• Title: Franklyn
• Year: 2008
• Rating: R
• Running Time: 97 mins
• Director: Gerald McMorrow
• Writer(s): Gerald McMorrow
• Cast: Ryan Phillippe, Eva Green, Sam Riley, Bernard Hill, Jay Fuller, Art Malik, Kika Markham, Gary Pillai, Susannah York

Franklyn is psychological fantasy caught in the age of the superhero film, where many of the sadly superficial trappings of big budget films creep in to mar a narrative that already pushes its luck and chips away  at the viewer’s patience. It’s also quite interesting at times, and perhaps rather brave, but it never really delivers a reward commensurate with the demands it imposes on the audience. And, while it is occasionally a smart film, it is never as smart as it thinks it is.

It is also, unfortunately, a film difficult to discuss without offering major spoilers — which I will refrain from doing. Following the lives of four characters all separated from each other, Franklyn plays a narrative game that has the viewer tracking clues and similarities between the threads in an effort to figure out just what is going on. The big puzzle, and perhaps the big let down, of Franklyn are the events that take place in Meanwhile City, a dark steampunkish Never-Never Land aesthetically and thematically at odds with the rest of the film’s contemporary London setting.

In Meanwhile City we have Preest, a kind of masked avenger and vigilante, an unbeliever in a city of a thousand coexisting religious dogmas, in which the only rule is that everyone must believe in something. Preest is on a mission of revenge, and is betrayed into the hands of the authorities — soberly attired enforcers in top hats and puritan frock coats. It is never quite apparent where or when Meanwhile City exactly is (until the end of the film), but these sequences, initially compelling and exciting, start to weigh the film down after the first act, and seem increasingly trivial and out-of-place alongside the other events of the story.

Those other events concern three characters in contemporary London; Emilia, a crazy art chick who has turned her attempted suicides into performance art, Milo, a mopey jilted groom who thinks he sees snatches of a childhood sweetheart wherever he goes, and Esser, a church warden who travels to London in search of his son. The degree to which these characters may or may not be interacting with one another is a game Franklyn plays somewhat inexpertly, though not without flashes of brilliance (sadly those are spoilers too!), but in the end much of these narrative tricks come across as a shade too manipulative and trite to really satisfy.

What the film was shooting for was a message about imagination and belief, and at times it does manages to surprise and illuminate by exploring how each of these characters forge their own realities through manifestations of their own desire. In the end the threads are pulled tight and we are treated to a stark reality, all imagination blown away — a good and bad thing, as it turns out. But Franklyn doesn’t really satisfy at that point, as the overly self-indulgent unevenness of the film has thoroughly diffused the audience’s attention with incidental detail by the time the viewer should be most focused and aware.

Franklyn is a film I wanted to like more than one I actually ended up liking — a movie that didn’t pay me back for the effort. I’d say it’s a bad good film — something that could have been much better in more competent hands. As it is, I’d still recommend it to those looking for a puzzler with fantastical elements — just don’t expect too much.

More reviews of Franklyn

Artist Ward Shelley has crafted a really extraordinary infographic depicting the historical evolution of science fiction, from the age of Gilgamesh to the time of Star Wars. Moving from left to right, Shelley’s tentacled monster (inspired by War of the Worlds aliens) contains sinuous and bifurcated pathways detailing the seminal writers and stories that have built the speculative fiction universe. It’s a beautiful piece of work, and the sort of thing you can get lost in as you follow certain threads back and forth. And seeing a visual representation of relationships is always an illuminating experience. There’s even a few jokes hidden in there.

Click the pic for a shot at the full-size version, it’s well-worth it, and check out this interview of Ward Shelley on Slate, all about this particular project.

• Title: Gamer
• Year: 2009
• Rating: R
• Running Time: 94 mins
• Director: Mark Neveldine, Brian Taylor
• Writer(s): Mark Neveldine, Brian Taylor
• Cast: Gerard Butler, Amber Valletta, Michael C. Hall, Kyra Sedgwick, Logan Lerman, Alison Lohman, Terry Crews, Aaron Yoo, John Leguizamo, Milo Ventimiglia

A clue to which hat you should wear when watching Gamer can be found in writer/directors Mark Neveldine’s and Brian Taylor’s previous credits. Yes, the team that gave us Crank and Crank 2: High Voltage would really prefer it if you wore your Dumb Action Movie hat for this one, and not look too closely at the sci-fi underpinnings of Gamer’s world of 2034. That’s fine, my Dumb Action Movie hat is well broken in, but there are only so many allowances one can make before the hat comes off and the head gets scratched.

Gamer is a cliche wrapped in a trope wrapped in a movie-you’ve-seen-before, all liberally seasoned with great dollops of The Running Man and The Matrix. In the dystopian near-future, nanotechnology has made it possible to control people remotely (while apparently having achieved nothing else), and gaming has evolved to take advantage of the fact. Two games, Society and Slayers, allow players to control real live humans, either to act out their every deviant whim in Society (think The Sims, Porn Edition) or to Kill Kill Kill (think every FPS game since Doom). In Society, the human avatars are played by down-on-their luck actors and pervo volunteers. In Slayers, the game pieces are death row inmates, who will be pardoned once they have survived 30 games.

Enter hero Kable, played with bland masculinity by King Leonidas himself, Gerard Butler. Kable, the most successful Slayer of all time, is only a couple of games away from a pardon, and is a huge international celebrity. His player is a spoiled rich teenager, who divides his time between fending off emails from groupies and buying upgrades for his killing tool, such as swarming bullets and body armor. A monkey wrench gets thrown into this symbiotic relationship when a group of hacker rebels provide Kable with the means of escaping his sentence, all in an effort to overthrow the evil Ken Castle (Dexter’s Michael C. Hall), inventor of the nanotech games and would-be enslaver of all mankind — and the guy behind Kable’s imprisonment in the first place.

There isn’t anything in Gamer you can’t already predict from a partial plot synopsis, but originality shouldn’t really be at the top of the list of crucial ingredients for a film of this kind anyway. To its credit it is well-paced — and it moves fast enough past some of the more egregious points that they never really manage to get under your skin, as they would with some films.Visual elements range from the great — the virtual holo-computer interface and the subtle projections on the sides of buildings — to the rather uninspiring. Topping the list of disappointing visuals would have to be the environments of Slayers and Society themselves, neither of which really rise above their low-budget origins to give us something interesting.

Finally, Gamer occasionally insists it’s a satire, but I don’t buy the argument. If it’s trying to make a point about the trivialization or commercialization of sex or violence, well, Gamer itself is at the top of the list. And, while the writers do get a lot of the jargon and behaviors of gamer culture right, they don’t seem to understand it more than throwing around vocabulary like ‘tea-bagging’ and ‘fragging.’ In fact, what it shows us is really more akin to some sort of interactive reality television, more than it is anything truly game-like. And, as silly and superficial as most of the assumptions Gamer makes about gaming are, it really makes even bigger blunders when it comes to human nature itself. By utterly overemphasizing how appealing the novelty of controlling live people would be, while at the same time completely missing out on what a truly pervasive or insidious game of this kind might look like, Gamer seems rather clueless. At least, when you compare Gamer’s ‘game’ with the rapidly approaching development of real and total immersion, Gamer comes off as a bit quaint in its forecast. A bit, say, 1990s.

All of this sounds like I didn’t enjoy Gamer, but I did for the most part, though ultimately it is a pretty forgettable film that neither rises to the occasion of its subject matter in an effort to actually say something interesting, or really follows through with its premise in a satisfying way. If you can ignore some of the more eye-rolling moments, and scrunch the Dumb Action Movie hat down real tight, you’ll probably come away from Gamer mildly entertained.

More reviews of Gamer

Target Practice scene from Disney’s The Black Hole. V.I.N.C.E.N.T. totally schools this clown.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a5ySBeCV_zM

I was really pleased to see that reports of Ray Gun Revival’s demise were, ultimately, greatly exaggerated. Thanks to the good folks over at Every Day Publishing, RGR is back as an e-zine, and publishing science fiction in the grand tradition. And hey, they even have this cool trailer!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rdFfrgbyDfE

So, you know that bit in every apocalypse when the plucky survivors find that bit of greenery growing in the fire-husked rubble of whatever cityscape they are currently foraging in for ramen and shotgun ammo? That little shoot of something, maybe a bean plant (which has the advantage of being much more practical than a flower, though just as metaphorical), promising a better tomorrow? Amidst all the doom-and-gloom of market closings and contractions for short SF, two new e-zines have just been spotted forcing their little green fronds through the cracked pavement of the short fiction scene: Lightspeed and Daybreak.

Lightspeed Magazine, coming in June of 2010, will be helmed by John Joseph Adams — currently assistant editor at F&SF and also widely known for the numerous recent anthologies he has edited, such as The Living Dead. Lightspeed will be the SF companion zine to Prime Books’ Fantasy Magazine, a magazine that has clearly learned a thing or two about online presentation in its transitioning to a web-based existence.

Jetse de Vries’ Daybreak Magazine launched yesterday and already has its first story up. The zine is a companion to de Vries’ Shine anthology, and both book and zine focus on near-future, optimistic science fiction — something not too common in much of today’s SF but thematically appropriate on any day when two new short fiction zines can be seen sending their verdant little buds skyward.