Aaron Sorkin vs. Internet Girl

If you call a journalist "Internet girl" in the middle of an interview, and generally treat her like an entertainment industry hack moron, people are probably going to notice.

• This article's almost a week old, but somehow I missed it - my loss. The Globe and Mail's Sarah Nicole Prickett on "How to get under Aaron Sorkin's skin".
• And there's a good follow-up on Jezebel right here, by Katie J.M. Baker.

Now I adore Sorkin's writing. I think he's the best television writer in America today. I drink his snappy dialogue and his fiery didactic monologues like someone dying of thirst in a desert. This doesn't mean I don't think he's perfect (he's not), or that he doesn't deserve every walloping he gets for being an asinine sexist jerk from time to time (he is).

• Finally, if you want to actually read some Aaron Sorkin, here's a link to his Oscar-winning screenplay The Social Network. It's great stuff.
• EDIT: There's a good article just up at Dark Matter here, which follows on from this brief post in more length. Check it out.

Three links.

• Jon Morris has developed some striking trade dress for DC's Archive Editions, which currently boast a horrible pin-striped layout that looks pretty terrible. I'd buy these in a shot, but sadly they're not real. Yet. DC, pay attention!
• A group of independent cartoonists and comic artists are unofficially updating the art of the Index of the Marvel Universe. It reminds me of that indie-style issue of Generation X that Marvel let Jim Mahfood create some years back.
• This is a great article about Google's Daniel Russell explaining how to research more effectively using Google.

The alternative Silurian

When Steven Moffat took over as executive producer of Doctor Who, his arrival coincided with a company-wide string of budget cuts across the BBC. As a result, many aspects of the fifth season (Matt Smith's first) were trimmed, downsized and otherwise abandoned. The one that always made me a bit sad was how these cuts affected Chris Chibnall's two-part story "The Hungry Earth"/"Cold Blood".

This story re-introduced the Silurians to the series. They had appeared twice before: in 1970 opposite Jon Pertwee and in 1984 opposite Peter Davison. I always liked the design. Sadly for their new series debut the budget cuts meant that, rather than full prosthetic masks and rubber-suited bodies, the Silurians were by necessity re-imagined with humanoid faces and clothing.

The image attached to this post comes from The Brilliant Book 2011, and shows what we could have had, if the BBC hadn't cut the series budget so savagely (I read once it was a 40% across the board cut, but don't know if that's true). Such marvellous design work. Such a dreadful shame.

Is this the worst comic book cover of the year?

In my previous entry on Wonder Woman's costume, I suggested that it was the manner in which a character is drawn is a more significant driver of misogyny than the design of the costume itself. A case in point has conveniently arisen with Guillem March's widely derided cover to September's Catwoman #0. I'm no expert of human anatomy, but I feel relatively secure in suggesting that this pose is not physically possible. Or, at least, it's not possible without removing spines.

The "see my butt and my boobs" pose is becoming an endemic problem in popular culture - not solely in comic book art but in movie posters as well. It represents a pinnacle for exploitation imagery of female characters, rendering them entirely as sexual objects. I don't know about you, but I'm feeling rather tired of seeing potentially strong, positive characters stripped down (sometimes literally) to nothing more than magnets for 14 year-old boys - and the 14 year-olds at heart.

I've e-mailed DC Comics about my dissatisfaction with this kind of art. Hopefully others will too. I like Catwoman. I'm a big fan of the character. While DC keeps giving me art like this, however, I'm happy to stick with my back issues.

On Wonder Woman's costume

Over the weekend I spoke on a few panel discussions at Continuum 8, the national Australian science fiction convention. One of those panels was "Where Are All the Wonder Women?", focusing on the perceived (and in many cases actual) lack of strong, iconic female characters among American comic books. As the panel's title may suggest, Wonder Woman was brought up - and as with all discussions around Diana, talk quickly shifted to her costume. On a superficial level, the discussion these days seems to boil down to "Wonder Woman: pants or no pants?" I didn't really go into my opinions too much on that panel, but I've been thinking about it in the days since and figured it was worth writing them down.

Blog Space Nine, part #4: "Melora"

An officer from a low gravity planet is temporarily assigned to Deep Space Nine. While attempting to find a way to enable her to move about the station without a wheelchair, Dr Bashir begins to romance her as well. Meanwhile, an ex-convict arrives on the station with a plan to murder Quark - whose betrayal put him in prison in the first place.

It's an odd coincidence that shortly after watching Babylon 5's "Believers", an episode with a good basic premise let down by poor execution, I found myself watching Star Trek: Deep Space Nine's "Melora", an episode produced with the best of intentions but let down terribly by very similar pitfalls.

Babble On, part #12: "Believers"

Dr Franklin struggles to treat a young patient whose parents' religious beliefs do not allow him to undergo surgery. Meanwhile, Ivanova manages to take a break from the station by escorting a damaged passenger liner through raider territory.

"Believers" presents me with a dilemma, because of all the episodes of Babylon 5 reviewed so far it is easily the most frustrating. It provides a strong, confrontational story, but it brings with it a horrible inconsistency with the rest of the series as well as (a standard failing of the series) some pretty ripe dialogue. In the end my overall opinion could go either way. This is also an episode I can't review without completely spoiling, so if you haven't seen "Believers" you might want to skip the rest of this entry.

Blue (2009)

I'm not averse to the occasional Bollywood film, when the mood takes me. Culturally speaking, Bollywood is a highly distinctive form of cinema. Genre in American-dominated English-language cinema is generally a set of hard-and-fast rules, where elements are fenced off from one another so that a film can only be one or at best two things: a science fiction film, a horror flick, a romantic drama, a musical, and so on. These definitions are much more fluid in Bollywood cinema. Pretty much everyone knows that it's a form of motion picture where song and dance numbers can be inserted into any story. A film can shift from slapstick comedy to drama to confronting violence without a pause or second thought.

Sadly this old-school Bollywood method of film-making - a sort of "stick everything to the wall and see what happens" approach - is in decline, replaced by new films that increasingly attempt to ape the conventions and appearance of American cinema. This is a shame; I think India is losing something very distinctive and rather wonderful in the process. Blue is a case in point.