor (Sam Rockwell?) does an excellent job, and the story is quite clever.  I was able to predict some elements of it (likely due to my greater familiarity with science fiction as a whole genre), but in terms of science fiction movies, I can’t think of anything quite like it.  It is most definitely not a sci-fi action movie.  But it was good.  Really good.  I liked it.  My girlfriend liked it.  A definite recommendation from me.

Ponyo

Ponyo is, I believe, the latest movie from Hayao Miyazaki, the legendary master of Japanese animation, and was released in North America by Disney.  (Pixar’s John Lasseter is a huge Miyazaki admirer, and was a driving force behind Disney’s aquisition of North American distribution rights for the Studio Ghibli oeuvre.)

Ponyo is a traditional 2D animated movie, with the story loosely adapted from the original Little Mermaid fairy tales.  The animation was beautiful, and intense and terrifying in places, but overall it was a cute movie aimed at younger viewers.  More like Miyazaki’s “My Neighbor Totoro” than “Princess Mononoke”, for sure.  Still, any admirer of quality animation will appreciate this film.  I look forward to adding it to my Ghibli collection.

Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince

I have only read the first Harry Potter book, so all my knowledge of the story comes from the movies.  As such, I can judge the movies by whether they work as movie, rather than by how well they adapt the book.  For example, I thought the third movie (Azkaban) was great, but a lot of people were upset by how much was left out from the book.  The fourth movie tried to put in bits of everything, and it ended up being practically incomprehensible as a movie without knowledge of the books.  Thankfully, they got back on track with the movies for the fifth one, and continued the trend with Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince.

It was a good movie.  It continued the story nicely (as you would expect), had some great visuals, intense moments, and a coherent story that came to the end leaving us wanting more.  We learned things we didn’t know, and did it because the characters were smart.  So I count this movie as a win.

Transformers 2: Revenge of the Fallen

This movie was so terrible that my rage moved me to write of it after seeing it.  I think the comedy group Hot Waffles needs to rewrite their song “George Lucas Raped My Childhood” to feature Michael Bay instead.  This may have been the worst movie I have ever spent my own money to see.

Unfortunately, it made a hojillion dollars, so there will likely be a Transformers 3.  My only hope is that, like me, everyone else who saw this movie was so appalled that they will avoid any future installments like the plague.

G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra

Alongside Transformers, G.I. Joe was the other foundational toy of my childhood.  (Star Wars and Lego were also prominent, but Star Wars toys were adapted from the movie, not vice versa, and there hasn’t been a Lego movie yet, so I’m limiting myself to Transformers and G.I. Joe for the sake of comparison.)  After the abominable live action Transformers movies, I was less than hopeful for G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra.

Thankfully, it exceeded my (admittedly low) expectations, and turned out to be a fun, if ridiculous, action movie.  I’m not exactly sure I’d recommend it, but it was silly and enjoyable.  My biggest beef was that they revamped the background of all the characters, removing their diverse and long-established origins and making them all interconnected and less interesting.

They set up a sequel, which I’m sure I’ll go see.  This was much better than the first Transformers (live action) movie, so even if they drop the ball on the second like they did with Transformers, hopefully it won’t fall as far.

Surrogates

This is a Bruce Wilis movie.  A friend of mine said he expected that, at the end, Bruce Willis would survive, and win the day, and be beaten to a bloody pulp.  He was not wrong.

Surrogates was an enjoyable SF movie about a world of the near future in which people live primarily through robotic surrogates that they control remotely from their homes.  The Surrogates never age, and can look like anything, from an idealized version of the owner to someone completely different.  Trouble starts when some surrogates are killed and and so are the owners connected to them, which should be impossible.  Bruce Willis (a cop, naturally) is put on the case to investigate.

As the story unfolds, we encounter a number of twists and turns, some cool action sequences, and some interesting characters.  I hadn’t read the graphic novel on which this was based, so I don’t know about the _accuracy_ of the adaptation, but at least the quality is high.  I recommend this movie.

The Imgainarium of Doctor Parnassus

I saw the gala premiere of this movie at the Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF), which I wrote about here.  I don’t have much more to say than that.  It was a good movie, very Gilliam-esque, with delightful visuals and quirky characters and storylines.  Not for everybody, to be sure, but it will definitely resonate with the right audience.

Time Trip: Curse of the Viking Witch

The other TIFF movie I saw was a Norwegian movie about some kids who travel through time to help and immortal viking become mortal so he can die.  Not bad, actually, for a kids movie.  Not so good that you need to figure out how to import the DVD or anything, but not bad.

Astroboy

This movie was a computer animated take on the classic Astroboy anime.  Clearly aimed at kids, but enjoyable.  From what I can tell, it changed some elements of the story from the original, but still retained the basic premise: after his son is killed in an accident, a scientist builds a super-advanced robot with all his son’s memories as a replacement.  Needless to say, this doesn’t work out well for anyone involved, but Astroboy is born.

The movie had a bit of an environmental slant like Wall-E, and absolutely nonsensical science, but it wasn’t bad.  It was surprised that it showed some characters dying on screen, even if they were non-bloody deaths—I had thought that most films coddled kiddies more than that nowadays.  If you’re looking for a good kids movie, you could do worse than this.

Zombieland

I wrote about Zombieland briefly after I saw it, because it was just so much fun.  I do loves me some funny zombie-killing.  If you like zombies, and comedy, and don’t mind lots of gore, this movie is perfect.

Twilight: New Moon

I saw this with my girlfriend as atonement for taking her to Transformers 2.  I now consider that debt paid in full.  I mean, Transformers was still without a doubt the worst movie I saw this year, but Twilight: New Moon gives it a close run.  At least I didn’t spend my own money to see New Moon.

New Moon fails to entertain at every possible opportunity, and instead has vapid, uninterested actors spouting terrible, repetitive dialogue while they do absolutely nothing, and then external forces conspire to end the movie by essentially negating everything that did happen (which wasn’t much).  Terrible terrible terrible.

Ninja Assassin

Ninja Assassin is one of those titles, like Snakes on a Plane, that gives you a perfect idea of what the movie should contain.  You can quite readily know, when going to see a movie called Ninja Assasin, whether you are likely to enjoy it.  In that respect, you may consider me the target audience for Ninja Assassin.

Unfortunately, I was a little disappointed.  There were, indeed, some awesome action sequences, full of impossible martial arts and ridiculous gore.  But there was also a sort of storyline, and some superfluous characters that bogged the movie down.  There were parts where _minutes_ went by with no one being killed.  MINUTES!  I had been hoping for a movie like _Shoot ‘Em Up_, but with ninjas and swords instead of guns, but instead they actually had a bit of a plot.

Now, I likes me some plot.  It is my favourite thing.  I think my problem with it in Ninja Assassin was that it wasn’t interesting enough for me to accept it in lieu of non-stop over-the-top action.  The movie starts with a cool assination sequence, which sort of sets the bar.  When we switch away from ninjas, though, the plot better be DAMN GOOD to keep me satisfied, but I think it fell a little short here.

So, I liked Ninja Assassin.  I though the action sequences were pretty good.  The storyline was adequate—I mean, it made sense, and all—but it couldn’t match the action, and so the movie was uneven.  A decent enough action flick, but not one that I’d call “must-see”.

The Princess and the Frog

This movie marks Disney’s return to 2D animation, after they abandoned it in favour of 3D (thinking that was the secret to Pixar’s success).  After a number of notable 2D and 3D bombs, Disney has finally put out a decent movie again.

The animation is good, but I’ve seen just as good or better from Studio Ghibli and other Asian studios.  I enjoyed the jazzy soundtrack, although nothing stood out as especially memorable.  The characters, in a notable Disney first, were not entirely stereotypical: as an example, the spoiled, marriage-obsessed, self-involved daughter of the mayor turns out to be very generous and happy for her friend when she finds true love.  I was also suprised to see a main character killed, as in Astroboy, although this being Disney, perhaps they were returning to their roots in more ways than just going back to 2D animation.

Overall, this was a pretty good movie.  I’d recommend this one.

Avatar

James Cameron’s Avatar has been many years in the making, and has been getting lots of press.  Overall, it’s a very good movie, albeit a heavy-handed one.  The story is clunky and predictable, with absolutely no ambiguity or moral uncertainty about who is good and bad.

Much of acclaim has been accorded to the visuals.  I have to agree—the visual effects are among the best I’ve seen, with the aliens and their world seeming perfectly real to me, and blending nicely with the human actors.  I am less enamoured of the 3D nature of the showing I saw—I really don’t like the technology, and come out dizzy and disoriented, though sitting in the third row surely contributed to some of that.

The story concerns a Marine who essentially goes under cover with the natives of an alien planet to learn their ways.  Unfortunately, the alian culture seemed to be a mishmash of various First Nations and African tribal beliefs, rather than something truly alien, and the aliens were a little too human-looking for me to really view them as alien.

Anyway, as he becomes more involved with the alien culture, he puts himself at odds with the corporation and military group that want to move the aliens to mine some more “unobtainium” (we never learn why it’s valuable).  Wackiness ensues.

The cast is good, the visuals are great, and the story is kind of “meh”.  Still, definitely worth seeing, even at nearly 3 hours long.  I supsect I’ll prefer the non-3D version on DVD…

* * *

And that’s about it!  I think my favourite movie of the year was _Star Trek_, with honourable mentions (in no particular order) to _Ponyo_, _Zombieland_, _Coraline_, and _Moon_.  For 2010, I’ll try to be more on the ball with movie blogging.

First, I’d like to offer an apology to Hayden Christensen and Natalie Portman.  I had thought that no two people could have less chemistry on screen than they did in the Star Wars prequel trilogy.  Kristen Stewart and Robert Pattinson, however, have achieved new heights in visible disinterest in each other.  I can’t imagine any two people intoning “I love you” more apathetically than them.

Not that Stewart’s character, Bella, said much more than that.  Most of her dialogue consisted of “Please,”  “Don’t,” “Please don’t,” and “Don’t, please.”  She was completely and utterly useless throughout the entire movie.  When she was dumped, she moped for months.  MONTHS!  This was shown on screen in what felt like real time.  Then she starts leading on a guy who obviously has a crush on her, tries to kill herself a bunch of times so that she can remember her ex, and then runs off to Italy to save his unlife.   By showing up.  Not by doing anything active, god forbid, just by being there.

This movie was boring.  The pacing was slow, and I have no idea how the giant book it was based on still failed to provide any actual content for the movie.  All of the characters are completely stupid, and involved in self-destructive, abusive relationships with equally stupid people.  And nobody does anything—I haven’t seen so many characters going around and asking what they should do since The Matrix Reloaded.

Even the action was boring!  What could have been an awesome fight scene (where a werewolf pack hunted down what was apparently a recurring vampire villain from the first movie) became instead some running and later, a 1-second bit of flashback.

Leaving aside the ridiculous nature of the “world” of Twilight (sparkly, nigh-indestructible vampires with no meaningful consequences to becoming undead), this was more like a bad romantic comedy than a drama—minus any romance or comedy.  The way it was filmed did nothing to improve the source material either—the one scene of vampire Bella and Edward frolicking through the woods in Alice’s vision provoked laughter from everyone in attendance, whether they were buying into the rest of the material or not.

This was just not a good movie.  However, at least I went in with low expectations, and so I still came out less angry than after seeing Transformers 2.  It may have helped that the girlfriend bought the tickets, so I didn’t spend my own money on it.  But honestly, I can barely imagine that the fans of the books could enjoy this movie, much less anyone who has to take it on its own merits.  And still it did huge box office business.  It’s enough to make a guy cry.

First of all, it was a great lot of fun!  My girlfriend and I had an absolute blast, and are already making a list of people we plan to press-gang into going to the next one we can feasibly manage.  Everyone we met was friendly—or at least perfectly polite—and while I wouldn’t say we made any new best friends, well, that wasn’t really why we went.

I was happy to meet several authors I only knew of from their writing or online presence, and find out that they do indeed seem to be pretty cool in person, too.  My biggest regret was that my attempt to travel with minimal luggage limited the number of books I could bring for them sign.

The panels were, by and large, delightful.  We always had plenty to choose from, and in some cases, making a decision between them was really tough.  We attended some that were truly excellent, many that were good, and a few that just weren’t quite what we’d been looking for, but such is the way of things.

I even enjoyed the opening and closing ceremonies, and the Hugo Awards.  I’m not usually one for ceremony and pomp, but everything was kept moving briskly and infused with humour.  It was particularly fun watching the shock and delight on the faces of some of the award winners (David Anthony Durham, Ann Vandermeer, and Frank Wu come to mind).

I attended a lot of the panels on writing, as I have aspirations in that direction, and while they were uniformly excellent and and full of good general advice, most of it I have encountered before in one place or another.  Perhaps this is a sign that I’ve gotten all the general advice there is to get, and there’s nothing left for me to do but practice, practice, practice and seek out specific guidance and help.

So, all in all, a truly delightful time.  I took a fair number of pictures, most of which didn’t turn out, but I have posted them to Flickr anyway.

Nancy Kress, David Hartwell, and other Hugo winners

Now, given that this was my first Worldcon, I have no idea how it compares to previous ones in terms of attendance, programming, organization, or, well, anything at all.  The comments that follow should be read with my general ignorance kept firmly in mind.

One thing that sort of concerned me was, to put it bluntly, how old a lot of the attendees were.  When people talk about they graying of fandom, all they need to do to make their point is take a picture of the audience at a Worldcon panel.  Perhaps I’m phrasing this too harshly—I don’t mean to complain that there are a lot of older people, but rather that there didn’t seem to be that many younger people.  I’m 30 and still felt young compared to the majority of attendees.  At the very least I had expected myself to be near the median.

My concern is, well, where are the new fans going to come from?  The current fans aren’t going to live forever (well, barring breakthroughs in senescence research), and so the con—and the Hugo Awards—will need a constant influx of new people, and it’s not something I saw happening in a big way.

This is in stark contrast to the San Diego Comic-Con, which continues to grow as a massively popular media event among young people.  I have two friends who have made a trip to see SDCC, whereas I doubt they’d heard of Worldcon before I’d talked about it with them.  Now, no one wants Worldcon to be overrun by TV, movie, and video game content like Comic-Con has, but at least that brings in young people.  And an infusion of more people could do Worldcon a world of good.

Now, perhaps my concerns are overstated—there was a sizable chunk of teen and youth programming, so perhaps there was a sizable chunk of youngsters secreted away somewhere.  Similarly, there may be lots of younger people who would like to go to Worldcon, but can’t due to their economic situations—as they age and prosper, perhaps they will be the infusion of new blood.  However,  I can’t help but agree with Lou Anders (who I unfortunately did not get to see on any panels, despite his near-omnipresence and my enjoyment of his blog and many Pyr titles) that if Worldcon raised its profile a bit, it could boost attendance and ensure a long and healthy future.

Anders cites the opening night conversation between economist Paul Krugman and author Charlie Stross as the sort of thing that could raise said profile, and I agree.  A Worldcon built around a set of high-profile events like that as anchors of the programming, promoted and advertised well in advance, might attract more people interested in seeing what it’s all about.

I mean, I’ve been reading SF and fantasy for more than 20 years, but only in the last year or so have I started going to cons, or even wanted to, and part of it was ignorance of what goes on there and why I should go.  For a distributed community of Sf fans, who don’t all come from larger population centres with local cons, having a big draw like that to get new people in the door can only help bring more people into the fold, without corrupting the essence of Worldcon.

Another concern—or perhaps this is more of a comment or question—related to the Hugo Awards.  It was apparent that winning the Hugo meant a lot to the winners of the Fan awards, or to the writers and editors of the fiction awards, and semiprozines, and art, and the like.  Even the newly-minted graphic story had a few of the nominees in attendance, and I think that award may grow into more prominence in the coming year.  But, apart from the Metatropolis crew, I don’t think any of the nominees for dramatic work  (short or long) were present.  With that being the case, I sort of felt, well, why bother?

I mean, I can see that the Hugo Awards are fandom’s way of signifying and rewarding the things we liked most in a year.  But I feel that it should be meaningful to the nominees and winners as well.  This article has suggested that a Hugo for video games is overdue, but perhaps the Hugo voter demographic isn’t engaged enough with that field, and, well, do the game writers even care?

Perhaps this ties back in to needing to raise the profile of Worldcon.  While the prestige of a Hugo for Dramatic Presentation will never eclipse the significance of an Oscar or Emmy, it would be nice for it to be regarded as prestigious nonetheless.

Anyway, I suspect these concerns will resolve themselves over time, as I become more familiar with the ongoing history and life of Worldcon and the Hugo Awards.  In the short term, I just hope to be able to make it to the Worldcon in Australia next year.

With that, my 2009 Worldcon adventures have come to a close.  Time to start reading potential nominees for next year’s Hugos….

The morning started off with sleeping in a bit—there were no 9:00 AM panels that grabbed our interest more than sleep did, and so it was at 10:00 AM that we hit up the “Movements in Fantasy” panel, which talked about the rise of literary movements within the genre.  Among the key points discussed were that such movements are usually only identified after the fact, often arise from a group of like-minded authors reading each other’s work and responding to it (usually pre-publication), and need a defining work to kick them off and an ideologue to promote it.  Interesting and entertaining stuff.

At 11:00 AM, my girlfriend went to the “On Editing” panel featuring David Hartwell, while I went in search of autographs from Charlie Stross, Julie Czerneda, and John Scalzi.  I was happily successful, and they were all very warm and friendly, though due to the lines for each, it meant I could only get to “On Editing” for about the last 5 or 10 minutes.  What I saw of that panel was good—Hartwell is a very entertaining and engaging speaker.

After lunch, we took in the panel on “Hard SF: Is It What You Do, or How You Do It?”, which explored whether the definition of the genre is fixed in the rigorous application of science, or in the appearance of the rigorous application of science.  They did admit that hard SF could still incorporate “magic” technology, but otherwise no one held forth a conclusive answer, which, I suppose, it not terribly surprising.  Interesting, but after an hour the audience ran out of questions and a lot of ground had been covered, so it ended early.

We did a brief run through the Dealers’ Room again, though thankfully did not spend any further money, and then we went to a reading by Robert J. Sawyer.  He’s a generally entertaining reader and pretty genial guy, and he entertained us with a reading of his story “Mikeys” and a prose poem (not in that order), and then I got him to sign my copy of the Distant Early Warnings anthology I’d been collecting signatures on all weekend.

Next, at the request of the girlfriend, we went to a reading by George R. R. Martin from his forthcoming and eagerly-anticipated book A Dance With Dragons.  Fans of the series (which has been optioned by HBO, and a pilot episode is currently in production) seemed to enjoy it, and I thought it was okay—a little too descriptive and verbose for the kind of reading I’m into these days, but I could see why he has a huge fanbase.  I will no doubt pick up this series when I’m back into reading big books.

And then it was the closing ceremonies, which were brief and too the point, handing off things to the Melbourne Worldcon organizers for next year.  It was surprisingly well-attended, and a sort or sad send-off back to the real world.

Almost.

After successfully acquiring dinner at Le Steak Frites, we hung out back at the hotel for a while, before heading to the Dead Dog party at the Consuite at the Delta.  It was surprisingly packed, and we ended up in some long and varied conversations with some very nice people before heading back to our hotel after 11:30, because I seem to have come down with the plague.

Or a slight sore throat.

I’m not sure which.

Anyway, that was the Worldcon.  Once I’m back in Toronto, I may do a wrap-up post of my thoughts about it, post some pictures, and possibly update these posts with panelist names and such.  Yesterday, however, was about seeing a bit of Montreal.

This proved to be more problematic that we could have imagined.  We first decided to go back to Le Steak Frites, but found them to be booked full until 8:30 or later, which was no good, since the awards started at 8:00, and, well, we didn’t want to wait that long.  It seemed to be full of Con people, and perhaps there were officials being dumped there, and such.  So we went back to the convention center to try a restaurant there, only to find that was full.  We had had trouble finding a place that was open near the convention center the evening before, so we decided to go back to our hotel and try the restaurant there.

Food was only being served at the bar, and was not especially cheap or appetizing.  So we set out again, thinking maybe of the nearby Dairy Queen, before ending up at Eggspectation, where I had a satisfactory panini sandwich.  After all that questing, we were running a little later than expected, but still arrived at about 7:55 PM, where we had to sit toward the back of the massive Main Tent, as it was quite full.

The Hugo Awards ceremony was generally well-run.  There were a few tech mis-cues, and a few times we had to wait slightly long before somebody came out or got to the stage, or whatnot.  None of the speeches were unnecessarily long, and so the evening went by quickly and pleasantly.

The results can be found here, at the official Hugo Awards site.  It was nice to see Neil Gaiman win for The Graveyard Book at the Worldcon where he was Guest of Honour.  David Hartwell also won Best Long-Form Editor, and he was Editor Guest of Honour, and also damned entertaining.  I enjoyed all of the winners, and felt a little bad for the “losers”, many of whom were my first choice, but it was a fun and exciting evening overall.

After the awards ceremony, we did one more panel, from 10 to 11 PM, called “Young Turks”.  It featured a few writers who were basically emerging as forces to be reckoned with, and because the audience was small enough, it became a sort of cooperative Q&A whereby they talked about why they wrote, how they got to the point they were each at, techniques and tools they had found helpful for their writing, and the like.  For a panel so late, and day 4, after the Hugos, it was a pleasant surprise to have such an engaged and active set of panelists, and such a fun and interesting panel.  Kudos to them for pulling it off.

At that point, we called it a day.

The next panel we both went to was “Online Magazines Represented HERE: A Good Market”, in which several people who work in various capacities at online fiction magazines discussed the advantages and disadvantages of the format.  Advantages were mostly in the negligible cost of distribution and international reach, but the downsides were the lack of a business model and combatting obscurity—how does your magazine get found among everything else online?  The panelists were all good and played off each other well.

Then there was a panel on “How to Pitch Your Novel… and how not to”, which was good at offering practical advice from publishing professionals on how you can get someone to look at your novel.  Thankfully, I had encountered most of the information before, so it seems like my research into publishing in the field has been successful.

Next up was a panel titled “Aunts in Spaceships”, which my girlfriend was interested in seeing.  She was hoping it would more be about why aren’t there more characters with extended families (or families at all) in SF literature, but it was concentrated more on older women characters, and became something a chance for the panelists and audiences to list examples of such characters.  Given that it was a 90-minute panel, and wasn’t quite what we were looking for, we ducked out a bit early and visited the dealer’s room again.

At 6:30, there was a short event, featuring author Karl Schroeder and his Tor editor David G. Hartwell talking about the process of working together, and how their relationship and working approach has changed over the course of working on 7 novels together.  It was really interesting, and actually felt like it ended too soon.

Then we went looking for dinner, but found a large number of places were closed, so we ended up going to an Italian place that was fine, but a bit slow because they were overwhelmed with other Con-goers.  As a result, we were late getting back, and missed the first hour of the Masquerade costume show.  We saw a few minutes of it, but I was interested in another event, “Gaiman Reads Doctorow”.

As an experiment, Cory Doctorow is releasing his next short story collection as a self-published Creative Commons title, and using it to explore a number of different ideas a business models, including a free audiobook read by friends (in this case, Neil Gaiman, star of the Worldcon), print-on-demand, and high-cost hand-made limited editions.  Gaiman read quite well, as he is wont to do, and then they both fielded questions after the recording was done.  Gaiman and Doctorow were both gracious, funny, and passionate speakers, and I felt the event was well worth missing the Masquerade.

The last event of the night was a fireworks display that we could watch from the top floor terrace of the convention centre.  The fireworks were not part of the Worldcon (it was for the Festival of Fire, I think, being a South African entry), but it was a nice way to end a very long day.