Here’s a very cool thing indeed. Over on DeviantArt, someone going by the name of ComputerSherpa has put together a Periodic Table of Storytelling. I’ve included a small image in this post, but you really need to click on the link and see the chart in its full splendour. The table is based on the TV Tropes Wiki which bills itself as a catalogue of the tricks of the trade for writing fiction. From the website:

Tropes are devices and conventions that a writer can reasonably rely on as being present in the audience members’ minds and expectations. On the whole, tropes are not clichés. The word clichéd means “stereotyped and trite.” In other words, dull and uninteresting. We are not looking for dull and uninteresting entries. We are here to recognize tropes and play with them, not to make fun of them.

ComputerSherpa has used the info from TV Tropes and fashioned a spiffy, colour-coded summary of the most popular tropes — which do, in my opinion, include a lot of dull and uninteresting clichés — over which you could quite easily spend hours, especially if start drilling down through the TV Tropes site. Hours. You have been warned.

This is one of my favourite bits:

Possibly because I read this post about clichéd gender stereotypes in fiction by Ann Leckie over the weekend and in the discussion that followed, one commentator (eljaydaly) actually pointed out how sadly commonplace it is to see so-called ensemble casts with only one female character:

Her character is, you know, “the woman.” Because males get to have various flavors of character: the nerd, the jock, the genius, the bad boy, the opportunist. But females only get to have one flavor: “the woman!”

And there it is, smack bang middle of the Periodic Table. One of the things I love about this chart — aside from the fact that someone obviously put a lot of time and love into it — is the way it unintentionally highlights the implicit gender imbalance present in popular culture storytelling. In particular, take a close look at the elements pertaining to character: Heroes, Character Modifiers, Archetypes, and Villains. Now consider how each of the elements is gendered. Some are explicitly gendered — “knight in shining armour” as opposed to “plucky girl” — while others could be seen as more gender neutral, especially if you decide to allow for traditionally masculine words like “hero”, “bastard” and “master” to be applied equally to both men and women.

Of course, the problem is that even the supposedly “neutral” character roles are not equally occupied by men and women when it comes to actual cultural artifacts like moves, televisions shows, comics and books. How many females can you name who have occupied the role of gunslinger, tragic hero, adventurer archaeologist, captain, ace, chessmaster, corrupt corporate executive, magnificent bastard, brute, amoral attorney, mad scientist, fool, lovable rogue, and so on? By contrast, you could probably fill a page with male characters without even having to think.

Now, I’m not saying that ComputerSherpa or even the TV Trope site is in any way responsible for the gender bias present in their work.  Far from it. But their work does deal with common tropes and clichés — essentially, the most popular representation of plot, setting and character to be found in our collective cultural artifacts — which makes for a rather significant snapshot of the way gender is presented in pop culture. And it’s not exactly what you would call a balanced picture.

So, as much as I genuinely love this Periodic Table of Storytelling, it also makes me somewhat sad and more than a little frustrated. Which, coincidentally enough, is too often the way I find myself feeling about pop culture these days. Hopefully, sometime in the none-too-distant future, we’ll be able to add a lot more elements to the table. A lot more flavours, shall we say. Until then, here’s another periodic table for you to enjoy. A bit old now — in internet years anyway — but still very much relevant:

It’s not often that a piece of entertainment news genuinely warms the cockles of my heart, but I was overjoyed to hear that Shaun Tan has won the Academy Award for Best Animated Short for his film, The Lost Thing, based on his book of the same name.  I’ve loved Shaun’s work ever since I saw his beautifully detailed and often whimsical illustrations for Eidolon magazine back in the early 1990′s. Three of his books in particular — The Lost Thing, The Red Tree (oh! that final glorious page!) and The Arrival — are beloved favourites of mine, read over and over and chosen as gifts many times.

If you’ve not yet come across the work of Shaun Tan, you really should consider rectifying that situation. I promise, you will not regret it!

Here’s the trailer for The Lost Thing film, just to whet your appetite:

Five double passes to see new Australian torture porn flick, The Loved Ones, have landed on my desk and what better time to give them away than now, just a couple of days before Halloween? The passes are valid Mondays to Fridays from 4th November when The Loved Ones will be released nationally.

To win a double pass, simply email and tell me your most beloved horror movie:

kirstynm AT gmail.com

The first five people I hear from get the tickets. Please make sure you send me your name and address (within Australia only) and I’ll get the tickets in the mail straight away. There now, don’t say I never doing nothin’ for ya.

*** ETA: Okay, tickets are all gone now! People’s favourite horror movies include The Thing, Clockwork Orange, The Hunger, Saw and Let the Right One In. Congrats to the lucky winners!

“Brutal, bloody and black as all hell!” – Ed Gibbs, ROLLING STONE

“The best entry to the Aussie horror canon since Wolf Creek.” – Julian Shaw, FILMINK

“Hardcore … The Loved Ones will drill a hole right into your brain and leave you twitching and terrified.” – Nick Dent, TIME OUT SYDNEY

Next Sunday is Halloween! It’s also my birthday! Double Huzzah!

Fittingly, I’ll be at Dymocks Southland for their Halloween HorrorCon on the 31st, eating too much sugar and signing books along with four other might fine local authors of dark fiction — Alan Baxter, Bruce Kaplan, Bob Franklin and the dashingly handsome Jason Nahrung. Come along and say Boo!

Date:  Sunday, 31st October 2010
Time:  12.00 noon – 1pm (approx)
Address:  Dymocks Southland, 3067 Westfield Shopping Centre, Cheltenham, VIC

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For those in the mood for a night of spooky Q&A, Continuum 7 is hosting a Halloween Trivia Night next Saturday with none other than the fabulously vampiric Narelle Harris as Inquizator. Costumes are optional but there will be lots of yummy prizes, so don’t be shy about getting your Halloween groove on.

Date: Saturday 30th October
Time: 8pm
Where: Brian Boru Function Room @ The Celtic Club, 316-320 Queen Street, Melbourne
Cost of Entry: $5

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The Guardian.co.uk  published their Top 25 Horror Films this past week. It’s not exactly the list I would make, were I in the habit of making such lists — The Hunger is missing for a start — but it’s a fine collections of films nevertheless. There’s a few classics on there I keep meaning to track down — Peeping Tom, Don’t Look Now, Les Diaboliques — so it’s also a timely prompt. Good the see the beautiful Swedish film, Let the Right One In, making it into the top ten.

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Lastly, here’s an interesting factoid for you: October 2010 has 5 Fridays, 5 Saturdays and 5 Sundays — all in one month. Mathematically, this only happens once in 823 years. Such things amuse me.

ETA: Sadly, this last is not true. In fact, the last time this happened in October was 2004 (six years ago) and the next time it will happen is 2021 (11 years from now). Thanks to Andrew McKiernan for pointing this out for the benefit of a Kirstyn too lazy to google . . .

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Upon watching the above trailer, you’d be forgiven for thinking that new Australian horror flick, The Loved Ones, is actually going to be the story of Lola Stone — a plain yet pretty, somewhat shy and possibly much maligned schoolgirl with a bad cases of the unrequiteds. Maybe a cross between Carrie and Pretty in Pink, updated for the iPod age. So I was pleased to be invited along to a review screening last Wednesday and keen to see what would be delivered onto the screen.

Unfortunately, The Loved Ones proved to be a disappointment, in no small part because what we get is not Lola’s story at all,  but that of Brent, the boy Lola’s father kidnaps for her. (Actually, Lola doesn’t really have a story; she’s just psychotic; never mind why, it’s obviously unimportant.) We’re treated instead to a fairly pedestrian script, fraught with logic problems, stereotypical characters and a sub-plot that’s left wither on the vine. The black comedy was too cheesy for my palette and the parts where the audience laughed the most were, it seems, unintentionally funny.

To be fair, the cast did a good job with what they had to work with. Robyn McLeavy is an hysterically psychotic Lola and Xavier Samuel’s Brent, although vocally crippled for much of the film, comes into his own during the prolonged and realistic torture scenes. Terror, fury, defiance, pain and vengeance all play with equal eloquence across his perpetually blood-streaked face.

But the story is both illogical and way over the top, and its characters barely formed. I found myself caring for none of them, because none of them seemed like real people as much as they did cinematic shorthand. Which is  shame, because unless I care about the people in a film, unless I’m drawn into their lives and made to feel as though they could be real, I care very little about what happens to them. And that includes torture.

Maybe I’m jaded. Maybe I stuffed myself so full of splatter films in my teens and early twenties that it takes something really violent and gross and disgusting to get to me these days. Maybe — or maybe I’m just not that cheap a date. You want to keep me interested, you better make me care. Otherwise it’s just power drills and fake blood and prosthetics and a hell of a lot of screaming. Very well done, but of less concern to me than the fact that my boysenberry choc-top is all gone.

What also irritated me throughout the entire screening — and this is by no means unique to The Loved Ones, I hasten to add — was the unsubtle prevalence of the male gaze. The lingering, sexualised attention of the camera on its female subjects is used again and again, with particular emphasis on camera (and thus audience) as unsuspected (male) voyeur. Not only Lola, but both the film’s girlfriend characters — blonde, wholesome Holly (Victoria Thaine); goth-with-a-heart-of-gold Mia (Jessica McNamee) — are treated in this manner. The closest the film comes to admitting a female gaze are the shots of Lola’s scrapbooks — of course, even then, Lola’s gaze isn’t “female” so much as it is “psychotic”, and what she’s gazing upon aren’t real boys, they’re photographs or clippings from magazines, ones in which the subject is quite aware of the camera lens.  Now there is someone Lola desires very much but never do we get any quasi-erotic, voyeuristic sequences of him. Which is a shame, as it would have added a genuinely creepy texture to the film.

The Loved Ones is not a bad movie or indeed an overly stupid one it. It’s slickly filmed, without dispensing of any of the gritty realist aesthetic Australian cinema does so well, and the gruesome special effects are faultless.  It’s quite well-paced, and lots of nasty stuff happens, and there are some moments of genuine horror and humour. But when all is said and done, it’s a very safe film, and a very conservative one, as a lot of the horror genre tends to be — yes, I know us horror fans don’t like to hear that particular c-word, but it’s oh so true. I still mourn the lost opportunity for a killer climax — one that would have punched the audience square in the guts, instead of leaving us sniggering in disbelief — but sadly it was not to be.

The Loved Ones opens in Australia on 30 September. If you’re up for a spot of mindless torture-porn, with a distinct Australian flavour, then mark the date in your diary. As for myself, I might hang back wait for something a little more dangerous to creep its way across my path.

I can be a harsh critic, I know that. The older I get, the less patience I seem to have for things that waste my time.  (Why am I on Facebook? Ah, the paradox!) I’ll put books aside unfinished if they don’t grab my attention after a few chapters, I’ll stop watching tv shows if they get boring or stupid. I have not yet started to walk out on movies, probably because they are only a couple of hours long and I’m usually at the half way point before I start to get really irritated anyway. Funnily enough, the more potential a movie has, the more disappointed and annoyed I am when it doesn’t pan out. Daybreakers is one of those movies. It could have been a really excellent film, but the scripting is lazy and full of contradictions, inconsistencies and logic holes. The direction is hackneyed at times, with some very cheap fright moments — shrieking bats flying at the camera, anyone? It’s a B movie, at best. And that’s a shame.

The rest of this post will contain some major spoilers, so if you’re intending to see Daybreakers, perhaps you should come back and read it later.

The primary issue I had with the movie was the supposed science behind the vampirism. Now I dig science-based monsters. I love it when a writer or film-maker tries to work out the real-world basis and mechanics of mythical creatures, and gets it right. (The UK television show, Being Human, does this exceptionally well with werewolves and, only a touch less successfully, with vampires.) The thing is, once you start getting your science on, you need to follow it all the way down the line. You can’t cherry-pick from the established mythos based on what will look pretty or cool on the big screen. It has to work with the science you’ve set up; that’s Basic World-building 101.

One of the key plot-points in Daybreakers is that the vampires need human blood to survive. We are told this several times throughout the film, and shown the dramatic physical and mental deterioration a vampire suffers when deprived of human blood for just 30 days. Yet the film’s vampire hero, Edward (played by Ethan Hawke), has taken a moral stance and refuses to drink any human blood. Pig seems to do just fine for him and — wait, hang on a second. Vampires can survive on animal blood? Really? So what’s the fricken problem? Sure human blood is primo and would be very expensive when available, but if animal blood will suffice then where are all the pig blood farms? And cow blood farms and horse blood farms and … you get the picture. There would be no food shortage issue — the issue that drives the film — if vampires can live off the blood of any mammal. It’s lazy scripting, presumably done to make Edward more heroic to a human audience and more of an outsider to his own kind, but it makes no sense.

There are several other science-logic miss-steps, albeit not as integral to the plot. Why are vampires not reflected in mirrors but picked up on a digital video camera? Why the non-reflective bit at all, when it comes right down to it? What kind of fricken virus does that? (Oh right, the sneaky It-Looks-So-Cool-On-Screen virus.) Why do vampires explode like dynamite when their heart is pierced by a length of wood? How does that bit of physiology actually work? The immolation by sunlight I can live with, but not the fact that some vampires display immediate injuries which take some time to heal — Frankie shows the shadow of a burn on his cheek hours after a brief brush with the sun; Cormac has hideous burns after flying several feet through daylight — while Edward is directly and repeatedly exposed to sunlight for several seconds, bursting dramatically into flames each time, and suffers not even a singed eyebrow. (Let’s not mention the heart monitors he’s hooked up to, which are obviously made from platinum-grade asbestos.)

I will give the Spierig Brothers full points, though, for not mentioning crosses, churches or holy water. Not once, not even with the brush of obligatory post-modern irony. Good call, boys.

"Look, just give us a script that makes sense and no one has to get shot."

There are numerous other plot problems, unrelated to world-building. A bunch of refugee humans have been found and are being brought back to the resistance headquarters where they’ll be safe from the vampires. Naturally, they travel at night, in a suspicious-looking convoy, with all their windows down to reveal just who is riding in the vans. You know, to keep safe from the vampires. The humans also stay in contact with each other via a radio/telco device that allows almost immediate tracking of the frequency/call back to HQ. Naturally, they keeping using the device for precious seconds after they’re informed that the convoy has been attacked. You know, to keep safe from the vampires. And poor Claudia Karvan’s character, Audrey, somehow manages to stand lookout in a huge field with practically a 360 degree view (specifically chosen as a safe meeting point because of this) and still not see the vampire soldier sneaking up behind her. I think she was distracted by a bat (seriously). That’ll teach the menfolk to trust a lady with such an important job.

Which is my other major beef with Daybreakers. There are female faces on screen (vampire extras on the street, human extras in the resistance) but very little in the story itself.  Women play only two significant roles: Audrey, who keeps getting captured and needing to be rescued; and Alison, the still-human daughter of the head vampire honcho, Charles Bromley. Both women serve more as plot devices than characters. Its the men who drive the narrative and get all the meaty roles (and choicest dialogue). Audrey is there to be Cormac’s number two and the obligatory girl among boys. And to get rescued. (To give the Spieirg Brothers their due, she is not portrayed as the stereotypical kickass, leather-clad glamour grrl, but then it’s not that kind of film.)  Alison likewise is not a character in her own right. Appearing in the second half of the film, she serves merely to fill out her father’s emotional palette and provide fodder for a few nasty scenes that show vampires at their worst. It’s somewhat telling that Bromley has a daughter and not a son. I can’t help but think that Daybreakers would have been a much more interesting film if Alison had been a male character, if some of the soldiers in the vampire army were women, if Audrey was actually the leader of the resistance rather than second in command. None of that would have helped with the plot-holes, but it might have given a more textured rendering of the story.

I’ve now spent more time writing about Daybreakers than I did watching it, which seems odd. But thinking about why this film failed and analysing its faults actually makes me feel like I’ve gotten back some of that wasted time in the cinema. Even bad story-telling can be instructive. That’s what I keep telling myself.

No, I think not. Because last Thursday I saw The Road, directed by John Hillcoat from a screenplay by Joe Penhall. The movie is based on Cormac McCarthy’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel of the same name and the adaptation of the source material is nothing less than masterful. Subtle, faithful and unflinching, with just enough tweaks as were necessary to bring McCarthy’s bleak yet ultimately hopeful story to the screen.

As a novel, I love The Road. It was the first book in a long time that pulled me in so immediately and so powerfully that I found it hard to put aside. I fell asleep late the first night I started it because I simply could not make myself stop reading. It’s a book I recommend to everyone and one that would easily skate into my Top 100 Books Ever List, should I ever decide I have the time to waste in making one. Possibly even my Top 10 List.

Now, I’d heard very good things about the movie from its bumpy and ill-handled release in US cinemas last year. I greatly enjoyed Ghosts of the Civil Dead and The Proposition (two of Hillcoat’s other films) and I’ve seen Viggo Mortensen in enough varied roles to feel confident he could play the Father without any trouble. So I went into cinema with very high expectations indeed. Expectations which were met in spades. The Road is a beautiful, disturbing and vitally important film. It shows us the post-apocalypse as it will be, not how we often like to fantasise about it. No zombies, no flame-throwers, no hiding out in shopping malls or amusement parks, no fun and no wisecracks. Just survival and the brutal, human need to believe that there is something worth surviving for, even if all evidence points to the contrary.

The Road is a near perfect film on all levels. The screenplay doesn’t miss a beat, the direction is elegant and the performances from the entire cast are complex and beautifully understated. The cinematography and the score exquisitely capture the look and sound of a world very much on its knees.

I’m a book person. As much as I enjoy film and television, I’ll almost always take words over pictures. With this bias, I’m often wary of adaptations. At best, they usually offer little more than a visual synopsis; at worst, they feel like they’ve torn the heart out of a much loved story. However, The Road is one of those very rare films that I love equally as much as the book. Let the Right One In is another, as is Fight Club. You need to see The Road, if you haven’t already. Don’t even worry about reading the book first –  in a way, I kind of envy you the tabula rasa experience.

(By the way, the fact that it didn’t get an Oscar’s Best Picture nomination? When there were TEN slots to fill this year? It’s a bloody disgrace and an embarrassment to the Academy, or it should be. I mean, seriously. Avatar? For best picture? Perhaps the apocalypse isn’t so far off in the distance after all.)