Our Friendly Neighborhood Wildfire Experience

So, we had a wildfire today! We didn't get a lot of snow last winter, and we haven't had a lot of rain recently, and in Alaska that's all prime conditions for a wildfire. And sure enough, one broke out just outside of my neighborhood today. Fortunately, there was a river between us and the flames, so no homes were endangered, and no one had to evacuate. But man, if it wasn't the most exciting thing that happened in our neighborhood in a long time.

So here's what we know:

• I'm not sure when the fire started, but I do know that smoke became visible on our street around 5:00-5:20 p.m. 
• The smoke got more profuse and more worrying. Cars started slowing down to look. My siblings and I were walking home from a friend's house; we hurried home at this point and alerted our parents. 
• We originally assumed it was a controlled fire to burn out dry brush, as we hadn't been alerted or heard any fire warnings. 
• A friend called 911. Turns out that close-looking fire wasn't controlled, and firefighters were working hard just to contain it. 
• We started packing in case of evacuation. 
• My dad and I went out to check on people we know who lived a little closer to the fire's location. As we went we gathered information about the situation from neighbors and friends.
• We learned that the fire was started by some campers. Also, there's a river between us and where it was, so there wasn't any immediate danger. 
• The wind continued blowing the fire away from our neighborhood, so no evacuation/emergency measures were necessary. 
• Smoke and flames continued to be visible from our neighborhood, but again, the fire never got within a dangerous distance of us. 
• The fire has now, as I write this, been contained and the emergency/excitement is over. 

Like I said, this is the most exciting thing that's happened in this neighborhood in a while. It's definitely given everyone a lot to think about. And it's possible that, if we don't get rain, this will happen again in June, July, or August. So the upside of all this is that we've had a test run and now have an idea of what to do if we do ever have to evacuate. 

My dad and I took videos and pictures as everything was going down, and I'm going to be compiling those into a sort of mini-documentary, which will be up on YouTube shortly. This really has been a unique experience. I thank God we weren't hurt and our friends and neighbors are safe. And now, in case a real wildfire emergency happens, we know what to do. 

Movie Fights: Guardians of the Galaxy vs. The Lightning Thief

For some reason, this week has been a Bad Movie Week for me. And when I say that, I mean that my sister and I somehow finished two phenomenally bad movies in the same week. However, as I told my sister while we were watching Percy Jackson: The Lightning Thief: there are two types of bad movies. There are good bad movies, and bad bad movies. And as it just so happens, I watched one of each this week. So here I am to put my classical education to work in the real world and compare those two movies.

I’m going to start with the first installment in the Percy Jackson and the Olympians movie series. Before I get into this, I’d just like to make a note: the Percy Jackson series is very near and dear to my heart, because I started it when I was young, and the writing only improved as I continued reading it into teenager-hood. It’s a good series that blends Greek mythology and modern wit with great characters.

Anyone who’s followed my blog for a length of time knows that few things rile me as much as a movie adaptation desecrating a book that I love. So it is with great loathing and bitter glee that I am about to rip into this laughable excuse for an adaptation.

To start with, I feel that everyone reading this should know that Rick Riordan, the author of the Percy Jackson series, publicly disowned the movies. (Sadly, there’s a second movie. I haven’t seen that one.) As a writer who would love to see some of my ideas on the big screen, that’s a pretty bad sign right there. And oh, let me tell you: the movie was just as bad as I anticipated based on the author’s sentiment alone.

To start, they butchered the characters. Usually I’m not a huge stickler for movie characters looking exactly the way they did in the book, but the one time I actually cared about that, the movies went and changed the character. Anyone who has read the Percy Jackson books knows: Annabeth being a brunette is as much an oxymoron as a warm snowflake. And that’s just the tip of the iceberg.

This movie changed pretty much the entire plot of the book, and had to throw in a bunch of extraneous scenes and details just to support that change. I get that they might not have been able to replicate the book’s plot exactly, but they surely could have done better than they did. They took out the actual villain from the books and used the decoy villain, the guy who didn’t actually do it, as the actual villain. Like I said, they took out a ton of plot from the books, and then stuffed a bunch of nonsensical filler in to try and hide the gaps. That’s not the only problem, though.

Not only is the plot terrible, but the writing in general is just insipid, and the writers utterly butchered nearly every aspect of Greek mythology they could get their hands on. They flat-out ignored every aspect of worldbuilding from the books. They ignored stuff from the original mythology, like the actual conduct of Hades’s and Persephone’s relationship, and the fact that Hades is more of a grumpy introvert than a fire-breathing demon lord. Also, the characters were flat as week-old soda. Percy had none of his sarcasm or snappy repartee from the books. Annabeth was… smart, I guess… but had none of her depth or insight. Grover had some great lines—he was one of the few things I enjoyed about the movie—but he also lacked any and all depth. The movie was over all badly written and a shameless cash-grab only loosely based on the books.

But hey, the special effects were pretty good.

In conclusion, don’t watch The Lightning Thief. Don’t ever watch it. Just read the books and pretend the movie(s) don’t exist. The Lightning Thief is a bad bad movie, and I utterly hated it.

Fortunately, that wasn’t the only movie I watched this week.

The other movie I saw was Marvel’s Guardians of the Galaxy, which I’d been wanting to watch for some time. I’d heard it be called “Marvel trying to do Star Wars”, and maybe that was meant to be a derogatory description, but it just intrigued me more. Plus, it has space pirates. Space pirates are one of my favorite fiction things, and you wouldn’t believe how hard it can be to find things that are about them, so that was also a plus.

I don’t know how close Guardians of the Galaxy is to the original source material. I do know that by most rubrics, it’s a bad movie. I mean, it’s corny. It’s nonsensical. It’s silly. It’s just a little bit surreal. (Which is fitting, I guess, because from what I’ve read the original comics were one heck of a drug trip. You think I’m joking, but I’m not. Look it up.)

The point is, Guardians isn’t a good movie, or even a really well-written one. But it’s fun. It’s big and it’s loud and it’s colorful and it’s funny and it doesn’t take itself seriously. The protagonist is about as generic as they come, yet he’s relatable enough that I enjoyed watching him. The point is, Guardians of the Galaxy is by all measurements a bad movie, but it’s a good bad movie. It owns the silliness, the absurdity of the premise, and it just has fun with it. Yeah, it’s a bad movie, but I like it. I can like bad stuff.

(There you go, Dad. It’s in writing. Happy now?)

There’s not a lot of a difference between The Lightning Thief and Guardians of the Galaxy. By all logic, I should despise the both of them. But The Lightning Thief took one of my favorite book series and tossed it in the mud, so yeah, I’m never touching that movie again, not even with a ten-foot pole. Guardians of the Galaxy took a really weird, nonsensical premise and made it into a fun, silly movie. Sure, it’s not a good movie. I wouldn’t say it’s even as good as Ant-Man. But—much like its protagonist—it’s able to muster enough charm, jokes, and good looks to bluff its way through my common sense and critical analysis. So there’s that. I wouldn’t recommend Guardians of the Galaxy to anybody I know. I will make fun of everything in that movie because it’s the corniest film I’ve seen in a long time.

But I am definitely going to watch it again.

Movie Fights: Ant-Man vs. Pacific Rim

[My review of Pacific Rim] [My review of Ant-Man]

Good morning, everyone! Or, well, good whatever-time-of-day-it-is-where-you-are. Today I'm debuting the first in what will hopefully be an extended category of blog posts, sorta similar to my History Recaps. Movie Fights is a series where I put my classical education to work in the real world and write out a comparison of two movies. Today I'll be talking about a pair of action movies. One features a guy who uses a super-suit to shrink down to an inch tall, and the other is about giant robots slugging it out with giant alien monsters.

As you can see, I'm taking my classical education very seriously.

On the surface, Ant-Man and Pacific Rim don't seem that similar. One is a superhero movie, and the other is more of a general sci-fi action movie. Of course, they're both popcorn summer flicks that you wouldn't think to put a lot of thought into the first time you saw them. To be fair, I have only seen Ant-Man once, but if you've read my review you know I put a lot of thought into it. I've seen Pacific Rim like... four times? So I've had time to analyze it.

So today I'm going to compare the two. Specifically, I'm planning to look at how these two films handled their female characters and characters of color.

Let's start with Ant-Man.

Ant-Man tells the tale of Scott Lang (played by Paul Rudd), a down-on-his-luck thief with a cause who, now that he’s out of jail, is having trouble finding employment. Luckily he’s able to crash with some friends, but he doesn’t quite have the money to pay child support, which means he’s mostly cut off from his young daughter.

That’s the initial setup of the movie. It’s Scott Lang’s story, first and foremost. He’s the main character. He’s a good main character, and Paul Rudd plays the part very well, but he’s nothing new. Nothing groundbreaking. Hollywood loves their white male protagonists, and Marvel especially loves their white male protagonists. Playing opposite Rudd is Evangeline Lilly as Hope Pym, the high-powered corporate executive estranged-from-her-father daughter of Hank Pym.

I like what Evangeline Lilly did with this role. Like most of the actors in this film, she exceeded my expectations and breathed life into a character that wasn’t all that original. My problem is with the way this character was written, because while Hope Pym has a lot of cool character traits, she’s not really a complete character. In the end, she only really exists to prop up the stories of Scott and Hank. Scott and Hank both have their own story arcs; Scott’s is most prominent, seeing as he’s the main character, but Hank has a progression too, and weirdly enough, both Scott’s and Hank’s arcs are very closely tied to Hope’s character. Yet Hope is the only main character, aside from the villain, who doesn’t have her own story arc. Yes, she does reconcile with her father towards the end of the movie, but overall it feels like that’s more for Hank’s benefit than for Hope’s character growth.

I’d like to contrast this with the way Pacific Rim treated its protagonists. At first glance, the main character of Pacific Rim is Raleigh Becket, played by Charlie Hunnam. For the most part, Raleigh seems like your average white male action movie protagonist. He’s a somewhat world-weary veteran Jaeger pilot, who, due to the traumatic loss of his brother in a battle, is not eager to get back to piloting. But he has to, in order to save the world, so he comes back to the world of Jaeger piloting. That’s where he meets Mako Mori, a hopeful pilot.

On the surface, Mako Mori seems to have a similar narrative purpose to Hope Pym. She’s a very integral part of Raleigh’s story, and for about the first half of the movie you assume that that’s it, that it’s Raleigh’s story, not Mako’s.

But as the story progresses, we learn more and more about Mako and her adoptive father, who happens to be a former Jaeger pilot and Raleigh’s commanding officer. We learn Mako’s backstory, we learn what drives her and why she’s so eager to become a real pilot, and by the end of the movie, it’s Mako Mori who has achieved her goals and become a full-fledged character in her own right. It’s Mako Mori who has a concrete story arc and really blossoms by the end of it.

(Raleigh appears to have his own arc—overcoming his hang-ups and trauma about getting back in a Jaeger—but that doesn’t really develop. Actually, once he meets Mako and forms a relationship with her, he seems to settle into his old career with a new ferocity. It’s an interesting dynamic.)

Ant-Man seems to be attempting to tell a father-daughter story with Hank and Hope, but because Pacific Rim allows to Mako Mori to be her own character, and really develops the bad and the good of her relationship with her father, it tells a much better story. That’s the crux of the matter, I think: Pacific Rim allows its heroine to be her own person, her own character, with a backstory and motivations outside of her relationship with Raleigh Becket. Oh, Raleigh and Mako are close, and I love how their relationship develops, but Mako is never forced to sacrifice any part of her character to advance Raleigh’s story. She’s her own person, and she’s treated as such.

Ant-Man… well, as I said, the actors did a lot with what they were given, but the writing isn’t anything to crow about. And Hope Pym? She’s written as a side character meant to be a part of Scott’s story. She’s not given her own arc or her own impetus. On one level, that’s fine. Every story needs supporting characters. Not every character in a story can have their own arc. On another level, though, the treatment of Hope Pym is disappointing, because it’s almost always a female character that receives this type of sidelining in action movies. (The Lego Movie did this too. I love it to pieces, but The Lego Movie did this exact thing with Wyldstyle.)

Women are less likely to be the hero in a contemporarily written story than men are. Women of color are a lot less likely to be the hero, or even be included in the story in the first place. In my opinion, this is (one of the reasons) why Pacific Rim is better-written and more well-rounded movie than Ant-Man is. Pacific Rim gives us Mako Mori, a Japanese woman who is allowed to be the hero of her own story, a Japanese woman who is allowed to be a fully fleshed-out character just like her co-lead. I liked Ant-Man, but it didn’t do this. It stuck to the old formula of using a female character to support and prop up a male hero, just the way many Marvel films so far have. For this reason, I firmly believe that of these two movies, Pacific Rim is the better story.

(Postscript: Ask me about my other, more minor, compare/contrasts of these two movies. I was going to talk about other stuff, but this issue is near and dear to my heart, so it took the forefront. Oh well.)

Captain America: Civil War [Spoiler-Free]

So I got very lucky and was able to see Captain America: Civil War opening weekend. I don't want to spoil it for anyone less lucky, so I'm just going to post a vague outline of spoiler-free thoughts, and then expound on them later.

- The Russo brothers, directors of both this movie and Captain America: The Winter Soldier, continued to impress me with this movie. The plot is... a little sketchy, overall, but it's paced well. 

- The writing and characterization were excellent. I was skeptical and a little nervous about how this movie would be written going into it, but I wasn't disappointed. All the characters were great, and some were particularly great. 

- I'm definitely going to compare this movie to Batman vs. Superman later on, because there were a lot of similarities, but also a lot of contrasts. 

- I would definitely recommend seeing this movie. As with Winter Soldier, it's easily one of Marvel's best movies. 

Identity & the Divergent Series: Examining Casting Choices

I’ve been thinking a lot about the Divergent series lately. For anyone who doesn’t know, the Divergent series is a book trilogy set in a dystopian post-apocalyptic Chicago. It’s somewhat divisive as far as opinions go; either you like it or you don’t. I’m not the biggest fan and I’ll readily admit the series has problems, but I still like it.

Now the Divergent series has recently been adapted into a series of movies. The first three movies (Divergent, Insurgent, and Allegiant) are out; the fourth (Ascendant) is on its way. (I reviewed Insurgent a while back.) While I’m a moderate fan of the books, I have some decidedly mixed feeling on the Divergent movies. As far as writing goes, they’re… they’re okay. They smoothed over some plot holes/rough patches in the books while still creating a recognizable adaptation. So it’s not really the writing I have a problem with; it’s the casting.

You see, a while back, Veronica Roth, the author of the Divergent trilogy, answered a fan’s question over at her blog. In the post, Ms. Roth said that she’d imagined Four, the series’ romantic lead and main guy character, as being biracial and/or racially mixed, with his father being white and his mother being an olive-skinned woman of color. According to Ms. Roth, Four is recognizable as the son of both his parents—basically, he’s got a mix of features from both of them. Roth also stated that Four’s skin color more resembles his father’s, which means he’s light-skinned and/or white-passing. For me, a light-skinned biracial kid, this is (or was) exciting news.

Now, almost none of these cool details were in the book. Four’s mother is described as dark-haired and olive-skinned, but Four himself is never really described in terms of skin color or race. On its own, that’s okay; it can be challenging to describe a biracial character in a speculative setting where you can’t use words like “biracial”. And though she didn’t clarify it in the books, Ms. Roth said in another blog post that should her series be adapted into movies, she would do her best to ensure that her characters of color—Four, Christina, and Tori, for example—would be accurately cast.

And… well, now we do have a series of Divergent movies. And I will admit that Christina and Tori were accurately cast. Four, however, is played by Theo James. Mr. James is darker-skinned than his co-star, Shailene Woodley, who plays main character Tris. But James isn’t biracial; he’s of English and Scottish descent, with a Greek grandfather. So while he looks racially ambiguous, he’s not biracial.

Theo James as Four is, on its own, something of a mess, but it’s unfortunately not the worst casting choice I’ve ever seen. But the problems continued in Insurgent when Naomi Watts was cast as Evelyn Eaton, Four’s mother, who, if you’ll remember, was a woman of color in the books.

I have nothing against Naomi Watts. She’s a good actress. But even setting race aside, I couldn’t see her as Evelyn. And adding race into it, let me just say: Naomi Watts is white. Very white. Blindingly white. I know some white people can be considered “olive-skinned”, but Naomi Watts isn’t one of them. She just straight-up didn’t seem at all like Evelyn Eaton to me.

So it was Insurgent that really got me thinking about the casting of the movie series. Soon after I saw it, I re-watched Divergent with my sister, and noticed that while there are a lot of non-white people in the background, and as supporting characters like Christina and Tori, all of the main characters were played by white actors. I started to wonder, as I have with so many movies: If post-apocalyptic Chicago has such a diverse population, why are all of the main characters in this story white?

I don’t have enough money or influence, yet, to make a lot of changes in the movie industry. But I can imagine how things might be in my perfect, idealized universe. Thus, without further ado, I present: Divergent, as I might have cast it. (Click on the pictures to enlarge them.)

***

1. Chloe Bennet as Tris Prior

Tris is the main character of the Divergent series. In reality, she’s played by Shailene Woodley. It was while watching Insurgent that I realized that, in my opinion at least, Bennet and Woodley actually look somewhat alike. The difference is that Chloe Bennet is mixed (Chinese/white). Since she’s already proven that she can play an action heroine in Marvel’s Agents of SHIELD, I think Chloe Bennet would be an interesting choice for Tris.

2. Tyler Posey as Tobias “Four” Eaton

At this juncture I would like to point out that I do think Theo James did a decent job with this role. But the fact remains that he’s not biracial. Tyler Posey, on the other hand, is. (His father is white and his mother is, I believe, Mexican-American.) Wow. Look at that. An actual biracial actor to play an actual biracial character. Look at that, Hollywood. It’s not that hard.

3. Lucy Liu as Jeanine Matthews

Confession time, here’s what I got: I have always imagined Jeanine Matthews, the villain, as East Asian, ever since I first read the books. The movies cast Kate Winslet, who plays the part pretty well, but is also blonde and white. I left the first movie a little annoyed by this (but not too annoyed, because I’m still not sure how Jeanine was described in the books). Most of this post was conceived after I saw Insurgent, but Lucy Liu has always been and will always be my top pick to play Jeanine Matthews.

4. Constance Wu as Natalie Prior

Natalie Prior is Tris’s mother, and she’s not a terribly important character, though she does get things done in the story, unlike some fictional mothers I could name. She’s played by Ashley Judd in the actual movie—but if Chloe Bennet were to play Tris, it would logically follow that one of her parents should be Chinese. I figured I’d keep her father (played by Tony Goldwyn) white and cast Constance Wu as her mother.

5. Kenny Leu as Caleb Prior

This is related to the above point. Caleb is Tris’s brother, so it follows that he would also be Chinese like her and their mother. That’s pretty much all I have to say here.

6. Esai Morales as Marcus Eaton

Marcus is Four’s father. When I originally thought up this alternate cast, I only included Four and Marcus (Four’s mother isn’t in the first movie)—so I figured, if I was going to cast a Latino actor to play Four, I should cast a Latino actor to play his father, too. Then, of course, Insurgent came out and I got involved in the whole mess surrounding the casting of Four and his mom. That led me to…

7. Rosario Dawson as Evelyn Eaton

After seeing Insurgent and reading up on the miscasting of Evelyn, Four’s mother, I just wanted to see a woman of color as that character. So, without thinking about it much, I added Rosario Dawson to my happy fictional alternate cast. It wasn’t until later that I realized why this wouldn’t work—namely, because Four is supposed to be half white, and neither Esai Morales nor Rosario Dawson are white. However, the movies cast non-biracial, but ambiguous-looking Theo James, and then made both of his parents white, so hopefully you’ll forgive me for casting actually biracial Tyler Posey to play Four, then making his parents non-white. (Morales is Puerto Rican-American and Dawson is, interestingly, also biracial, being black and Latina.) Were I to somehow do an actual reboot of the Divergent series, I’d probably do this differently, but for a fun thought-experiment blog post I’m not going to put that much effort into it.

So there you have it.

***

Ultimately, the Divergent series is about two teenagers trying to find their way in a world where people are divided into rigid, divided groups by a self-imposed system. It’s about young people rising up against a world telling them, You can only be one thing. I think that’s a story a lot of biracial/mixed kids can relate to, and I think it’s a shame we’re not allowed to see ourselves play out that adventure on the big screen. Divergent is a story so heavily centered on the theme of identity, a story that says, You can be more than one. You can have multiple facets of identity. Trying to pigeonhole people is reductive and doesn’t work.

Shouldn’t biracial kids be able to see themselves in that message, too?