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buggeryThe SciFi channel is officially on my shit list.
Last night and tonight, I've been watching Farscape: The Peacekeeper Wars. It's fantastic, as good as the four seasons of the series ever got (not going to be spoilery now, may write up a review later) and visibly benefitting from a considerably larger special-effects budget than they've previously had to play with.
But. The so-called "miniseries" is only four hours long. At least 40 minutes shorter than that, actually, what with the commercials. Actual run time, we're talking more like three, three-and-a-half hours.
In other words, it's a longish film.
On the bright side, I didn't have to figure out whether to use a 6- or 8-hour tape, or some combination thereof.
On the other hand, three or four hours is no replacement for the full fifth season of episodes that SciFi was under contract to buy from Farscape's production company, and screwed them (and us) out of.
Don't even get me started on the dren SciFi paid for with the money they stole from Farscape.
And then there's Earthsea.
Adapting a novel, or a series of novels, to screens large or small is always a challenge. It's impossible to keep everything in, and, particularly in the fantasy and science fiction genres, there can be numerous story elements which are either impossible or prohibitively expensive to depict. Some elements of a story will inevitably need to be truncated, or portrayed/narrated/explained in a way different from the original text.
None of these factors have any bearing on why I'm so ripshit over the way Sci-Fi is adapting Ursula K. le Guin's Earthsea books. (Yes, apparently they're condensing at least two of the books into the one four-hour microseries, but I'm not going to declare that's a mistake without seeing the thing first.)
Here's the problem.
Ursula le Guin made a point of populating her world of Earthsea with mostly non-white peoples: a wide variety of brown skin shades, a wide variety of cultures. There were a few characters we'd call white, but only a few. This wasn't just an affirmative-action gesture; it underlies, and is crucial to, many elements of the story.
SciFi cast everybody white. Everybody, with the two exceptions of Danny Glover as the Token Mystical Other (a blatant perversion of his character's status in the source material) and Kristin Kreuk as... a white girl played by a half-white, half-Asian girl who has demonstrated over and over again her inability to be a tenth as good at acting as she is at looking pretty.
I have actually seen people argue that SciFi "had" to cast the way they did, because audiences wouldn't be interested and advertisers wouldn't invest in a science fiction series with a handful of white characters outnumbered by black, brown and tan characters. Yeah. Suuure. Because the Matrix series was such a box office bust and never had more than a fringe following.
I'll just be over in the corner, growling.
Last night and tonight, I've been watching Farscape: The Peacekeeper Wars. It's fantastic, as good as the four seasons of the series ever got (not going to be spoilery now, may write up a review later) and visibly benefitting from a considerably larger special-effects budget than they've previously had to play with.
But. The so-called "miniseries" is only four hours long. At least 40 minutes shorter than that, actually, what with the commercials. Actual run time, we're talking more like three, three-and-a-half hours.
In other words, it's a longish film.
On the bright side, I didn't have to figure out whether to use a 6- or 8-hour tape, or some combination thereof.
On the other hand, three or four hours is no replacement for the full fifth season of episodes that SciFi was under contract to buy from Farscape's production company, and screwed them (and us) out of.
Don't even get me started on the dren SciFi paid for with the money they stole from Farscape.
And then there's Earthsea.
Adapting a novel, or a series of novels, to screens large or small is always a challenge. It's impossible to keep everything in, and, particularly in the fantasy and science fiction genres, there can be numerous story elements which are either impossible or prohibitively expensive to depict. Some elements of a story will inevitably need to be truncated, or portrayed/narrated/explained in a way different from the original text.
None of these factors have any bearing on why I'm so ripshit over the way Sci-Fi is adapting Ursula K. le Guin's Earthsea books. (Yes, apparently they're condensing at least two of the books into the one four-hour microseries, but I'm not going to declare that's a mistake without seeing the thing first.)
Here's the problem.
Ursula le Guin made a point of populating her world of Earthsea with mostly non-white peoples: a wide variety of brown skin shades, a wide variety of cultures. There were a few characters we'd call white, but only a few. This wasn't just an affirmative-action gesture; it underlies, and is crucial to, many elements of the story.
SciFi cast everybody white. Everybody, with the two exceptions of Danny Glover as the Token Mystical Other (a blatant perversion of his character's status in the source material) and Kristin Kreuk as... a white girl played by a half-white, half-Asian girl who has demonstrated over and over again her inability to be a tenth as good at acting as she is at looking pretty.
I have actually seen people argue that SciFi "had" to cast the way they did, because audiences wouldn't be interested and advertisers wouldn't invest in a science fiction series with a handful of white characters outnumbered by black, brown and tan characters. Yeah. Suuure. Because the Matrix series was such a box office bust and never had more than a fringe following.
I'll just be over in the corner, growling.
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Re: part 1: the fans
Date: 2004-12-20 09:29 am (UTC)Te's much less willing to suffer foolishness than I am. Looks like she may be a lot less willing to suffer it than you do, too.
I sincerely wish I was making any of those up
It's okay. When you're done grieving for the world you can laugh at it and us in it.
I've been involved in science fiction fandom to varying degrees for about 25 years, like I said. Whether the other fans in question were more into television series, novels, or equally fannish for both, my experience is that people with the kind of racist arrogance redhawk displays are not only uncommon but shunned by the community when they do turn up.
It's nice to know that you've been lucky enough to play Peewee Reese. Or may have benefitted from folk stepping up to plate in the manner of Peewee Reese, but in my experience?
I talk about race and ethnicity with folk who've made a rather arbitrary cut. I talk to some folk in rl. And I'll discuss it with some folk online, but I'm not open. And I won't apologize for that. But look, here I am discussing it with you, and I haven't the foggiest if you're of color or not. :)
Definitely, I'm benefitting.
I realised that fans of science-fiction films tend to fall into two very different groups: fans of science fiction (books and/or television series) who also appreciate some films enough to be fannish about them but avoid or are outright disgusted by most of what passes for science-fiction cinema; and fans of Hollywood science fiction (often primarily or exclusively of the Star Wars franchise which isn't properly science fiction at all but "space opera") who may occasionally watch science-fiction television series, rarely if ever read any science-fiction novels or short stories which aren't tie-ins to a franchise, and tend to hate more highbrow sci-fi films such as The Man Who Fell to Earth.
This is an interesting distinction. I wish to read more on it, and I'd like to know what other folk think. Most of the fen I've been dealing with, though, are out of comicbook fanfic land. And maybe it's not so much racism and privilege but being a bunch of rude know it alls that are as good at giving offense to non-comic book X-Men fans as they are some people of color. Certainly, I don't speak for all fans of color. Like,
I think comic book fans that I've known tend to be widely read, well-informed, and, um, knowledgeable. As for the difference between sci-fi movie/tv fans and readers in the genre...hunh. I don't know. In fact, I'm wondering if thinking that holds a bias in favor of folk who have enjoyed a certain sort/level of education.
Boy, howdy, this is a fascinating discussion. :)
THANKS!
But see, I come out of X-Men comicbook fandom, and let me tell you, that's full of people who think they've got race and ethnicity figured out. But the irony of a bunch of folk digging on a 'verse that basically took 'Malcolm vs. Martin' and ran with it, and still manage to be nigh on fucking clueless when it comes to offense, privilege, and mannerlessness?
Yeah.
So. Done. I'll read fic, write fic, read books, read stories, but I've found that the less I know about what an active sci-fan's thoughts on race, the more I'm able to enjoy their work/efforts.