Cas tried to convince me to go and catch a flick with him last night. He wanted to see 12 Rounds, a film staring wrestler John Cena, and directed by Renny Harlin, the man responsible for Die Hard 2 and other cinematic masterpieces. For some reason I didn’t feel like throwing sixteen odd dollars at that. I could’ve maybe bought some bad drugs mixed with lead shavings and had a better time, you know?

Eventually, though, we settled on hiring out a DVD. It cost us two bucks to hire a recent release, which I figure is a sign of the video store market breaking beneath the weight of all those anti-piracy commercials that makes everyone want to run off and download. We weren’t really in the mood for anything good, even though I had drawn the line at the Cena flick. Mostly, that was about the cash. New Seagal films and Van Damme films got a glance, as did some vampire flick staring what one could assume was a cleaned up Jason Mewes, also known as Jay from Kevin Smith’s Jay and Silent Bob. Some martial arts flicks got a look. A documentary about America that claimed to have never been released in the States because it told the shocking truth about the country’s fascination with violence also got a look. Having recently sat through a report on the new dog of the Obama’s, I didn’t think it was such a surprise where this came from. At any rate, we eventually ended up settling on the new Guy Ritchie film, Rock-N-Rolla.

Ritchie grabbed a bit of fame with his second film, Lock, Stock, and Two Smoking Barrels, a small, stylish crime film that came out around the time of Pulp Fiction. That film wasn’t too bad, I thought: funny, a little stylish, a way to pass the time. His follow up film was Snatch, a messy crime film of which the only redeeming feature within it was a barely understandable Brad Pitt. Shortly after that, Ritchie fell in with Madonna, and made a film called Swept Away, which I skipped. Directors putting girlfriends in films has never been the best thing, to my mind, but Snatch was such a mess that I mostly couldn’t stomach another. I missed the next film, Revolver, but I finally caught up with Rock-N-Rolla, a crime film that was proposed capers, drugs, and music. It did all those things, mind you, but it was such a shambling, incoherent mess that I can’t, even now, understand why I was subjected to long, pseudo intellectual speeches by the film’s resident drug addict and musician, Toby Kebbell. I would maybe have been there if Brad Pitt was making them in an accent that required subtitles, but no.

Still, what really bothered me was just how little newness there was in the film. All the fun, stylish things that were in Lock, Stock, were here in the new film, but they were stale, old, and without any new spin or growth. It was as if you had come across that friend who had found a fashion in the early nineties, and was still wearing the clothes from there, clinging to the ideals and concepts and presentation as if they could never go wrong.

In other words, Rock-N-Rolla kind’ve sucked.

I watched Children of Men yesterday, which makes me late to the discussion, but that’s alright, because I like to have the final word about these kind of things.

Children of Men is a film set in the near future where, after an unexplained infertility hits the human population in 2009, the world sinks into a segregation and violence as an ever aging population realises that it will be the last generation on the face of the planet. At least, in part. The film itself doesn’t actually engage in those concepts, but rather focuses on the segregation and racism that has given rise to the detention camps and general bad treatment of illegal immigrants. It is, from the outset, a rather odd pairing of issues that the film seeks to explore, and it never does either justice. The latter gets more play within the script when the first woman to fall pregnant is a young, illegal immigrant who has been working as a prostitute, and an activist group seek to get her to the Human Project, an unexplained concept that one is forced to detail through the title, and which one assumes is interested in the future of humanity, the birth of new children, and perhaps the return of David Bowie’s early work.

For the most part, the film is a shambling, but interesting mess. Clive Owen presents a jaded, ex-activist who has become disillusioned with the world after his child died, forcing a split between him and his then wife, Julian, played by Julianne Moore. She has him kidnapped one day and bought into the play to escort the first pregnant woman in over eighteen years to the Human Project. Around them is Chiwetel Ejiofor, who plays Luke, the right hand man of Moore’s character, and Michael Caine, who plays Jasper, an elderly pot salesman living in a secluded place within the bush. The latter is also looking after his wife, who one assumes has gone into a catatonic state of shock after the death of Own and Moore’s child, and the infertility of the world. The pregnant girl is played Clare-Hope Ashitey, and Pam Ferris plays Miriam, the mid-wife who is assigned to her, and that ends my run down of people worth knowing in the film. It won’t shock you to learn that there are the usual betrayals, deaths, and so on as Ashitey’s Kee is rushed to the Human Project.

I think what sits wrong with me in the film is the two thematic pieces. Overall, director Alfonso Cuaron (with the thing over the ‘o’ in Cuaron) presents a decently paced, and worked film. He builds a society sitting on the edge of hysteria nicely, and I thought he referenced the Gaza Strip nicely within the detention camp that the characters end up on at the end (though this just might have been my reference, and not intentional). But, with that said, there’s not enough in the script, and he seems interested in something that is not central to the idea that powers the narrative of the film. There were constant moments within it that I wanted to see things questioned. For example, animals were still having babies. How was that possible? Why was the infertility limited to humans? There was, I thought, a bit of an unfortunate hint that it was women who were infertile, but that may have just been because of the fact that it was a woman who fell pregnant within the narrative. I would still have liked to see it addressed, however, and explored; and I would have liked to have seen the immigration issues linked to this lack of new children, too. The question that I kept asking in my head was, with the ever ageing and dying population, was why there were such population/immigration issues? Would not the world’s population have been shrinking rapidly, and thus leaving space? And would not all young people become these things to be cherished and pampered, raising them to an even more prominent status in our society than already exists? (When the film began, I actually thought it was going to make a commentary on the way that youth has become a commodity, and that your growing age sees you diminish just not in attractiveness, but use, potential, and marketability.)

With none of these issues properly addressed within the film, I did try to get into the immigration issues that the film raised, and I could see a lot in it that I could reference to the australian government’s treatment of illegal immigrants, but again, after seeing it, I found myself wondering what it planned to do with the concept?

The answer wasn’t much.

Still, I enjoyed it, even if the scene in which Theo and Kee walk out of the building with a baby and everyone stands there in awe, having stopped shooting and bombing, was really ridiculous.

Late last night, I walked into a spider web. It was late at night, I’d just finished teaching, and I was heading to the garage to put the car in there and then go and crash for the evening.

The problem really arose after I walked into the web and had the the quick glance to find the spider. I found it easy enough: a large square sitting in the air, suspended by the web that I couldn’t see. It looked like it was ready to jump, but I couldn’t be sure. Still, the jumping spiders. Who likes them? My thought process as I stood there peeling web off me was, “Is this the jumping kind? I fucking had the jumping kind. They jump right at you. Also, they tend to be poisonous. Shit, it’s by the garage, too. Is it a funnel web? I can’t tell. Fuck, don’t be a jumping funnel web.”

In case you’re not aware of it, the funnel web spider is one of Australia’s fun time poisonous spiders. As someone on wikipedia wrote, “The Sydney funnel-web spider is one of the most dangerous spiders in the world and will defend itself aggressively if threatened or frightened. For this reason, humans are strongly advised not to approach them. Chances of being bitten are high if encountered, and bites can be lethal within 40 minutes if not treated.”

Still, it had that big back, like an enlarged belly. Wasn’t that really a red back spider?

Also, weren’t funnel webs mostly located in the ground?

More importantly, the spider had not leapt into my face and caused me to shriek like a teenage girl. Perhaps it was just poisonous and not aggressive. Despite popular myth, the red back isn’t very poisonous, and no one has died from it since the 1950s, or so this site is telling me: “To get bitten you have to actually stick your hand into the web of a spider, they rarely leave their nest. The fangs of the Redback Spider are tiny. Even if you do manage to get bitten the bite is likely ineffective. In addition the Redback Spider venom is a very slow acting toxin, and most people don’t show any reaction to it (except it itches like crazy). Possible symptoms in those who do react are pain (can become severe), localised sweating at the bite site, and later on more sweating, muscle weakness, nausea and vomiting. A simple ice pack is the best first aid. In most cases it’s all that’s required as very few people actually develop these symptoms. Honest, if you go and see a doctor here and tell them a Redback bit you, they’ll just tell you to go home and put ice on it.”

(The symptoms of a funnel web, however, are somewhat more dramatic: “Australian spiders will often bite without injecting venom. But if you get bitten by a large black spider in the Sydney area you should take the bite seriously. The symptoms of the venom include pain, mouth numbness, vomiting, abdominal pain, sweating and salivation. Whether you have symptoms or not, apply a pressure immobilisation bandage as explained on the page about Australian snakes, and seek medical help.But there is no need to panic. Nobody has died from a Sydney Funnel-web Spider bite since an antivenom was introduced in 1984.”)

Either way, I wasn’t coming to a conclusion any time quick, so I left the car, went inside, found a can of poison and came back and sprayed whatever kind of spider it was. It crawled off in pain and I felt brave, which is often how I feel when I use chemicals to punish my enemies. However, this morning, when I went back to get the car, I found a tiny little baby red back in a nice position to squash, and I suppose it was really the latter and I didn’t need to spray, but it doesn’t pay to mess round, I guess.

I’ve never really gotten along with spiders. I used to be fine with them, but then a huntsman–a large, fifteen cm like spider that’s ugly and mean looking, but quite harmless–laid its eggs in a car I had once. I didn’t realise this until one night when I came back to my car after seeing a film, and found the roof shifting. For a moment, I thought I was having one of those moments, but then I realised it wasn’t so much shifting as it was crawling with tiny, almost translucent baby huntsmen, in a number I couldn’t possibly count. They had laid claim to the car though, and no matter of squashing would catch them all. That’s why, unfortunately, trips in that same car for the next six months often resulted in swearing, screaming, and at one time, a sudden break as spiders that grew in size over the months popped out and dropped onto.

It was kind’ve distracting as you drove, you know?

Meh. I’ve accidentally deleted every comment of the webpage blog in attempt to purge the insane amounts of spam it gets. Honestly, the thing is more annoying than it is useful at this point (everyone still reads the livejournal), so it might need a bit of a redesign and shuffle to be slightly more useful.

The t-shirt is from threadless.

Kristine Kathryn Rusch takes on the gender debate in speculative fiction and you’ll be pleased to hear that there’s nothing to complain about:

Recently, I participated in one of John DeNardo’s Mind Meld columns for the SF Site because he posed the perennial question about whether SF discriminates against women, although he tried to pose the question in a new way for a new century by asking if gender bias played a role in SF.

My first reaction to the question was a heavy sigh. I wrote a long piece about the ways that gender bias no longer exists in SF. Then I read what everyone else wrote.

I learned a few things. First, the question came about because a couple of editors had produced anthologies in the same year with few or no female names on the table of contents. One of the editors defended himself on the site, by stating he had invited women into his anthology, but the women either missed the deadline or bowed out at the last minute, forcing him to go to writers of his acquaintance who worked quickly and weren’t already invited into the anthology. As a result, he produced the accidental womanless TOC.

Every editor has similar problems. The all-fantastic issue with no well-known fantasy writers (how I suffered through that for one issue of F&SF), the science fiction anthology with only slipstream stories (no one ended up writing a hardcore SF story) and so on. Such things happen.

But a group of people got upset about the lack of gender equality in these anthologies and wrote letters of complaint. And the editors responded, first with apologies and then with making certain that their future anthologies had a more diverse tables of contents.

What amazed me was that the same group of people believed this to be evidence of gender bias in SF publishing. And as I poured through the names of the complainants on the site and on linked blogs, I realized that all of these people were much younger than I am.

These young writers stand on a platform built by the writers who came before them. That platform states that gender bias is a bad thing. And so these writers complained, were heard, and got an explanation and an apology, because the editors involved shared the belief that gender bias is a bad thing. The editors were embarrassed and promised never to do such a thing again.

But what the writers don’t seem to realize is what the real gender discrimination fight was like. I have an inkling, because I’m part of a crossover generation. I came in after the battles were won, but not every person was comfortable with the victory. I got a lot of hate mail that first month I edited The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction because I was the first woman to take the job.

…

The pioneering women in SF went through a great deal, some of it overt and some of it subtle. No one has written the definitive history of this part of the genre and someone should. Most of the pioneering women—C.L. Moore, Leigh Brackett, and others—are gone now. But the next generation, the women who pushed the door open just a bit wider—women like Ursula K. Le Guin and Kate Wilhelm—are still with us, with great stories to tell. Someone just needs to interview them or ask them to write essays about their experiences.

…

It’s science fiction’s job to try to understand these platforms and see what they’re building toward. But you can’t do that job unless you understand the platforms of the past.

History teaches us the most about ourselves and our futures. With an understanding of what came before, we can’t predict everything, but we can predict some things.

For example, I know that the arguments about gender bias in SF will eventually disappear. They’re fewer and farther between now than they were when I came into the field, but they’re not finished yet. (Although I think they should be. There are other things to argue about.)

Isn’t that excellent?

Of course, you can trust Rusch completely. She was a journalist for ten years and researches these things utterly, as she tells me. That’s unlike you people on the internet, especially you young women with your boob tubes and your thong bikinis and your fast cars. The youth of today, they just don’t know how hard it was, back in the day.

You know, the strangest thing is, I don’t even think the current gender debate is handled well. It bases itself on numbers, doesn’t actually engage with female authors, and discuss the content of the work within the larger movements of the field. Just as a starter. So, technically, I’d actually be on the side of anyone who had a constructive argument against the last few gender debates–and when I mean constructive, I mean good, and when I mean good, I mean thoughtful and interesting–but this here, this is just ignoring that struggling for equality has a lot of different forms, and mutates itself from generation to generation, scene to scene.

On my days off, I usually manage to catch the SBS news. It’s two days a week, at most, less if I get caught up in other things.

Last night, however, I did catch it, and there was a piece there about Michelle Obama and Sarah Brown, doing tea. It came after a piece about their husbands, leaders of the UK and the USA, and the important international issues that they are discussing, and it struck me that, most sadly, their wives were nothing but entertainers for the world, the little lady who brings the international (or national) audience into the house, gives them biscuits, and makes mindless chit chat while the men handle the real work in smoky dens with assistants in short skirts. It kind of sucked, to be honest. Watching it I saw all the negative female representations that you try to avoid falling into when you write, and when you interact with women. I watched as the news reporter (also a woman) commented on the fashionable, yet sensible style of Michelle Obama’s clothing; I’m fairly sure she didn’t go into Target and buy her own clothes, but there the reporter felt it necessary to inform me that the reason why Michelle was dressed so was because it showed a sympathy to the plight that many people in the world are feeling in this moment. Of course, the same reporter’s moment of daring was to scream out to Michelle Obama and ask her how she liked Britain. “Fine,” she said. One word mouthed from a distance. Shortly after that, the same reporter told me about the fact that Michelle and Sarah and JK Rowling and more women would be meeting for a dinner on Downing Street, put together by Jamie Oliver himself, the menu of which did not look like things I could just go up and pick up from the corner store for a few pound. Since it was in Britain, I just felt like adding that bit about the pound there. We all know real money is in dollars, however, but there needed to be a joke here somewhere.

Maybe I was in a mood about things, but the more I watched, the more I wanted to kick something. There were images of women drinking tea with cancer victims. A bit of mindless chit chat, an autograph, some fake interest in people below their social standing, then back to a glamorous dinner in which, I can only imagine, the women later stripped down and fought each other with pillows. Perhaps Jamie Oliver was tied to the bed and they used him shamelessly. He seems like the kind of guy who would be into that.

I shouldn’t be surprised, and I should’ve flipped the channel, but I would only have ended up with the Biggest Loser, and maybe I was watching a version of that already.

I am currently listening to Howling Bells’ new album, Radio Wars. I can’t say that I loved their first album, at least not to the point that I thought everyone should listen to it, but I did like it well enough and it has remained on my rotation since I first picked it up a few years back in 2006. Not many albums do that, so I picked up the new one, and all I can say so far is that I don’t love it, but I might like it well enough.

You may have noted that things have been quiet around here, and that’s just due to things being busy. Give me a bit and things’ll return to normal.

However, here’s something amusing. One of my students is writing a zombie script. He’s in year seven, and he and his friends have decided that they’re going to make a zombie film, and he is going to write and direct it and then load it up onto youtube later. We can take bets on how far they’ll get into this, but as the tutor who is always looking for new ways to keep things moving, I grabbed hold of this. Movies! Scripts! Zombies! I currently have him watching zombie films and writing his script, and learning about film techniques. The best bit, however, is the motivations for the making of this film. There is, of course, artistic merit. The whole wanting to make a zombie film with your friends and everything is the main reason, but the second one is that one of my student’s friends wants to kiss this girl in their year. In the time honoured tradition of elaborate and unnecessary plans that do not result in kissing, and which all teenage boys indulge in once or twice, they have come up with the zombie film. Reportedly the girl has agreed to the end scene kiss.

Speaking of films, Jim Jarmusch’s new flick, Limits of Control, has a trailer that I just saw:

Jarmusch’s last film, Broken Flowers, was an intimately boring thing that I hope was a blip on the radar, since I’ve long been a big fan of Mystery Train, Down by Law, Ghost Dog, Dead Man, and other flicks that he made. Fortunately this one looks promising.