Unlike so many of the other Disney films of the late 90’s and early 2000’s, Mulan’s got an actual plot and characters with personality.  It has a legit villain in Miguel Ferrer’s yellow-eyed Hun badass, mostly non-annoying side characters and some of Disney’s best design work.  Yes,  it’s also the one where Eddie Murphy is a dragon named Mu Shu, but watch how well that character works despite how out of place it is.  Mu Shu should sink the film, but he comes out as kind of likable.  The same can be said of the songs, which are not particularly great but don’t feel perfunctory like the ones in Hercules.

Mulan herself is perhaps Disney’s strongest female character in their entire filmography.  When she struggles to fight with the men, it’s less because she’s a woman than that she’s never done anything like this before in her life.  By the end of the film, she’s fighting with and outsmarting Hun warlords and saving the empire without a boyfriend coming to her rescue.  In Mulan, the heroine rescues the hero.  Even though Mulan kinda sorta becomes a princess at the end of the film like every Disney heroine, she earns it by saving the Empire, not by marrying a prince.  She comes home not with a dress but a sword as a trophy of her victory.  Mulan kicks ass.

Mulan is the film I wish Disney made every time up to bat.  It has character development, a great story without the pathetic emotional manipulation Disney tends to trade in and the thing by which I’ve always judged a great Disney film against the rest: a fantastic climax.  Look at, say, Hercules, which isn’t a horrible film by any measure. But look at how it ends:  The Titans beat up everyone, then Hercules gets a power-up that lets him easily slay them.  Mulan ends with a well paced action scene, ending with Mulan decisively beating a stronger opponent not through luck, but cunning.

Mulan should be on the list of great Disney films, but I fear it’s too far off the beaten path to get recognized.  For all people’s complaining about Disney movies having too many princesses and not enough role models, I see an awful lot of frilly lace and not that many Chinese swords.

I’ve been on this run of serial fiction lately, picking up collections of stuff that originally came out in Astounding Science Fiction or The Magazine of Science Fiction and Fantasy.  I started with the original run of Elric stories, if for no other reason than that Amazon gave the Kindle edition away for free.  Something about the raw rush of energy really hit me, even through the dripping-with-emo aura of Moorcock’s albino hero.  It was something fantasy had not been to me in a long time: a really, really good time.

So I wanted more, naturally.  I considered Conan, but Brennen suggested something else: “Doc” E. E. Smith’s Lensman books.  Sure, I thought, why not? I have a severe Science Fiction deficit in my reader-ography, so why not start with the grandaddy of space opera?  I always thought the title Lensman sounded a bit goofy, but it wasn’t like that was a fair criticism of anything after I just finished four novellas about an albino with a soul stealing sword called Stormbringer.

I decided to start with Galactic Patrol, which isn’t exactly the first story in the series, but is the first with its central character, Kimball Kinnison, and covers his first battle with the Boskone pirates.  I wasn’t sure if it was even going to hit me, so rather than try and read the whole series straight through and end up potentially bored, I did something I usually don’t and started in the middle.  I’m glad I did.  Galactic Patrol is just a great, great time.  It’s filled with strange planets, bizarre creatures and insane space battles.  There are spy-beams and projectors and screens and all kinds of other pseudo-scientific things on display, most of which barely makes sense at first but eventually becomes part of the rhythm of the language.  Spy beams flicked out.  Screens gave off rainbow color under the force of the projectors.  Wacky stuff.  Fun.

If you liked Star Wars and can give some really clunky 1930’s dialogue a pass, I think you’d have to work not to have fun reading Galactic Patrol.

Now I’m onto the first book of The Chronicles of Amber, Nine Princes in Amber.  After that, I’ve got both Grey Lensman, the next book in Smith’s series, and The Savage Tales of Solomon Kane by Robert E. Howard.  Solomon Kane just got made into what’s supposedly a pretty awesome film, so before it hits in the U.S. I thought I should read some of the original stories of Howard’s Puritan demon hunter.  I mean, really; Puritan demon hunter.  That’s almost all you have to know.

Fletch

Thanks to Community, I’ve had a hankering to go back and check out old Chevy Chase stuff.  You know, from the days before he stopped being funny and started being banned by the Geneva Convention as an instrument of torture.  Fletch popped up on watch instantly and it seemed like as good a place to start as any.  Maybe it’s because of where Chase was in his career as I was growing up, but I expected one of those Buffoon-Who-Lucks-Into-Success plots that I hate.  I was pleasantly surprised to see that the main character of Fletch was clever, imaginative and witty.  If Chase had played more characters like this and less like Clark Griswold, he might not have needed Community to resurrect his career.  Also, this film was written by the guy who did the original The In-Laws, so you know it’s going to be funny.

Un Chien Andalou

Yeah, we’ve all at least heard of one shot of this movie.  You know the one, where the guy grabs the woman’s head and slits open her eyeball.  This is that film.  Salvadore Dali and Luis Bunuel partnered to create what is probably the single most famous piece of surrealist film (and one of the most famous surrealist works ever).  It’s only fifteen minutes long, and I doubt it could have gone on much longer without wearing out its welcome.  There is nearly no plot to speak of, though the film does center around two characters whose relationships as portrayed makes a weird sort of emotional sense.  There are a number of classic shots – apart from the eye slicing, there’s also a creepy bit with ants crawling out of a hole in a guy’s hand, and a sequence where he rubs a woman’s clothed breast, which then becomes unclothed, then becomes her butt – but the real impact comes from seeing how intricately it’s all strung together.  This is probably seen as a film school kind of thing to watch, but anyone who enjoys film at all should see what the medium can be like if it’s pried out of its typical narrative structure.

Excalibur

A lot of fantasy films came out around the time I was born, and I managed to see very few of them until I grew up.  I think the things that come out when you’re alive but too young to understand are the most awkward to pick up later, though I don’t know why.  We see older films and we see new films, but something about the familiarity of a film that you vaguely remember coming out but didn’t actually see breeds disinterest.  Excalibur gets a lot of praise as one of the few really good fantasy films, but after seeing it I cannot for the life of me see why.  It’s essentially a boring CliffsNotes version of the Arthurian legend, except when it veers off into straight out goofiness.  Over and over again I wondered if the director realized how open he had made himself to Monty Python and the Holy Grail jokes with his too-serious, overblown take on King Arthur.  When Mordred shows up in gold armor with nipples, it was clear nothing could save the movie.  This one hurt to watch.

It’s been a while since I plowed through a fantasy series.  There was a time when it was a huge part of my life.  Even the oft-encountered disappointment didn’t slow me down.  I love to read; mostly I love to read stories.  But most of all I love to read long stories.  Big stories.  Stories that took on pivotal events, that gave me more than the mundane, daily crap I found at school or work.

Before I sat down to write this review, I thought about all of the series’ I’ve got under my belt.  The good ones, those never really leave the mind.  But there are dozens of other ones. Books that I powered through years ago but left a sour taste, or that unshakable feeling of disappointment.  Like Stephen Lawhead’s The Song of Albion, or Margaret Weis and Tracy Hickman’s Darksword Trilogy (which were, oddly, lesser novels than their Dragonlance books),  or Mickey Zucker Reichert’s Renshai Trilogy and its sequel.  The interesting thing about them is, despite their flaws,  despite the disappointment, there are things that stuck with me from these books.  Things that were unique to them, that I never got even from more accomplished novels.

Which brings me to Brandon Sanderson’s Mistborn.

Mistborn: The Final Empire has a great sounding hook: What would happen if the hero of prophecy failed? What if, at the pivotal moment, the Dark Lord killed him and took power for himself?  The idea of Mistborn’s first novel is an interesting amalgam.  Part turning the genre over on itself with a triumphant Dark Lord, part heist novel as a group of thieves set out to steal a cache of power so important that it could lead to the overthrow of the empire – even if all they’re in it for is the profit.  Cool, huh?

Though the series’ strongest novel, there’s a critical problem that haunts the rest of the series.  Within the first few chapters it becomes clear that the hook – a hook that the author himself says was his starting point – is either a spoiler or a misdirection.  And, for a series’ whose primary theme is trust, it’s disappointing that it betrays its readers’ trust in the first novel.

Still, Sanderson is a good writer, and having read the annotations for the books on its website, it’s clear he really thinks about what he’s doing.  I’m going to get into spoilers, now, and as I do I’m going to be pretty critical of my problems with the series. But let this be known: I had a good time reading it, and I think that Sanderson has the right stuff to make some killer fantasy novels. Hell, if you liked Mistborn, then he’s writing killer fantasy novels right now.  I admit that much of my disappointment in Mistborn is an entirely personal reaction to the conclusion of the series.

Now, let there be spoilers.

Mistborn begins in the city of Luthadel, the seat of The Final Empire.  Yes, the empire is called the Final Empire.  No, it’s not as silly as it sounds.  The empire has been ruled for 1,000 years by a man who seems to be immortal and omnipotent, who took the power of the Well of Ascension and became as a god; he is, as his church proclaims, the Sliver of Infinity.  In other words, this empire is the last one the world will know, for it will last forever; it is, literally, The Final Empire.

And it’s not a pleasant place to live.  By day, ash is spewed into the sky endlessly by volcanoes.  By night, mists that flow like water chase the superstitious into their homes.  And most of the population, known as skaa, work as slaves for the Lord Ruler’s nobility.  Though rebellions are attempted, how do you kill a man with seemingly endless power who can be burnt to a skeleton yet regrow skin in seconds? How do you bring down an empire with a god at its head?

To its credit, Mistborn answers these questions in the first book.  The trilogy is not about killing the Lord Ruler; it’s about the power that he wielded, and the worse danger the tyrant held back.  Even the seeming main character, a powerful but impulsive thief named Kelsier, doesn’t survive to see the end of the first novel.  The hand off to his protege, Vin, is so smooth that I should have seen it coming earlier. We get a trilogy’s worth of plot development in the first volume, which makes for an exciting novel.   Even despite the misdirection/spoiler of the hook – everyone believes the Lord Ruler is the hero of prophecy, meaning you spend all of book one wondering if they’re wrong, or if the book jacket lied to you – The Final Empire is a great read.  It has its problems, mostly in a clunky, implausible opening where a bunch of thieves just kind of decide that taking on a 1,000 year empire is good business, but is very worth the time.

Things get dicier from there. Like many great fantasy series openings, the follow-through has problems.  There’s a great set up, some interesting characters, but the further it goes the less tight it all feels.  With Mistborn, significant pacing problems and an odd lack of scope kill the second book’s momentum and it never really recovers.  And it doesn’t help that the set-up of the first book – that the hero lost – is less interesting than what initially appeared to be the case: that the hero had won, taken the power, then turned into at tyrant.  As the series progresses, I got the feeling that Sanderson was actually more interested in this idea, and he does his best to split the difference with the Lord Ruler’s motivations.

The Well of Ascension takes another fantasy trope, that of the Prophecy of the Hero, and flips it on its head.  The basic idea around it is great, but getting to the end requires slogging through 500 pages of indecision, inaction and inner monologues about indecision and inaction.  There’s an interesting idea of nation building embedded in the book’s structure, but it never gets any momentum.  Yes, the idea of how you hold together a people that are used to a God ruling them is great, but it was disappointing that the best Sanderson managed was a protracted siege of Luthadel by squabbling warlords and a game of musical chairs with the throne of the Empire.  Eland, the man who tries to make the Empire into a better place, spends the entire book thinking about how he wishes he was a better leader.  And Vin, his lover and protector, worries that she’s nothing more than a killer. That’s about it.

Still, the climax of the book had a great moment: Vin begins to believe she’s the true Hero of Ages, the thing the Lord Ruler failed to be.  She makes her way to the Well of Ascension, the source of the Lord Ruler’s power, only to learn that the prophecy of the Hero was a lie, manipulated by a chaos god the Lord Ruler took power to try and contain.  And Vin, trying to fulfill the prophecy, lets it out.

That gave me hope for The Hero of Ages.  Perhaps with one book left to go, Sanderson would set a brisker pace.  I hoped in vain.  Instead of the heroes stuck in a single city defending against a siege, they take an army to another city and…begin a siege.   Mistborn’s problem is common in Big Stories: a lack of scope to the story’s actual events.

I think authors get wrapped up in the scope of their setting and miss the needs of the story.  Yes, The Hero of Ages deals with a godlike power of chaos trying to end the world, and yes, the actions of the heroes are meant to save the world.  That’s not scope, though. That’s setting.  Constructing a plot that matches the scope of the setting can be difficult, and I think that Sanderson got lost trying to create understandable plot points.  In The Well of Ascension, it was resolving the Siege of Luthadel.  In The Hero of Ages, it was the artificial need of finding the Lord Ruler’s hidden supply caches, left to combat the chaos-god Ruin.  At the start of the story, there is one left to claim, and the bulk of the book is spent with the heroes trying to get this one supply cache.  By the time the plot twists come, there are only 100 pages left and the story feels too small because of it.

Scope is a tricky thing, and I’m coming to believe it has more to do with the impression of movement in the plot than with the actual size of the events.  The world ending doesn’t, on its own, give a novel scope.  Scope demands, I think, objectives and motivations to constantly evolve, for goals to be achieved but prove to be only a piece of the story.  Keeping characters mired in indecision for 2/3 of the a novel means, essentially, that nothing happens for 2/3 of a novel, and that kills any sense of scope.  When battle for the fate of the world comes, it feels out of place next to a story about a group of insecure people refusing to make a decision.

This is especially a concern in The Hero of Ages, as while the characters are doing very little, massive chunks of plot revelations are given through the quotes that precede the chapters.  Things like why the world is covered in ash, where the various magic systems of the world are from and the very nature of the villain himself are all given here, and not in the body of the story.  I started to wonder if Sanderson had simply held too much back for book 3 and decided to dump his world notes into the book to catch things up.

Mistborn made something clear to me, though, that I had not noticed before.  Many of the fantasy series’ of the past, the ones that I liked but left me cold at the end, share an important similarity.  They all end with some mixture of the end of the world and the mysterious pseudo-deaths of the main characters.  I don’t mean that the main characters died.  I mean they sort of died but really became gods, or returned to their world, or people thought wait, maybe they didn’t really die and will return again and the audience is left to wonder.  It’s a really, really common ending in fantasy and science fiction.  You can see it from The Matrix to Evangelion to every book series mentioned above.  And I’m starting to think that, as a rule, this kind of ending is simply an unsatisfying cheat.

Mistborn ends with not one but two characters ascending to godhood within 50 pages of each other.  It ends with the world becoming so blasted out by the battle that only two options are possible: an utter remaking or the death of mankind.  And I’m completely unsure of what to make of one of its major character arcs, in which a character teaches hundreds of religions, then becomes an atheist, then becomes god.

I think the problem is that, despite Sanderson’s opinion that allowing his characters to monologue about how insecure they are is character development, in the end he cheats by not giving an actual character ending for them.  It’s just really, really hard to relate to a character whose culmination is and then I remade the world in my image.  I can buy into a character  dying for his cause, or because he failed, or because of bad luck.  But how many more character deaths can I hope to relate to if their death is not really a death and might lead to their eventual return outside of the actual story? I don’t know. Maybe I never had it in me.

And I’m tired of the ambiguity. Did the character die, or not? Did the world end? When it was reborn, do the characters remember what happened? How do they feel about it? Even with omniscience, how good of a god would even the best of humans make, anyway?  If ascending to godhood is the goal of your story, set that up earlier.  Don’t give me the gritty story of people trying to create a government, only to spend 100 pages at the end making everyone turn into gods. Serial Experiments: Lain is maybe the only successful version of this story, and that’s because within 2 episodes “god” is showing up telling Lain that she has the power to change the world.  That is the point of the story, and the character.

I’ve gone all this time without mentioning Mistborn’s intricate magic system, and that’s on purpose. Every reviewer has said how cool and well done Allomancy is. They’re right. It’s neat. It’s consistent. It’s well used.  It’s just that a magic system can’t save a book, even if it makes the battle scenes more interesting an readable. Sanderson did a great job on it, though, so let that be noted.

Yet, despite all my complains, there’s something here. Just like The Darksword Trilogy’s totally batshit last book where the guy with the magic canceling sword has to fight tanks, I came away with something I didn’t have before.  The image of the Ashmounts and the mists will stick with me.  The sad sense of a world being smothered to death by ash will haunt me.  The thought of a world broken by the heroes of old so that it could survive destruction will remain.  And, despite the inordinate amount of time they spent whining and doing little else, many of the characters will stay by my side as well.

All that reminds me of something  important that I shouldn’t forget: Sanderson made me feel like a teenager again, shut up in my bedroom with a book, ignoring the world around me.  I missed that feeling.

The question 0083 poses is this: What led to the formation of the Titans, the elite and fanatical military force that served as Zeta Gundam’s primary antagonists?  At first, this sounds like a neat idea, until you realize that you don’t need to know why the Titans were formed.  The One Year War against Zeon was so destructive, so terrible, that it’s believable that fear of Zeon’s reformation would enable the rise of a unit dedicated to their annihilation. And really, why do we care how the Titans came to be? It’s not like they were a complex and multifaceted bunch, anyway.  I’ve seen Nazis with more nuanced motivations.

I’d like to describe the plot for you, but I’m a little cloudy on what it was.  Yet another remnant of the Principality of Zeon enters stage left and steals one of two experimental Gundams the Federation is testing.  Why one and not both?  Well, besides the fact that stealing Unit 1 would leave the hero would nothing to pilot against Unit 2, it’s not really the Gundam they’re after.  They want the nuclear weapon system it carries.  Why the Federation is building a nuclear weapons system in violation of treaties when there is no enemy to fight is perhaps a question for another OAV.

This kicks off a convoluted series of events known as Operation Stardust. It involves a series of unconnected military actions designed to, I guess, spontaneously reconstitute the Principality of Zeon by use of a nuclear weapon attack followed by a colony drop.  Maybe picking apart the plot isn’t fair.  The Gundam universe portrayed in 0083 is one in which a single nuclear warhead can take out 2/3 of the entire Federation fleet.  If the sky was also purple in this world, it wouldn’t surprise me.

It might have all been worth it if they could have either given us some interesting characters, or ended it with an insane mobile suit battle.  They do neither.  In fact, this might be the only entry in the Gundam franchise not to end with a mobile suit battle at all.  This is not a distinction to praise.  After what felt like fifty hours of pointless skirmishes and indecisive character whining, to end without a couple of characters tearing each other up in big robots was downright heartless.

Kou, the “hero” of 0083 takes the worst parts of every Gundam hero ever but never delivers on the change into someone you can cheer for. His nemesis, Gato, meanwhile, dances around in Char’s shoes for a bit (he is quite literally portrayed as the other best Zeon pilot from the One Year War) before finally getting so bored with the series that he goes on a kamikaze run. Since actual mobile suit combat has little to do with Operation Stardust, the presence of an ace pilot seems like a waste of resources. He gets to pilot the beefiest Gundam this side of SEED’s Providence Gundam, though, so maybe that was worth the trip for him.

There’s also some romance that you’ll want to ignore.  Even with the revelation that the main character and the villain are actually engaged in a love triangle with the same girl, you still won’t care. That the girl in question’s name is Nina Purpleton does not help. Purpleton. Seriously.  It makes you yearn for the days of Seabook Arno, doesn’t it?

By the time you get to the postscript telling you that all record of the events of this series were deleted you’ll be wondering why they couldn’t have told you that the series literally had no point back in the first episode when it would have made a difference.

On the bright side, the mecha designs were done by Shoji Kowamori, he of Macross Plus fame, so there’s a lot of pretty to look at.  And the one decent mecha battle that takes place about 4 episodes from the end is actually worth the time you spend watching it; it’s just not worth the time you spent watching the rest of the OAV.

I hate to be so glib about this, but watching 0083 was a chore and I want to take out my frustration on it somehow.  It tested my patience in a way only one other Gundam series ever has, and at least that one had its bright spots.  This was, frankly, a total waste of time on every level.  The time you spend watching this could be better spent doing almost anything else.  Even if you’re a Gundam completist, I suggest lying about having actually watched this and responding with a few generalities like, “Kou sucked” and “Why the hell wasn’t there a mecha battle at the end?”

I am not joking when I tell you that one of the space ships in this OAV has a wooden steering wheel like the ones on boats in pirate movies. That’s the kind of series this is.

I didn’t even put a video at the top of this review like I do for the rest of my Gundam reviews.  If nothing else has made my spite for this clear, I hope that does the trick.

The 400 Blows

Continuing my unbroken streak of disappointment in the French New Wave, I sat through François Truffaut’s The 400 Blows and had only intellectually nice things to say about it.  It was well shot. It had realistic characters going through honest, believable situations.  But just like with Breathless, I didn’t care.  The genre strikes me as so aggressively distant and plotless that it almost wants you not to connect with it.  I can see how this movement, at the time it came out, influenced filmmakers and lovers of film, especially in a Hollywood dominated by an oppressive studio system.  Even so, I haven’t seen a single French New Wave film that makes me think something other than “I wish I was watching Fellini.”

Dr. Strangelove, or How I Learned To Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb

Speaking of styles that leave me cold, how about a little Stanley Kubrick? There are certainly Kubrick films I like a lot, but on the whole he’s all brain and no heart through too much of his filmography.  I put this in immediately after The 400 Blows, and I honestly don’t know if I thought I’d follow one potential disappointment with another, but either way what I got was a surprise: I really, really loved Dr. Strangelove.  It was funny and biting and a really good time.  This is the first time I’ve seen Peter Sellers and, based on this film alone, the praise of his comic talents does not seem overblown.  Also, I’ll be making “precious bodily fluids” jokes for weeks.

M.A.S.H

Somehow, despite my love of Robert Altman, I’d managed to never get around to seeing M.A.S.H. Tsk, tsk.  I never saw much of the television series, either, so I went into the movie cold.  Verdict: I can totally see how this movie made the successful translation to a television series.  The movie is broken into a series of episodes as it is, each one connected by little more than the characters themselves. What better compliment can I give a movie than this: I not only did not hate Donald Sutherland in this, I actually liked him.

Dirty Harry

We begin and end with a disappointment.  I guess Dirty Harry is exactly what it tried to be.  It’s a mean spirited, nasty little action film about a cop who can’t be bothered with things like Constitutional rights and due process and is proven correct by the end.  What can you say about a movie in which the hero tortures a suspect after searching his home without a warrant, rages when said suspect is released because of the violation of his rights then seems to suggest that when the killer then continues to kill that it’s the system’s fault, not the rule breaking cop’s?  At least Clint Eastwood is always a good time.

Mobile Suit Gundam F91 is an interesting and difficult film to discuss.  Does knowing that the film was supposed to be a full fledged television series cause you to prejudge it, holding things against the film which are not fair?  Or does it help explain some of its weaknesses in a way that allow you to appreciate the film for what it is.  Both?  Neither?

Let’s start here: I enjoyed F91 a lot. More than I expected to, in fact.  Despite a flabby middle where the only plot was a convoluted retread of a dozen other Gundam plot ideas, it had a tense, involving opening and an exciting, full-on Gundam battle to close things out.  Which, I suppose, makes it the film equivalent to most of Tomino’s Gundam television series.  In this one case, film was a kinder medium to Tomino than television; stretched out over 20 boring middle episodes, Tomino’s water-treading can get tiresome to watch.

Describing the plot of F91 isn’t difficult because it’s complicated, but because it’s so banal that the plot barely exists.  Set in the Universal Century timeline, F91 is the first Gundam story to take place after the dissolution of the Principality of Zeon.  Without his old warhorse of an antagonist, Tomino needed to come up with something new.  Instead, he gave us the Principality of Zeon with a different name: The Crossbone Vanguard.

What are the goals of the Crossbone Vanguard? Oh, you know, independence for their colony and the complete takeover of space.  Or something.  Oh, and their leader wears a mask.  Even if you didn’t see him you’d know it because his nickname is “Iron Mask.”  As in, The Man in The.  There’s some hand waving about the formation of a new space empire, Cosmo Babylon, but other than a lot of talk about destiny and ascendency it doesn’t add up to much.  Tossed in is the old standard of Gundam plotting: the lost son/daughter who is actually the prince/princess of the enemy kingdom but is now on the side of the heroes.  Or is he/she?  Tension!

As plotting goes, F91 is an awkward bridge between former and upcoming Gundam stories.  An awful lot of the Crossbone Vanguard stuff mixes well-tread Zeonic ground with some of the odder, less coherent space empire ideas that would get more play in Victory Gundam.  The secret princess du jour, Cecily Fairchild, combines two character ideas that Tomino would split in Victory.  She’s a blonde mobile suit pilot who’s the romantic interest of the hero (see: Katejina Loos) and the princess whose choice of side seems based on whose ship she’s riding around in (see: Shakti Kareen).  Which is to say, Cecily isn’t a very interesting character, and thus neither is much of the plot she’s involved in.

Yet, beyond the daddy issue driven story so common in Tomino’s work, F91 is a lot of fun to watch.  The film opens with an assault on a colony – y’know, just like every Gundam – only, instead of it being an attempted theft on the new, advanced mecha, the objective is Cecily herself.  The abduction of Cecily forces Seabook Arno (yes, Seabook) to pilot the new, advanced, mobile– never mind, you don’t need me to explain this.

As mecha goes, the F91 is decent looking and not too overpowered, so the battles are pretty to watch.  And despite the overplotted nature of the Cecily stuff, it does at least set up Iron Mask as a bizarre, unlikable bad guy who you want to see get into a mecha and be turned into pulp.  Also, it was a nice change of pace for the main character’s love interest to be a mecha pilot and not the girl who takes care of the occasionally naked children inexplicably running around the endangered military vessel.

The final battle, with Seabook and Cecily on one side and Iron Mask in a really strange mobile armor on the other, was a surprising amount of fun considering how barely invested I was in the plot itself.  It even made me worry about one of the heroes buying it to take Iron Mask out when I hadn’t cared up to that point.  As Gundam final battles go, F91’s is one of the better entries.  In fact, for the opening and closing battles alone, the film is probably worth seeing.

Unfortunately, F91 doesn’t really tell a complete story.  Cosmo Babylon still exists a the end and has more or less trounced the Federation in their only major battle.  Iron Mask’s death is pleasant, but like most military villains in Gundam, he was not the real power behind the throne.  I understand that the follow-up manga Crossbone Gundam picks the story up and runs it to its conclusion, but I’ve never read it and have no idea how satisfyingly it ties things up – especially since I think it deals with a different group of characters and really only resolves the political plot threads left hanging.

I was expecting to barely enjoy F91.  Maybe lowered expectations helped.  Or maybe it was just a fun, likable mecha film with enough good going on to make seeing it worth the two hour investment.  Certainly, in its own way, it’s a more enjoyable film than Char’s Coutnerattack, even if that film told a better set up story than the grand tale of the badly named space empire.  It’s still probably only for Gundam completists, but I think Gundam completists will enjoy the film more than some of the other things they’ll inevitably force themselves through.

I have a challenge for you.

It’ll be easier if you have Netflix and Watch Instantly.  If not, it’s still worth it if you can do it for free.

Get yourself a stopwatch.  Optionally, pour yourself a few shots of tequila or, if you prefer, vodka.  Then, start watching Dragonlance: Dragons of Autumn Twilight.

Time how long you get into it before your hand involuntarily snatches the remote and turns it off.  If you think slamming a few shots will improve your resolve, feel free.  I doubt it will help.

I was sober and I made it 5 minutes.

Trust me, you’ll be glad you tried.  It’ll be like the getting a red badge of courage for sitting through horrible animation.

Can you make it to 6 minutes?

Before Mobile Suit Gundam 0080: War in the Pocket, everything in the Gundam franchise had been put together by Tomino Yoshiyuki.  Much as Gene Roddenberry was the heart and soul of Star Trek, Gundam was  all Tomino.  I think there are two points at which the franchises made vastly different choices over how to continue, and I think those decisions have a lot to do with Gundam being the superior franchise.

The first is in how the franchises grew beyond the direct control of their creators, which for Gundam began with 0080: War in the Pocket. The second was its decision that the spirit of Gundam was more important than its continuity and began producing alternate universe versions of its themes, starting in 1994 with G Gundam.  The first choice, to open the universe to different creative talents, made the second possible.  So where did Gundam get it right where Star Trek failed?

Star Trek grew away from Roddenberry awkwardly, simultaneously locking him out of creative decisions while straitjacketing themselves into a limited conception of the “Roddenberry Vision.”  It led ultimately to a string of too-similar shows that were never allowed to push the concept past its high water mark in the early 90’s.  Like a religion tied more to its rituals than its spirit, Star Trek became an increasingly empty series of rote repetitions of the same concept.

Gundam, on the other hand, was not as extreme in either direction. Tomino never entirely stopped producing Gundam shows, and Sunrise never felt so tied to some abstract, limiting conception of what his vision was as to let their franchise stagnate.  Interestingly, I feel that Gundam managed to stay truer to its roots than Star Trek precisely by being willing to go off the map when they had to.  Imagine a Star Trek series as different in form as G Gundam was to everything that had preceded it that still managed to wrestle with the moral dilemmas that made Trek what it was.

All of that began with 0080.  The first full Gundam OAV, War in the Pocket did something that I have to imagine sounded crazy at the time.  It told a sympathetic story of Zeon soldiers fighting the the Earth Alliance during the One Year War.  It also avoided the kind of scope that marked the previous Gundam series’ and film; instead, we follow a young boy, Alfred, on a neutral colony as he befriends an undercover Zeon pilot.  Bernie, the pilot, has come to the boy’s home on Side 6 to destroy an experimental Earth prototype.  What follows is more coming of age tale than war story, closer to The Red Badge of Courage than Star Wars.  Alfred develops a sort of hero worship for Bernie and his comrades and comes face to face with the daily tragedies of war.

0080 is an odd bird, and if you’ve seen any Gundam prior to it you may find yourself fidgeting through the first three episodes of this six part OAV.  Like I said, it’s small and intimate, and you’ll see little battle until the end.  By the time the battle comes, you’ll almost wish it hadn’t as the war takes a terrible toll on the characters.  It’s the kind of small, slice of life story that would have made the Star Trek universe so much richer had it been allowed.  The demands of an epic, 50 episode war story leaves little time to see how the average person – or even average soldier – deals with life in the world.  War in the Pocket gives us just that.  It’s a story of characters at the mercy of larger forced, forced into combat when bloodshed is the last thing they want.

There’s a battle near the end, where Bernie’s unit makes its assault on the prototype’s military installation, that’s brutal to watch.  Character after character is cut down mercilessly in a mission that has lost all meaning in the face of the relationship that’s formed between Bernie and Alfred.  What follows that battle hurts as much for its inevitability as the actual deaths that the series’ conclusion gives us.

War in the Pocket is canny in how it ties into the mainline Gundam story without ever getting directly wrapped up in it.  The prototype under construction is codenamed the “Alex” and serves as an intended replacement to Amuro Ray’s RX-78.  Though the project fails to go into production before the end of the One Year War, the technology used serves as a link – retconned though it may be – to the Gundams we see in Zeta.  It gives the impression of a realistic, ongoing attempt by the Earth Military to stay technologically ahead of its enemy.  Like actual military research,  not everything under development becomes reality.

It took me time to come to grips with how I felt about War in the Pocket, but the more I think about this OAV the more I like it.  It’s small and quiet and painful.  It’s one of the most effective tragedies in the franchise, perhaps the most effective.  While Tomino was always good at giving his audiences depressing, nihilistic conclusions, he never quite nailed tragedy.  Unlike the endings to Zeta and Char’s Counterattack, War in the Pocket’s characters do  not meet their doom because life sucks.  They are trapped by their own decisions and by a remorseless system that has no interest in small, human needs.  Bernie goes into battle that final, fateful time because to choose any other way would be a betrayal of self.  True tragedy only emerges from characters given the choice between change they cannot stomach and continuing on to their doom.  War in the Pocket navigates this tricky narrative landmine perfectly.

I don’t know if I’d recommend War in the Pocket to someone who hasn’t seen Gundam, because I simply do not know how it would play.  On one hand, it’s an identifiable, human story regardless of knowledge of the world.  On the other hand, it’s an extension of themes developed in the ten years of Gundam’s existence to that point; whether it stands on its own or not isn’t a question I can answer.  I saw it very late into my Gundam experience – just months ago, in fact – and cant’ separate my feelings on it from my broader feelings on the franchise.

I can say this: War in the Pocket is an amazing piece of work, and the first step Gundam would take in taking a great concept and turning it into something that could be healthy 30 years after its creation.  If only Star Trek had done the same.

After watching Fox rake Firefly over the coals, I know it seems natural to point fingers at them as Dollhouse has struggled with with a poor time slot, increasingly common preemptions and an early, lengthy production shutdown.  Firefly was a classic show right out of the gate.  Its treatment as a failed property so early in its run was absurd, made worse by Fox’s meddling with the airing order of episodes and – yes – regular preemptions.  Its run was cut unceremoniously short halfway through its first season.  It was a travesty; Firefly started great and got better as it went.  What could have been a healthy SF franchise died because executives didn’t understand what they had.

On the surface, the problems with Dollhouse sound familiar.  Without knowing what’s going on behind the scenes, I can’t discount executive meddling as a drag on the show.  There’s a clear difference, though, between Firefly and Dollhouse.

Dollhouse is a far worse show, by almost any measure, than Firefly.

It has a great premise, I agree.  Occasionally, when they find the right story to tell within the premise, it really works, too.  The unaired episode, Epitaph One, is ironically the best of the lot, and it shows that the premise Dollhouse is far from an unworkable idea.  It’s got some amazing actors running around in it, too.  Olivia Williams, (Adelle DeWitt), Enver Gjokaj (Victor), Dichan Lachman (Sierra), Harry Lennix (Boyd Langton) and Reed Diamond (Laurence Dominic) have all put in noteworthy performances.  The ingredients are there.  Even with every bit of executive meddling Firefly faced, there’s enough raw material to pull from to put together something worth everyone’s time.

A premise is not a show, nor are the raw materials of good storytelling guarantee of creating something memorable.  Dollhouse is troubled by problems deeper than network interference. What bothers me is that, judging by his interviews and statements, Joss Whedon is either unaware or in denial about his show’s weaknesses.  With Dollhouse a near lock for cancellation at the end of its 13 episode second season, it’s fair to ask why this show didn’t succeed, despite a miraculous and probably undeserved renewal after its troubled first season.

• Misplaced Faith – I love Eliza Dushku.  She’s sexy and tough and full of charisma.  I fell for her as Faith and was impressed by how well she handled some of the tougher material for that character.  Watch “Five by Five” and “Sanctuary” in Angel’s first season for Eliza at her best.  But when I hear Joss claim it was her ability to play any role that inspired him to create Dollhouse, I question his judgment.  While strong in some areas, Dollhouse has put her weaknesses center stage.  Worse,we’ve twice seen better actors play the exact same character as her within the same episode: Season one’s “Gray Hour” and season two’s “Belle Chose.”  If you were concerned about her ability to be the center of a show that demands she convincingly play different people every week, you were sure of it after those episodes.
• Broken Dolls – One of the worst things you can do to a group of characters who are supposed to be experts is to give them only stories where they screw things up.  Yet Dollhouse’s primary plot device is to have the Actives malfunction in the middle of a mission.  We’re three episodes into season 2 and we’re still without a successful engagement.  It strains credulity that anyone would hire these people when malfunctions result in things like kidnapped babies and homicide.  (Having worked in many corporations I’d argue that it does not strain credulity that these people still have their jobs. Look how long Ken Lewis kept his position at Bank of America).  It’s also boring to see the same device used over and over again.  Joss has been a canny writer in his other shows, able to turn cliches on their heads every episode.  Here, we just get the cliche.
• Inertial Dampeners – What do you do with your miraculous renewal after ending a season with the introduction of a great antagonist, followed by an un-aired episode that turns the premise of your show on its head? Go back to the status quo, right?  For reasons I do not understand, Joss Whedon opened a season that needed an immediate ratings boost with three stand-alone malfunctioning Actives plots in a row.  This is where my disappointment with Joss – and my annoyance with his apologists – becomes acute.  By rights, your show should have been canceled.  Yet, rather than open with a barn burner of a season premier, we get Echo pretending to marry an arms dealer to help take him down.  This was followed up by imprinting Echo to think she was the mother of a newborn.  Then a serial killer story.  Yes, Friday night is a death slot.  Yes it can be hard to pull ratings up.  But it’s nearly impossible to hold an audience when you tread narrative water for most of a month.  With your show on the bubble, there’s no excuse for not going all out.  Nothing in season two has been bad, but not bad is not enough when your existence is on the line.
• Ignoring History – I realize that Fox’s decision not to show “Epitaph One” made things difficult for Joss and his writers.  For those who saw it, a troublesome premise suddenly made sense.  Coming into season 2, Joss made comments that the premier would feature new scenes in the bleak future of “Epitah One” to get the rest of the audience up to speed.  When this was dropped due to concerns of creating an overly complex opener, I got worried.  Without seeing where this technology was going to lead, Dollhouse can seem small and uninvolving.  Now, three episodes in, I’m wondering if we’re going to see that future acknowledged at all before the lights go out.  I worry that this has created two, separate but equally unsatisfied, groups of fans.  On one side, you have those who haven’t seen “Epithaph One” and feel, as I did last season, that the premise is intriguing but pointless.  On the other, those who have seen it and are wondering when the hell it’s going to have an impact on the show itself.  Ignoring his most provocative episode, for any reason, is not helping Joss’ show.

A better time slot, a more consistent schedule and better advertising might pull in more first time viewers.  But of the shows that have aired, how many would compel them to keep watching?  Of the first season’s thirteen episodes, I can only think of six: “Man on the Street”, “Needs”, “Spy in the House of Love”, “Briar Rose” and “Omega.”  If someone watched it on DVD, you can add “Epitaph One” to the list.  That’s half, and all of them in latter half of the season.  Of the second season’s three episodes, I doubt any would turn a casual viewer into a fan.

It’s not Fox’s fault that Joss Whedon has had trouble getting a handle on his own premise, nor is it their fault that he started season 2 with a run of episodes resembling the least favorite of the previous season.  Like every other working writer, Joss Whedon is not infallible.  He’s fantastic and funny, and he’s created three of the most beloved series’ of the last decade.  He’s no slouch.  But that doesn’t make every failure someone else’s fault.  Dollhouse has been an interesting piece of work and, on the balance, I’m glad to have seen it.  It still could be a lot better.

I hope that the second half of season 2 is as good as people are saying.  Sadly, it’s too late.  I fear Joss missed his shot.

At the least, let’s give Fox the credit they deserve for giving it to him.