The Website of Jeremy D. Frens
Hobbies
My reviews of books, movies, or games that I enjoy must be filtered through my attitudes towards entertainment. The fact that I like science fiction naturally means I'll like science fiction movies more readily than someone who doesn't like science fiction.
My current intent for this page is mainly for full disclosure of my biases. This page also explains my tastes in very general terms. This page does not try to justify my tastes; that would take far too much time.
I'm a Christian, but I see and appreciate the need (yes, the need) for offensive content in entertainment. Let's face it, one of my top-ten movies is Pulp Fiction, a film filled with violence and offensive language. But I believe the film has its redeeming qualities, and I also don't think it would be as redeeming if the violence or language were reduced.
So, my reviews and comments will rarely talk about the amount of violence or the language in a movie. If these things are important to you, you need to find this information somewhere else.
By far my favorite genre is science fiction. I saw a t-shirt once that turned a common phrase around: "Reality is for those who can't handle science fiction." I love the imagination that can come with science fiction. I experience reality all of the time. I'd like my entertainment to take me somewhere I haven't been.
I also have an interest in getting things to do interesting stuff. I program computers to get them to do interesting stuff. I play with computers to see them to interesting stuff. Science fiction tends to be filled with a variety of things doing interesting stuff. Things and stuff I've never seen, heard of, or imagined of before.
I tend to like science-fiction stories that rely on hard science. I don't mind at all if the science might be made up as in the space operas of David Brin and David Weber, just so long as the science is plausible and consistent (unlike Star Trek).
I'm interested in the sciences anyway, so I'm sure this is a good part of why I like hard-science science fiction. I think it also has to do with my appreciation for consistency. I enjoy reading about the future, and I'd like it to be consistent with my present. The best way to get there is through hard science.
For some reason, I haven't taken to fantasy the way I have to science fiction. While fantasy does require a good deal of imagination and is significantly different from our own reality, I don't connect with it because usually it's not about things doing cool stuff. Also, the basic premise for fantasy seems so obvious: strange creatures, spells, and quest. Where's the creativity?
Some fantasy writers have caught my attention though: Steven R. Donaldson and Tad Williams (whose Otherland series is really fantasy).
I love reading about mythology. I'm really not sure why except that I have a great fascination with the Roman Empire. But that's a whole different story.
I am intrigued by serial killers. What interests me most is the internal logic that serial killers use and how similar killers are amongst each other. Perhaps it's more the profilers that interest me. They can look at a crime scene and tell you the killer's age, motivation, and reasoning. And they have reasons for their claims.
Unfortunately, movies (and, less so, books) in this genre tend to suffer from obnoxious surprise endings.
When I first starting reading science fiction in grade school, I was addicted to surprise endings. Asimov had a nice way of laying out a mystery and then tying everything together in the end; I really liked that. Other authors, especially in short stories, thrived on surprise endings. I remember looking for short story collections at the library so I could read more surprise endings.
I don't know if it's just bitterness because of age or just more experience, but I now find surprise endings annoying. Perhaps the way surprise endings are done is now different than in the past; perhaps I've changed (e.g., I've encountered all of the stock surprise endings). I suspect I've changed.
It's not that I find the ending predictable. Usually they do, in fact, surprise me. But they're often done, in my view, for the purpose of the surprise ending. It's not about the story or characterization, but about the ending. "How can we trick the audience into being surprised at the end?" And it ticks me off to no end when the surprise is contrived. The movie Primal Fear is my canonical example of this.
These surprise endings are now unacceptable:
Some movies with surprises in them don't irritate me because the surprise is not the purpose of the movie (or book). Even if you know the surprise, you can still enjoy the entertainment. Citizen Kane and Fight Club are good examples of this. Primal Fear and No Way Out are my canonical examples of movies that rely too heavily on their surprise endings. I cannot imagine watching Primal Fear again; I found No Way Out boring the second time I watched it. Somewhat to my surprise, I did find No Way Out more tolerable the third time I saw it, but that could have been because of all the time elapsed between my second and third viewings.
My friends and I had a rule in college while watching tv: "Don't point out the plot flaws." Without this rule we'd spend the whole time talking about plot flaws instead of enjoying the show. Any story is going to have it's share of inconsistencies, but pointing them out all the time gets a little old quite quickly. Nevertheless, I much prefer my stories to be as consistent as possible.
The obvious reason for this is that inconsistent stories aren't believable. If you can't trust what's gone before, then what's the point in pursuing the story?
In general, I've found books to be much more consistent than television. I stopped watching Star Trek (in its many incarnations) in part because they were inconsistent.
However, there are different degrees of consistency. I expect tightly knit sequels (like the separate series of Tad Williams, Frank Herbert, J.R.R. Tolkein, etc.) to be self-consistent within the series.
Recently, I've been thinking of some sequels in terms of "variations on a theme". I got this idea from Arthur C. Clarke who in his postscript for 3001 apologizes for the different type of material in each book of his Space Odyssey series. 3001 is really just a description of what Clarke thinks will be possible in the year 3001. The novel doesn't even really depend on the events of any of the previous books except for HAL killing Frank Poole by sending him flying into deep space. The monoliths and the conversion of Jupiter are irrelevant in this book.
For me, this actually worked without knowing what Clarke was doing. His exploration of this future world was interesting in and of itself. It wasn't until later that I realized it was missing much of what the previous novels had concentrated on.
Clarke, in this postscript, explains his actions by saying that for all of the "sequels", he never sat down with the intention of writing an actual sequel, but more of a "variation on a theme". He would discover a theme in a book that he wanted to explore, so he'd write a "sequel" that would concentrate on that theme, ignoring previous plot points and details as necessary.
I've found myself now reading sequels as variations on a theme even if the author didn't intend it that way. Specifically, I'm thinking of the Dune prequels by Brian Herbert and Kevin J. Anderson and the Ringworld novels by Larry Niven. The Dune prequels are bad compared to Frank Herbert's original series. But if you read them as variations on Frank's original theme, they're fine. I enjoyed them. Not as much as the originals, but much more than several other books I've read.