Attack of The Little People and
Odyssey Who

I know, the headline is terrible and I apologize for it.

But you have to admit that cover is worth any number of terrible heds.

I suppose there's really nothing else to say, beyond offering a tip 'o the proverbial hat to io9.com.

There are a few other amusements in that gallery, though in my opinion the Nazi ... elves? dwarves? pixies? gnomes ... are the cream of a dubious crop.

Stay tuned folks! Swear to god, there's a real entry-a-comin' sometime soon!

Meanwhile, another time-waster for the Geeks Of a Certain Age Among Us (and those who've managed to see aging torrents or re-runs).

(And yes, a review of the latest Who special will be coming shortly, along with a critically appreciation of the mostly quite wonderful Sarah Jane Adventures. Anyway, I'll leave you with a rather lovely Who/Kubrick mash-up which not only looks to the past but, quite appropriately, to the future as well. Kudos to TardisTimegirl, whoever she might be.)

A city without alleys

A neighbourhood of fearless cats

Smokers of the world unite!
You have nothing to lose but your jones(ing)!

Book Review:
Allen Carr's Easy Way to Stop Smoking

Allen Carr's Easy Way to Stop Smoking 2004, Clarity Publishing 186 pages, $19.95

At some point or another we've all heard the phrase, if something sounds too good to be true, it probably is, and most of us have probably used it.

"Easy" ways to make money, lose weight, find love, and cetera and cetera, are forever singing their syren songs from television adds, email spam and the self-help sections of bookstores, to name just a few.

So you can imagine my scepticism when a friend gave me his copy of Allen Carr's Easy Way to Stop Smoking. My friend told me he butted his final cigarette when he finished the book and he felt sure that I would do the same.

I've been smoking since I was 16 or 17 years old, very nearly as long as he and I have been friends and almost as long as he had been smoking — what did I have to lose? he asked me, and I had to agree to give it a try, no matter that I couldn't even imagine that quitting smoking could possible be "easy".

Well, it seems there's a reason the truism I mentioned at the outset includes the word, probably. Because I too butted my last cigarette at the precise moment I finished Allen Carr's remarkable book. Every once in a very long while, something that sounds too good to be true, actually is true.

Over the more than quarter century I've been smoking, I've quit quite a few times. All failures (up 'till now, I believe), my attempts at becoming smoke-free have lasted as long as two months (or almost — the lies a drug addict will tell himself and others are remarkable) and as briefly as five or 10 minutes. And every single one of those attempts was hard, a constant battle of Addiction versus Will (or "willpower", to use Carr's un-hyphenated term).

Whether quitting "cold turkey" (a term Carr correctly notes is inappropriately lifted from the much more physically debilitating symptoms of heroin withdrawal) or using nicotine gum or the patch, my previous tries have left me pretty miserable, and forever craving a cigarette so that, when temptation or pressure showed up, it was a relief to light up a smoke and suck that poison into my lungs.

Carr promises — and delivers! — an entirely different experience.

Early on, he promises not to flood the reader with health warnings about issues every smoker already knows, he promises that the reader will want to stop by the end of the book, and he insists that the smoker keep smoking until the end of the book.

What's not to like? And what, as Carr asks, has the smoker to lose?

Nothing but the chains of addiction, of course; and if it doesn't work, one can just keep on smoking.

I said that all my previous attempts to quit have been hard, even agonizing. This time really was easy, which is why, only nine [edit: now 10] days after butting out, I feel almost completely confident — not confident that I have "quit smoking", but confident that I am once again, for the first time in more than 25 years, a non-smoker.

The difference between a quitter and a non-smoker to my mind (to my mind now; I'm cribbing from Carr) is that the former feels as if he or she has given up smoking, that they have made some kind of sacrifice, whereas the latter (finally!) understands that he has lost nothing but his chains, that she has lost only her servitude to a drug addiction.

And smoking is a drug addiction, not a "habit" or a "choice" or anything other excuse or lie used to justify it.

But if (I hear you cry) smoking is an addiction, how can it possibly be easy to stop?

Simply put, because it's not a very serious addiction. After three days, all the nicotine is gone from the former smoker's body (half is gone within hours, which means every smoker sleeps through the worst of his or her withdrawal symptoms just about every night of their life. An addiction to nicotine is not remotely as serious as alcoholism or heroin addiction!) and, in the interim, the physical withdrawal symptoms are, in truth, very similar to the feeling one gets when one is begining to get hungry, nothing more. As Carr points out repeatedly, every smoker goes many hours at a time in "withdrawal" from nicotine day in and day out, if only while asleep. And usually doesn't even notice the craving.

Nevertheless, how does it work? Why did Carr's method enable me to quit when neither will-power, nicotine patches or nicotine gum have been of any use to me?

I think the answer lies in Carr's use of the repetition I mentioned above, of which the book contains a great deal, sometimes almost word-for-word. The effect is almost hypnotic as he repeatedly reminds us of things were already know in the abstract.

Things like it's not actually fun to hang around outside at minus-30 degrees in a howling snow-storm in order to have a smoke; nor is it a genuine pleasure to interrupt a date in order to grab a butt. Things like the fact cigarettes actually taste awful (and I am someone who, even two weeks ago, claimed that I "enjoyed" the process of smoking. I now know I was lying to myself).

Allen Carr's Easy Way to Stop Smoking doesn't lecture, doesn't hector and doesn't try to scare you with horror stories about lung cancer or rotting gums. It just calmly and quietly reminds the smoker that he or she is addicted to a drug, that he or she doesn't enjoy smoking (it must be the only addictive drug that doesn't get its users high), and that their lives would be much better off without the addiction.

And after 186 pages, this former smoker is convinced that he will never light up again.

If you're a smoker, gamble the 20 bucks on a copy of the book — that's about two large packs of cigarettes. If you have a loved one who is a smoker, buy a copy, read it yourself, then pass it on to them — there's hardly a smoker alive who doesn't (if only secretly) want to stop.

Just this once, something that sounds too good to be true actually is true: if you know what you're doing, it's easy to become the non-smoker you once were.

This essay originally appeared in the October 16, 2009, edition of True North Perspective.

I was going to post an up-date explaining what's going on with the store (electrician's coming in on Tuesday, after which we'll really be able to start building!) and how I don't have a life worth blogging about — then I decided not to blog about them. Meanwhile, sooguy has provided me with inspiration in another form. To whit, a meme (as always, I will not be tagging anyone, but feel free to steal if you're looking for a similar reason to type):

1. Star Wars, 1977: Of course this film takes pride of place on my list! I was 12 years old when it came out and there had never been anything like it before. Even more, I was a science fiction reader and so was doubly-thrilled not just by the spaceships but by the aliens. Pure magic for me then, and the memory of the experience will never entirely fade.


2. The Philadelphia Story, 1940: I think I was lucky enough to first see this at a rep-theatre. Knowing Cary Grant only from his handsome mug I had long been under the misapprehension he was "only" a romantic lead, rather than the brilliant physical comedian he also was. With a cast including Catherine Hepburn and Jimmy Stewart, The Philadelphia Story still holds up as All That A Romantic Comedy should be: emotionally gripping, witty, clever and populated by characters, not stereotypes, so that the inevitable happy ending nevertheless feels real and well-worth the voyage to get there. If you haven't yet had the pleasure, for god's sake see it soon!


3. Bolero (Les uns et les autres), 1981: Saw this in my early teens and don't remember it in detail — indeed, I suspect I didn't much understand it at all, despite the subtitles and my own command of French — but two elements of it are indelibly inscribed in the brain of the man I am now. First, Ravel's hypnotic and haunting "Boléro", which weaves in and out of the soundtrack like some wonderfully demented broken record. The second is what I remember being a fifteen-minute dance by a muscular, bare-chested man who by that performance convinced me that dance could be, yes, sublime.


4. Atanarjuat, 2001: A "foreign" film from my own country. Atanarjuat is an Inuit-made film about an ancient Inuit myth ("The fast runner") and as such is a fascinating look into a culture that lived as hunter-gatherers within living memory. It is also (if memory serves) a brilliant piece of film-making, with plot, character and the nearly infinite white landscape all coming together for an unforgettable cinematic experience.

But as the first item in this list shows, I am not here attempting to list the 15 "best" films I have seen, but the 15 most memorable.

5. The Raven, 1963: I first saw this on a black and white television with my father and younger brother. Those were the days when our television set was (even then) an ancient black-and-white floor-model that literally took three minutes to warm up and for which my brother and eye took turns playing remote control. "Ding! Ding!" dad would call when a commercial was about to start, and one of us would rush to the screen to turn off the sound.</p>

   One of Roger Corman's many B-movies of the time, this bizarre tale of two wizards (Vincent Price! Boris Karloff!) engaged in a battle to the death has absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with Poe's poem, The Raven also features Peter Lorre and (!)Jack Nicholson(!), looking very out of place in one of his first roles. (Where Price and company were hamming it up for all they were worth, Nicholson looks like he's trying to act, seeking motivation for a character that simply doesn't have the depth to support any.)

   I've seen it a couple of times since, and it holds up well as an idiot's delight.



6. 2001: A Space Odyssey, 1968: Boring, pretentious and non-sensical are three adjectives I've seen hurled at this remarkable movie and I can't argue with any of them. Kubrick was falling from (or rising towards, take your pick) being an artist whose primary goal was to communicate with a mass audience, to one simply in communion with himself — come along for the ride or not, Kubrick didn't care.
   
   I'm one of those who did and does find the film crawls at times, and who thinks the ending makes no sense at all. But I still think it's a magnificent piece of film-making. Mating "On The Beautiful Blue Danube" with space travel, made those ships (all obeying Newton's Third Law, something also un-heard of in SF films before or since), made the silent mechanics of space travel into nothing less than a balletic ode to the future.
   
   This is not a movie for the twitter generation, so be prepared to sit down and really watch it, if you're going to give it a try (which you should do). While there's much to criticize, there is also much to think about and much to simply enjoy.


7. Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb, 1964: Another Kubrick, this time in black and white and this time almost without flaw. Peter Sellers plays the titular character, a semi-paralyzed "former" Nazi scientist now working for the Petagon; the President of the United States; and an upright English army officer and an innocent viewer would probably assume three different actors. But that's merely trivia.
   
   Kubrick's satire skewers the military and political worlds with a keen and vicious eye, managing to provide the viewer with all the suspense of a good thriller and the belly laughs of the best of the Marx Brothers. "Gentlemen, please! You can't fight in here! This is the war room!" Oh hell, if you haven't seen it, then repair that flaw now.


8. The Great Dictator, 1940: I was nine or 10 the summer the CBC played just about all of Chaplin's major movies, probably on Saturday nights. In any event, it was must-see television for our entire family, and a revelation to me. The closest I had then seen to Chaplin's physical comedy was Don Adams' Get Smart, and good as the latter was, it was clear to me then (it's actually less clear to me now, but that's a digression for another time) that Chaplin's work was simply on another (higher) level entirely. In the years since I've blown hot and cold on Chaplin, but the "dance" in which his Hitler parody plays with a giant balloon marked with the world's continents and oceans will stay with me always.


9. Duck Soup, 1933: What can I say that hasn't been said a thousand times before? This is the Marx Brothers at the top of their game — anarchic satire, pratfalls and wordplay with scarcely a musical interlude to slow things down. See it in a theatre if you can, with a few friends who like to laugh if you can't.


10. The Petrified Forest, 1936: My first exposure to Bette Davis and one of my first to Humphrey Bogart, The Petrified Forest was all about the threat of violence, rather than violence itself. Stagey, perhaps, but compelling as hell when I saw it on television and one I've revisited a few times since. Based on a stage-play, it's definitely primitive film-making, but primitive doesn't mean bad.


11. Bliss, 1985: I saw this on first release and have seen it again and again and again. This painful depiction of love, lust and the traps one can set for oneself, this movie is at once a painfully funny black-comedy, a heart-breaking romance and withering social critique, with bits of surrealism thrown in for good measure. It has a closing seen almost as powerful as Sam returning home after seeing Frodo sail off to the Grey Havens in Tolkien's version of The Lord of the Rings. I still start weeping minutes before that devasting closing voice-over: "He was our father. He told stories, and he planted trees." What an epitaph. What a movie.


12. Henry V, 1989: When I first saw this movie, I was convinced that Kenneth Brannagh was the reincarnation of Orson Welles; sadly (and like Welles), Brannagh doesn't seem to have managed to live up to that promise. But still, his Henry V is a bloody brilliant adaptation of Shakespeare's play, respectful of the original source material but fully aware that film and stage are two very different beasts indeed.


13. The Wizard of Oz, 1939: I saw it as a wee boy-kid, as an adolescent, as an adult; I've seen on television, on video and in the theatre. The Great American Fairy Tale, this is one of those movies that speaks (and sings!) to just about everyone. The Wizard of Oz is scary and goofy, cynical and maudlin — all that, and much, much more. You know: a classic. Really.


14. Casablanca, 1942: Speaking of American fairy tales, Casablanca has to be on any such list. Humphrey Bogart's reluctant hero, the brooding, cynical and tortured Rick Blaine is utterly compelling, as is his supporting cast (which includes not nearly enough Peter Lorre for my tastes; but that's almost always the case with him). Some of the sexual politics have, um, not aged well (I can no longer manage anything like a sympathetic smirk when Claude Rains' Captain Renault takes yet another young and attractive refugee into his office for an exchange of sexual "favours" for a visa) and, yes, the story manipulates its audience with no more shame than Captain Renault, but — damn it! — when the manipulation is as good as it is here, it's hard to complain too much. As for Bogey and me, Casablanca surely was "the begining of a beautiful friendship".


15. South Park: Bigger, Longer and Uncut, 1999: I'm almost embarrassed to end my list with this one, but what the hell — it is a mighty memorable movie. Foul-mouthed 3rd grader heroes, political satire, great songs, a plot that actually makes sense (more or less) and a generally hilarious anarchic sense of humour all serve to make this movie one for the ages. But be warned: If the very idea of songs with lyrics like, "Shut your fucking face, uncle-fucker" twist your undies into a knot, it might not be your cup of tea. For the record, both my brother and my mother agreed it was one of "the dumbest" movies they'd ever seen after I'd foisted it upon them. My mileage, obviously, varied quite a lot.

Hell. Where's Rushmore? Where's Election? And what about Apocalypse Now? Or Manhattan? Or Jésus de Montréal? Or Citizen Kane or The Meaning of Life or High Noon or, or, or ...

Well screw it. This was supposed to be done in one sitting ("15 minutes" was the original formulation) and so I have done. Maybe someday I'll put together a list of "best", rather than "most memorable". For now, this serves pretty well as a snap-shot of what I currently think of as memorable movies.

Cross-posted from Edifice Rex Online

"The true heart of science fiction has always been the space-opera story; the thrilling adventure tale of powerful rocket ships, dashing heroes, and far frontiers — stories of immense scope and scale, color and action, taking us to the ultimate limits of both time and space [...]"
— From the introduction to The New Space Opera 2)</p>

There really is no such a genre as "science fiction". Unlike whodunnits or romances, SF^1. is a genre more by marketing fiat than by standard tropes or formulae^2.; there is no fixed plot, character-arc or even place or time required to define a work of science fiction as science fiction. Indeed, such a definition has been a matter of debate within the field for decades and I'm certainly not going to essay my own here.

How about space opera, then? That term too has a long and controversial history and for a long time it was used mostly as a pejorative, to indicate stories that were, essentially, mindless action-oriented adventures not to be taken seriously by anyone much over the mental age of 14. (Think Star Wars: wonderful to look at but dumber than a shuttle-load of trans-dimensional circuit-breakers.)

The "new space opera" then, presumably includes the "thrilling adventures" and "far frontiers" quoted above, but with the addition more sophisticated characterizations and technological and political backgrounds.

If only The New Space Opera 2 had lived up to those introductory words, or to its excellent predecessor (The New Space Opera) this would have been an easy review for me to write. As it stands, the volume contains few thrills, frontiers that feel about as far a trip to the end of the subway line, and socio-political speculation springing right out of 15th century Europe or even 1st century Rome.

With only a very few exceptions, in The New Space Opera 2, the "sense of wonder" for which science fiction — and especially space opera — is famous is pretty much absent. If The New Space Opera 2 tells us anything about the field in general, it suggests one that sees our future as one constricted by centuries-old political structures, threatened by eternal warfare and, perhaps paradoxically, one in which space travel is about as comfortable — and about as interesting — as a series of rides on space-going subway cars.

Half-way through my first read of this substantial anthology (Neal Asher's "Shell Game"), I felt as if the editors had opted for adventure in subway cars, whether or not that particular train was heading to the ends of time and space. Unlike the first volume in this series, which I thought a very good representation of the varieties of "new space opera",^3., The New Space Opera 2 feels less like a celebration of the far horizons to which SF can take a reader than it does a repudiation of same.

Not that it's all bad, of course.

The New Space Opera 2 Edited by Gardner Dozois and Jonathan Straham Published by EOS (HarperCollins), 2009 544 pages.

The strongest story by far (and the only one I would consider a potential award-winner) is Peter Watts' "The Island". Though its setting also "suffers" from both the aforementioned feeling of confinement as well as an active cast of only two (three, if you count a semi-sentient computer), Watts brings to the reader a strong sense of the sheer scale of near-light-speed travel through both deep space and deep time.^4.

As I've come to expect from the author of Blindsight, "The Island" includes a compelling (if not necessarily very sympathetic) narrator and a rigorously work-out situation and plot, accompanied by scientific speculation at once "cosmic" in scale and yet firmly rooted in the logic of Darwinian natural selection, while the emotionally-resonant story grounds the reader with a very unusual mother/son relationship indeed.

At the opposite end of the scale is Cory Doctorow's "To Go Boldly" — the "corrected" syntax of the title all by itself should tell you what to expect. "To Go Boldly" is a smug take-down of Star Trek-type tropes in particular and of human-dominated galactic empires in general. Unfortunately^5., Doctorow's barbs are aimed at obvious targets that have long-since been pierced by many, much-sharper, darts.

In between the extremes is a reasonably solid, but mostly forgettable, collection of science fiction stories.

The opening shot, Robert Charles Wilson's "Utriusque Cosmi" is cosmic in scope (it starts in the very near future and includes the end of the universe itself), but suffers from affectless prose and a very passive narrator. I didn't care about her, I predicted the "twist" ending about midway through and found the vaguely fractal-like cosmological and exo-anthropological speculations both uninteresting and unconvincing.

John Kessel's "Events Preceding the Helvetican Renaissance" is a standard-issue chase story, with a macguffin in which I just don't believe. That a society so high-tech as to make our own look like a hunter-gatherer's in comparison would be based on a single copy of anything (let alone a play that has been performed in public) fails to convince, and yet another story of a single individual "saving the world" is lazy trope all too common in SF.

John Barnes' "The Lost Princess Man" introduces yet another future of massive social stratification, one in which — through the wonders of genetic engineering — the aristocracy is literally at least physically superior to proles. That the bulk of the "action" takes place in a virtual reality makes "The Lost Princess Man" iffy as new space opera and a bit of a narrative cheat.

The prolific and always readable Kristine Kathryn Rusch manages many of the above tropes quite a bit better in "Defect", in part because the story does not concern the Fate of Worlds, but of characters. "Defect" includes quite a lot of action but it is not about action. The action serves the story, rather than the other way around. Like Watts' story, "Defect" is also about an unusual mother-child relationship, but the similarities end there. Where Watts' story sees hope in mere survival, in Rusch's survival implies much greater things to come.

Jay Lake's "To Raise a Mutiny Betwixt Yourselves" is the story of a complicated mutiny aboard a starship and the related battle between two millenia-old former lovers, the point of which escapes me only a couple of days after re-reading, perhaps because the most vivid character is the ship's computer. Similarly, Asher's "Shell Game" reads like a paint-by-numbers adventure-story-with-love-interest. In this case, humanity all-too-easily defeats an alien menace (without genocide, for a refreshing change) and the boy gets the girl — but the reader is unlikely to care much about either.

Garth Nyx's "Punctuality" is a mild-entertaining short-short with a twist on both the duties of a galactic emperor and on the nature of faster-than-light travel. It would not have been out-of-place as a filler in an issue of Analog, but what it's doing in a $20.00 anthology is another question.

By comparison, Sean Williams's "Inevitable", is a must-read. But only by comparison. A well-told tale of time-travel, it doesn't break any new ground and — like so many of the stories here! — most of the action happens underground and anyone familiar with time-travel paradoxes will figure out the inevitable conclusion long before the protagonist does.

Another story that arguably doesn't belong in this anthology, though one better than most of its companions, is Bruce Sterling's "Join the Navy and See the Worlds". Set entirely on a relatively near-future earth, Sterling's story sees the genesis of a new space-age, inspired by but independent from, that of a failing United States. Though well-written, I found the fifth-business narration unengaging and the story simply out of place, a critique of space opera rather than an engagement with it.

Bill Willingham's "Fearless Space Pirates of the Outer Fringe", on the other hand, can be classified as nothing but space opera. It could also be read as an answer to "To Go Boldly" — affectionate where Doctorow is contemptuous, "Fearless ..." embraces the genre's standard tropes and cliches, turning down its collar, brushing its hair and sending it out into the world. Unfortunately (I know, there's that word again!), the story is slight and the ending is so predictable I'd almost swear I'd read it before.

John Meaney's "From the Heart" reads like an excerpt from a much longer work and suffers for that. A cross between a bildungsroman, a love story and an action story, it fails to engage on any level but the first one.

Elizabeth Moon's novella, "Chameleons" is another relative high-point in this book, though again, it has the claustrophobic feel so common to this book. Moon introduces us to yet another future dominated by massive social division, petty greed and (in this case) egregious parenting. Moon writes an excellent action story, though, and Chameleons is one of the few here I didn't have to re-read in order to remember what happens in it.

Another high point, probably in the top three, is Tad Williams' "The Tenth Muse". Featuring a complex but not confusing background, unusual but empathetic characters and a genuinely alien menace, Williams' story comes to a satisfying and slightly open-ended conclusion, leaving the reader pleased to have visited and hoping Williams will give us the chance to return.

Justina Robson's "Cracklegrackle" brings us back to Earth (or Mars, in this case) with a bit of a thud, unfortunately. The story of a father searching for his lost daughter by a mysterious entity — alien or a super-human? If it was made clear in the story, I've forgotten — who shows him a truth beyond his ability to accept. Intriguing and complex enough to suggest this story is part of a larger "universe" that I would like to see more of, the story suffers from a failure to convince me of the psychological reality of the protagonist, so that his tragedy becomes mere anecdote.

John Scalzi's "The Tale of the Wicked" brings us back (almost) to "the final frontier". Opening with what promises to be the conclusive battle between a pair of faster-than-light battle-cruiser's, "The Tale of the Wicked" turns out not to be a war story at all. With an explicit nod to Asimov's Three Laws of Robotics, Scalzi's tale is an engaging take on emergent intelligence and what it might mean for us when (if) it happens.

The penultimate story here, Mike Resnick's "Catastrophe Baker and a Canticle for Leibowitz" is, as the title suggests, a lighted-hearted farce, complete with a "full-time freelance hero", a lusty and buxom heroine named (really!) Voluptua von Climax and a sort-of jewel-heist with a twist. Forgettable, but good fun enough if you like that sort of thing (and, with misgivings, I do).

Finally, John C. Wright's "The Far End of History" delivers The New Space Opera 2's promised cosmic scope and scale, but fails to convince with its love story, its war story or its aeons-long history of humanity. Really, if a writer is going to destroy the entire galaxy, the reader ought to care, and this reader didn't.

As is no doubt already abundantly clear, I can't recommend this volume. If the contributors' list excites you by all means pick up a copy when it comes it as a mass-market paper-back, but please don't give it some non-SF reading friend who you hope to interest in the field. This book won't convert anybody.

Notes:

1. I say SF because I came of age when Sci Fi referred primarily to Sf in film or television or to refer to SF the user considered inferior (often including just about anything that might have been considered "space opera", come to think of it). And so I continue using the old-school terminology. But I know the battle is long-lost and so won't bite if you prefer to use that "hideous neologism". Language changes and sometimes you just gotta roll with it. — Return.

2. This is not to say there's no such thing as formulaic SF. There is, and plenty of it. But it is the sub-"genres" which more easily carry the label of genre than does the field as a whole. — Return.

3. All right, all right! From the editors' introduction:

"The true heart of science fiction has always been the space-opera story; the thrilling adventure tale of powerful rocket ships, dashing heroes, and far frontiers — stories of immense scope and scale, color and action, taking us to the ultimate limits of both time and space..." — Return.

4. One element that divides "new space opera" from the old is a refusal to use faster-than-light travel, so Watts' characters have been travelling for several billions years from our perspective. — Return.

5. I say "unfortunately" for a couple of reasons. First, because he online persona suggests someone who broadly shares my political and philosophical beliefs, and we usually want to like the work of those we agree with. Also, we attended the same high school and I believe his first year there coincided with my sixth (and, yes, last — that's another, and a long, story). — Return.

Hard Candy Written by Brian Nelson Directed by David Slade Starring: Ellen Page Patrick Wilson Released April 14, 2006

Hardy Candy opens with an angled shot of a computer screen, where a flirtatious on-line chat is taking place between Lensman319 and Thonggrrrl14. Before long, we learn that the former is 32-year old photographer Jeff Kohlver (Patrick Wilson) and the latter, 14 year-old Hayley Stark (Ellen Page. After a brief on-screen exchange and as the camera moves ever-closer to the screen, Hayley types,

          "okay, let's do it
          hook up i mean"

and the viewer knows they're in for some kind of ugly ride.

The camera cuts to a close of a piece of cake being bitten into with a fork and we here Hayley moaning with (almost) an orgasmic pleasure. When at last we see her face, she looks oh so young — and her lower lip is dirtied with chocolate.

Jeff approaches from behind, asks her name and Hayley, embarrassed, says she'd hoped to seem more sophisticated when they met. She asks if he wants some cake and he says yes, then cleans her lip with his thumb.

Page plays Hayley perfectly. Struggling for sophistication beyond her years, a little nervous, maybe even a little scared, but determined not to make a fool of herself.

Despite our knowledge that Kohlver is a 30 year-old man who has been knowingly flirting with that very young girl, Wilson makes him charming, even sympathetic. Maybe he's not a predator, maybe we're simply about to witness the blossoming of an unusual friendship, a la the under-rated 1999 Sarah Polley vehicle Guinevere, an age-gap relationship psycho-drama.

But this is not that kind of movie. No, it's a thriller (I prefer the old-school term, suspense, but that seems to have gone by the way-side) and I give little away by saying so.

By the 10:40 mark, Hayley has agreed to come back to Jeff's place.

The film includes almost no incidental music or sound effects, but the wordless drive to Jeff's very stylish digs is very effectively accompanied by a quietly ominous instrumental.

I don't want to bore you with an extended précis, nor do I want to risk giving away any of the many twists and turns of the plot. Suffice it to say that this movie is a thriller and that it is not another woman-in-the-refrigerator story.

I will say that, not long after Hayley and Jeff have arrived at his place, Hayley has drugged him and he awakens tied into a rolling chair.

And the thriller begins.

By "thriller", I don't mean gore, nor running and chasing and there are no big explosions here. Hard Candy is all about dialogue and suggestion, a battle of wills, not brawn (to be fair, there are a few scenes of physical struggle as well, shot in a low-keyed fashion that is nevertheless incredibly intense.

As in Hitchcock's Rear Window, first-time director David Slade makes the claustrophobic most of a single set and a dialogue-heavy script. There is no cheating here but only a relentless tension that doesn't break until the very end.

And that climax, when it arrives, does so like an unhappy orgasm; not so much a pleasure as it is simply a relief — one can only shout "Oh my god!" at the screen so many times before one is desperate for the ride to be over.

Paedophilia is a pretty hot topic these days. Children are worried about and protected as never before — at least, as never before in my life-time nor those of my parents. Our instantaneous mass communications system means that a child abducted in Alberta becomes national news, perhaps international, and every incident adds another layer to to the burden of paranoia under which so many of us operate.

But Hard Candy isn't "about" paedophilia any more than it is "about" castration, nor even the psychology of revenge or the morality of vigilante justice.

And neither is it "about" any kind of feminism, except in the most implicit way. Hayley Stark is at no point an object in the film, she is one of two subjects, as fully (or as shallowly — your mileage may vary) realized a character as her antagonist.

David Slade and Brian Nelson seem to properly understand that didactic art is almost invariably bad art. There are no lessons in Hard Candy, no cheap psychology to "explain" the characters.

There is only a story and, when it is done, it is up to the viewer to make sense (or not) of what they have witnessed.

Both principal actors are excellent in their roles and a special nod must be given to Page, who was only 17 when the movie was shot. She is utterly convincing as a preternaturally sophisticated 14 year-old, by turns skittish and implacable, coquettish and naive (and when, at one point late in the proceedings, her plan seems to have come apart, her fear and desperation are almost tangible).

One may quibble that no 14 year-old has as sophisticated a vocabulary as is provided by Nelson, but then again, it's a big world and the variety of human capability is vast; while watching, I had no trouble suspending my disbelief and, in retrospect, I think I still can.

Hard Candy might not (quite) reach the heights of Great Art, but as a thriller, it is as intense and suspenseful a ride as I have encountered in a very long time and one that does not (as is so often the case in an age when "thriller" is too often synonymous with spectacular explosions and/or graphic blood 'n' entrails) insult neither the viewer's rational or their moral intelligence.

Originally posted to Edifice Rex Online

I'd really rather not promote the moral idiot Christopher Hitchen, an "intellectual" who shamefully broke with his own alleged principles when George W. Bush decided it would be fun and profitable to invade Iraq, but when he's right, he's right.

Nearly four years later, that short-sighted moral and intellectual pusillanimity is still going strong. Hitchens writes,

So here's another depressing thing: Neither the "experts in the intelligence, national security, law enforcement, and diplomatic fields, as well as leading scholars in Islamic studies and Middle East studies" who were allegedly consulted, nor the spokespeople for the press of one of our leading universities, understand the meaning of the plain and common and useful word instigate. If you instigate something, it means that you wish and intend it to happen. If it's a riot, then by instigating it, you have yourself fomented it. If it's a murder, then by instigating it, you have yourself colluded in it. There is no other usage given for the word in any dictionary, with the possible exception of the word provoke, which does have a passive connotation. After all, there are people who argue that women who won't wear the veil have "provoked" those who rape or disfigure them … and now Yale has adopted that "logic" as its own.

The full article is online at Slate.com (though it's interesting to note that, while Hitchens proivides a link to the cartoons, none of them appear alongside the article itself.

A problem with permissions, or is Slate refusing to practice what Hitchens is preaching?

(Cross-posted from Edifice Rex Online.)