You may have heard that we had a leap second on Dec. 31, 2008, between 6:59 and 7:00 pm EST.  I told a bunch of people about the leap second (which is like a leap year, but only a second long) at the New Years party I was attending, and the responses were typical:

“A leap second!  What will they think of next?”

“Silly scientists.  They have too much time on their hands.”

“Who needs a leap second, anyway?”

But I have a public service announcement for all of you.  The leap second is serious business.   If you failed to change your clocks and watches, please change them now.

Think about it.  One day in the future, you may want to travel back in time.  Maybe you’re a resistance fighter trying to defeat the robots that are trying to defeat John Connor (who is trying to defeat the robots).  The robots, of course, know about the leap second and have changed their internal computers accordingly.  But you, dumb human, have forgotten all about the leap second.  Ignored it as silliness.

Well, who is going to have egg on their face when they arrive on Earth in 2008 IN THE MIDDLE OF A MOUNTAIN?!  You, that’s who.

Because, as we all know, time doesn’t work independently.  Time is connected to space.  So if you arrive at the wrong time, even if you’re only a leap second off, you’ll arrive in the wrong place.  Maybe you’ll only end up down the road from your original destination.  Or maybe you’ll end up in the Earth’s orbit.  I don’t know; I assume it depends on how your time travel device works.  But I wouldn’t want to leave it to chance.  Would you?

So please, OTI readers, for humanity’s sake, obey the leap second.  John Connor is counting on you.

Nazis, Nazis, Nazis.  Boy, do we Americans ever love Nazis!  Okay, maybe we don’t love them love them, but we sure love watching them in the movies.  And we love rewarding them.  Play a Nazi, shoot a Nazi, be shot by a Nazi.  Oscars for you, my friends!  Oscars all around!

This year might be the year of the Nazis.  We Americans are sick of morally ambiguous wars and complicated world problems like “global warming” and “the economy.”  Give us a good black and white morality tale set in 1940s Germany!  The main character can be a lovable child, a sexy but illiterate concentration camp guard, or even Tom Cruise in an eyepatch.    I don’t care, as long as there’s Nazis!

But the reviewing establishment is getting a little sick of the Holocaust, and I can understand why.  A.O. Scott says recent movies of this sort are just rehashing clichés: emaciated, bald women in showers; evil tow-headed men speaking in clipped German tones as they toss another naked child onto the pile; a single echoing gunshot as the main character meets his doom.  “Remembering” the Holocaust the same way over and over and over, according to Scott, is just another way of forgetting, of replacing historical memory with recycled Hollywood visuals and simplistic themes.  Based on Manohla Dargis’s (rather hilarious) reviews of The Boy in the Striped Pajamas and The Reader, I think she agrees with him.

Hey, I’m nominally Jewish, and I happen to agree, too.  Enough with the Nazis already!   (But then, I was the girl in high school who read Night by Elie Wiesel and, dry-eyed, said, “So the moral is the Holocaust was bad?”  I’ve hardly read every Holocaust movie or book ever written, but Maus is the only one that said something new to me, and I recommend it wholeheartedly if you’ve never read it before.  Otherwise, I can take or leave the genre.)

So we’ll do away with Nazi movies.  Fine.  But what A.O. Scott’s article fails to answer is what we’ll replace them with.  Lucky for you, I have some ideas.

Just like last time, I’ll give you a plot, and you figure out the title I’m referring to.  Here we go:

There’s a new kid in town in Southern California.  He’s a nice kid from the wrong side of the tracks, and he has a bit of a temper.  That temper falls away when he meets Rich Blonde Teenage Girl (RBTG), who seems to like him even though she’s too rich and blonde for him.

But all is not well for our protagonist and his RBTG.  You see, RBTG used to be involved with Rich Blonde Muscular Dude, who has a temper bigger than our protagonist’s and the fighting skills to back it up.  And Rich Blonde Muscular Dude wants RBTG back.

Our protagonist and the Rich Blonde Muscular Dude get into scuffles over the next few weeks, each one escalating to new heights of violence.  This all comes to a head when, late one night, Rich Blonde Muscular Dude tries to drive our hero off the road… and succeeds.

Okay: Guess the Title.

From the “old news but new news to me” file comes this interesting tidbit: Hollywood is in pre-pre-production for a live-action Cowboy Bebop movie.  (It’s an anime.)  This news, of course, initiated my brain’s usual protocol:

10: Become excited
20: Wait
30: Frown and realize this is Hollywood we’re talking about
40: GOTO Wikipedia
50: Read related article
60: If famous and good production company/director/actor/writer is attached, GOTO 10
70: If famous and bad production company/director/actor/writer is attached, GOTO 30

For instance, I recently learned that a live-action film of Avatar: The Last Airbender was in the works.  Then I learned M. Night Shyamalan was attached to direct.  GOTO 30.

Well, take that mild disappointment and magnify by twelve and you get my feelings about the Cowboy Bebop movie.  Because Cowboy Bebop is my favorite anime.  Because it reeks of style and is clever and witty and has wonderful dialogue and character development.

And because Keanu Reeves is attached.

While Halloween is the perfect holiday for horror films, we shouldn’t give short shrift to the more family oriented fare that comes out at this time of year.  Nowadays, Halloween is arguably a kids’ festival, so it’s no surprise that Hollywood would want to cater to those who love and celebrate the holiday but are too young or, like me, too wimpy to watch The Exorcist.

Perhaps it’s fair to say, then, that there are two major genres of Halloween film: the scary and the family friendly.  (There’s also the funny or the romantic goth-y, but those subgenres are much less popular, and, moreover, the films that fall under those categories usually also fit into the aforementioned dichotomy.)  Real horror films can shock or disgust, but the very best of them terrify us by confronting us with things we are scared of in real life: dead bodies, foreigners, nature, pregnancy, clowns.  Family friendly Halloween movies, like all other family friendly films, have happy endings and seek to comfort us.  The only difference is that these films, being Halloween-based, tend to be a bit quirkier than usual.

You’d think that It’s the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown would fit in the second category, not the first.  I disagree.  It may be the scariest Halloween movie there is.

Let’s play a new game called Guess the Title!  Here’s a story for you.  You read it and then guess what title I’m referring to.

Ready?  Here we go:

Two characters who live back in historical times have finally returned from a long and brutal war.  One is a knight: blond, gaunt, tired from the years of fighting, yearning to return to his beautiful wife whom he married when they were both very young.  He is usually quiet and stoic, a state that obscures his tormented inner soul and existential anguish.  Every so often he’ll break down and start raging against the gods.

The other man is his squire.  He’s a buff fellow with buzzed hair, and he’s the exact opposite of his master.  He’s gruff, bawdy, and he loves the world.  Not one for angst, he’s a “live in the moment” kind of guy.  In fact, he barely takes a moment to think of the consequences before he saves a poor, nearly-mute, oh-so-hot waif from slavery and death, even though it could have gotten him into major trouble.  Don’t be fooled by his singing and joking, though; he can easily kill you if you get in his way.

Although these two seem to have nothing in common, they are the best of friends, sticking together even as the world crumbles around them.  Their quest is to return home and live in peace – but death lurks around every corner.

Okay: Guess the Title.

Last month, there was a cool article in the Times about The Sarah Connor Chronicles, although I didn’t get around to reading it until now.  The writer, Ginia Bellafante, does an excellent job of OverthinkingIt ™ in terms of its religious symbolism, apocalyptic mood, and political leanings.  She even makes mention of John Connor’s Important Haircut at the beginning of this season, thus scoring points in my book.

But then, at the very end of the article, she says this:

Like “Lost,” “Sarah Connor” speaks in code, but one that is considerably easier to read. The name of the Skynet brain is not geopolitically neutral: it’s called the Turk. So the machine endangering mankind is symbolically Ottoman.

Oh, come on, New York Times.  Read into the ethnicity of the series’ chess playing computer if you must,

Symbolically Ottoman?

but do the research first.  Even I knew that the Turk is a reference to an Automaton Chess Playing machine that wowed audiences through the late 1700s and early 1800s.  If you want to Overthink the Turk, don’t talk about the fact that it’s “symbolically Ottoman.”  Talk about the fact that it was a giant hoax.  The chess playing robot was actually just a chess master in a box.  If we’re going to read any symbolism into that, maybe it should be that Terminators and humans are more similar than anyone once thought and that the evils and ambitions of the Terminators are extensions of human evils and ambitions.

Why did they call this chess machine The Turk, anyway?  Maybe these 18th century hoaxers were also playing up fears of Middle Easterners and terrorists.

Yeah, no.  The machine was made to look like a guy in a turban, because mystical-looking old men in turbans = magicians = sexy and exotic.  It was just another way to wow the audience.

Research, New York Times!  Research!  Or are we to assume that Turk from Scrubs is a political symbol, as well?

In preparation for the March release of its film adaptation, I reread Watchmen this week.  It had been more than four years.  Back then, I liked it, but it wasn’t the time for me to read it.  I hadn’t been exposed to as many “real” superhero comics yet, and the world, while sucky, didn’t seem apocalyptic to me at the time.  This time around, Watchmen hit me a lot harder.  I mean, “Who watches the watchmen?” could be talking about I-bankers, right?  And Dr. Manhattan is the market’s invisible hand?  No?

For years, Alan Moore (the writer of Watchmen) has been saying that his comics are unfilmable.  He has a beef with Hollywood that is easy to understand, especially if you’ve seen the god-awful adaptations of his League of Extraordinary Gentlemen and From Hell.  In the late 80s, Terry Gilliam approached Moore, thinking he’d direct the Watchmen film.  Instead, Moore told Gilliam that it was an impossible task, like finding the Holy Grail or filming Don Quixote.  Terry Gilliam agreed.  Watchmen was unfilmable.

But is it really?

Once upon a time, an 80s girl was reading a subversive comic book in a diner while listening to that one A-ha song everyone likes.  But lo!  Out of one of the comic’s frames pops a sketchy hand – the hand of Patrick Swayze-inspired 80s Motorcycle Guy.  80s Comic Book Man brings 80s Girl into the comic book, which seems like fun to 80s Girl at first.  Little did she know that Evil Wrench Guy, Motorcycle Guy’s archenemy, is out for revenge!

Motorcycle Guy runs through the comic world with 80s Girl, realizes she is unsafe there, and sends her back out to her world through a portal made of pencil so he can fight dirty with Evil Wrench Guy.  After his victory against Wrench Guy, Motorcycle Guy makes his way into The Real World to live happily ever after with 80s Girl.

We assume.  But what might actually await Motorcycle Guy on Earth?  What happens after the girl decides to take him on?

Shakespeare won't read your fanfic, either.

Embarrassing admission of the day: I read fanfiction.  It’s hard to tell over the Internet, but that word “read” is in the present tense.  I read fanfiction.  Today.

But only sometimes!  Once or twice a year – at most, I swear! – I indulge in what I admit is a very guilty pleasure.  Some of you watch Gossip Girl; some of you unironically enjoy The Chronicles of Riddick.  Me, I read amateur versions of anime and children’s books.

99% of fanfiction is terrible, of course.  95% of anything is terrible, and I added 4% because this is the Internet we’re talking about.  But every so often I find a fanfic I can’t keep my eyes off.  It might capture the feeling of the original source, or attack the premise from an interesting and new point of view.  I get to see my favorite characters come back to life through the power of words.  The puppeteer might be different, but, in the best fics, anyway, my beloved puppets are back and better than ever.

Before you sneer, I should probably remind you that many great pieces of “real” literature are just glorified fanfics.  Every other year the Pulitzer or Man Booker Prize goes to a retelling of a some old text; the only difference is that they use stuff in the public domain so they can’t get sued.  Fanfic isn’t new, either.  See anything by Shakespeare, anything by the any of the Ancient Greeks, and the entire New Testament, for instance, and you’ll understand what I mean.  Although the New Testament did get the character of “God” all wrong and also was a little too G-rated in comparison to the original text.  Still, points for using the postmodern techniques of using “found documents” and not one but four unreliable narrators.  That’s a good fanfic.

The trouble is that it is very difficult to find good fanfic.  Sometimes I go dumpster diving at Fanfiction.net, but it just takes too long.  Why in the world doesn’t that site have a “sort by rating” feature or “sort by number of reviews” feature, anyway?  Seeing as I am too lazy to wade through the slush, as those in the publishing world like to say, I’m just going to have to make every fanfiction writer on the Internet better.  That means you.  In my spare time away from this blog I teach writing, so I do this more out of habit than anything else.  And, yes, I’m going to make the assumption that stories that meet my personal tastes are objectively better stories than those that don’t.

You guys better step it up.

A list of five thou shalt nots and five thou shalts below.  While some of these tips will be about writing in general, most are specifically about writing fanfiction, a form with its own quirks and issues.  And even if you don’t write fanfiction yourself, maybe you’ll enjoy reading a deconstruction of the medium.