On the borderland between SF and fantasy, X2: X-Men United was a considerably better sequel as sequels go than either The Matrix Reloaded or Terminator 3, and was quite successful commercially. It’s not as good as the original movie, but once you make allowances for the fact that it’s a movie version of a superhero comic book, working on comic book logic, assumptions, and aesthetics, rather than a science fiction film, you can relax and enjoy it; it’s stylish and well-produced, and moves along briskly to its ultimately rather disappointing ending. Daredevil was not as enjoyable as X2, being considerably darker and more brooding, or as successful as last year’s blockbuster Spider-Man, but did well enough to probably satisfy its producers. Just to prove that comic book movies aren’t always successful, though, two of the year’s biggest commercial and critical bombs were also drawn from comics or graphic novels. I’ve heard The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen referred to as “the worst movie ever made.” Was it that bad? Well, maybe not—but Lord knows, it wasn’t good. This one was a real stinker in almost every regard, and it died a well-deserved death at the box office, which must have been especially painful since it was a very expensive movie to make. Another big-budget flop was The Hulk, a movie for which expectations were even higher, since it was directed by acclaimed director Ang Lee—which didn’t save it from being an awful movie that sank without a trace.
And that was about it for science fiction or almost-science fiction movies this year. Coming up next year is a big-budget movie version of Isaac Asimov’s I, Robot, with Will Smith, that is already giving off vibes that it’s going to be remarkably dumb, and have very little, if anything, to do with Asimov’s classic. And—O joy! O rapture!—the final Star Wars movie.
It was a much better year for fantasy movies, both in terms of quality and overall box office performance. The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King was the dominating movie of the year, in or out of the genre, breaking box office records as well as garnering rave reviews and winning eleven Oscars, including the prestigious Best Picture Oscar, the only genre fantasy film ever to win one. Was it really that good? Well, probably not. But it was still pretty damn good, regardless, and probably deserves a good healthy proportion of the money and accolades thrown at it. There were flaws and missteps in it, of course (the Tolkien purist in me still longs for the Scouring of the Shire sequence that got left out, while at the same time I fully understand how difficult—if not impossible—it would have been to work it into the film), including a final twenty minutes that should have insured that there wasn’t a dry eye in the house, but which instead had the audience coughing and shuffling their feet impatiently. But so much of the rest of the movie was so spectacular, with good acting, good pacing, great build-up of suspense, wonderful set-dressing and costuming, spectacular battle scenes, and CGI effects a lot better (and more seamlessly integrated into the film) than those in The Matrix Reloaded, that it’s hard to quibble too much with the movie, in spite of some pretty substantial departures from The Canon. It certainly was worth the price of admission, perhaps more so than any other movie I saw that year. And although purists may niggle as they will, it’s without a doubt the best film version of The Lord of the Rings that we’re going to get during the lifetimes of most people who read these words, and a much better one than we had any reason to hope for. (Oddly, with all the high-tech special effects that saturated movies this year, one of the most mind-blowing and exhilarating moments in Return of the King was the relatively simple sequence showing the lighting of the alarm beacons, with the message being passed from peak to peak to peak from Gondor to Rohan. Now that’s entertainment!)
The other two big fantasy movies this year were also immense hits at the box office—and both of them were actually entertaining and reasonably well-made too (what are the odds?) I must admit that I went to see Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl, a movie based on a dated and corny theme-park ride at Disneyland, with something less than keen anticipation; in fact, my expectations were about as low as they could get. To my surprise, I actually enjoyed it quite a bit, in spite of a storyline that made little real sense and plot-logic holes that you could sail a pirate ship through. I’d expected all of that, of course. What I hadn’t expected was the humor. This is a very funny movie throughout, and features a flamboyant, outrageously over-the-top performance from Johnny Depp—in fact, if Depp’s performance was one whit less over-the-top, the movie wouldn’t have worked at all. (Humor isn’t Pirates only strong suite, of course. In addition to the sly humor, Pirates is also a well-directed, fast-paced action movie with some great fight scenes and some eyepopping cinematography, and some good CGI work (I think the Walking Dead People effects here are actually better than the similar effects in The Return of the King), with really good supporting acting from Geoffrey Rush (Hollywood need look no further if they ever want someone to play Long John Silver) and Orlando Bloom. The year’s other movie-inspired-by-a-theme-park-ride, The Haunted Mansion, had some funny moments as well, and featured Eddie Murphy doing his finest Willie Best imitation, but performed lacklusterly at the box office anyway. The year’s other fantasy blockbuster was the animated feature Finding Nemo, which did great business at the box office and has already become the best-selling DVD of all time. This is a typical Pixar movie (there must be great grinding of teeth at Disney that Pixar wouldn’t renew their distribution deal with them), with the usual virtues of such; I myself didn’t think that it was as good as Toy Story, my favorite of the Pixar films, or even Monsters Inc., but it’s clever, inventive, and funny, well-animated, with good voiceover work, particularly by Ellen DeGeneres as the voice of the perpetually befuddled fish Dory.
Speaking of animated films, it was hard to find Hayao Miyazaki’s Spirited Away in 2003, except for a few big-city art theaters, but by now it should be widely available from most good movie-rental places—so rent it. It’s one of the strangest and most beautifully animated films I’ve ever seen, wildly imaginative and lushly weird, with a storyline that would have scared the pants off me when I was a little kid, and yet a real depth of human sentiment. Another animated film cut from a similar kind of stylishly weird cloth is The Triplets of Belleville; this isn’t as grand an accomplishment as Spirited Away, Miyazaki’s masterpiece, but it’s funny, surprising, and charmingly surreal, and well worth seeking out (and the song from it beat the snot out of all the other Oscar-nominated songs, in my opinion).
Another movie that wasn’t a box office champ but scored a hit with critics as well as those small audiences that managed to actually see it was Whale Rider, a quiet, subtle, and moving fantasy with almost no special effects, and not even any monsters or swordfights, but which does deliver a fascinating look at cultures in conflict in the modern world, and a star-making turn from thirteen-year-old Keisha Castle-Hughes, who was up for a Best Actress Oscar for it.
A weird little movie that slipped quickly through the art-house circuit, Donnie Darko, is worth catching as well; it’s not entirely successful, for my money, but it’s certainly not The Same Old Thing either, and has many flashes of intelligence and imagination (a lot of the more pretentious moments were explained for me when I found out that the writer/director is only twenty-one; I was pretty pretentious when I was twenty-one, too). The new live-action Peter Pan had a considerably bigger budget and much higher expectations attached to it, but it slipped through town just about as fast as Donnie Darko had, fast enough that it was gone by the time the holiday season was over and I never got to see it; friends who did see it tell me that it was actually pretty good, but if so, it failed to find its audience, and was a box office disappointment.
The much-hyped big budget live-action version of The Cat in the Hat was also a disappointment, both critically and financially (I was going to say it was a dog, but I’m better than that, so I won’t).
Next year we can look forward to a new Harry Potter movie, Spider-Man 2, Shreck 2, and a big budget remake of the old television show Bewitched, among other treats. Restrai
n your enthusiasm.
Things didn’t look a whole lot better for SF and fantasy on television either; in fact, they looked worse, as several of the most popular shows on the air (among genre fans, anyway) have been cancelled, or are in danger of being cancelled. Buffy, the Vampire Slayer and Farscape went off the air last year, and the much-discussed new Buffy spinoff show never materialized. In early 2004, the original Buffy spinoff, Angel, was cancelled as well. With the demise of Firefly, which was cancelled after a short run last year, this means that Buffy producer Josh Whedon has gone from having three shows running at once to having no shows running at all, in the course of one year; it’s fascinating how quickly these TV franchise empires can disappear. It’s a shame about Angel, which, although not as good as it had been in its first few years, was still one of the few intelligent and witty fantasy shows left on television, and had actually been improving in quality at the time it was given the ax. Enterprise changed its name to Star Trek: Enterprise and pumped in more action in an attempt to boost ratings, but ratings have not gone up significantly, if at all, and the future of this show is also seriously in doubt; its cancellation could spell the effective end of the whole once-mighty Star Trek franchise, since the failure of last year’s Star Trek: Nemesis has pretty much killed the prospects for there ever being another Star Trek theatrical movie either. Oddly, Star Trek, Angel, and Buffy novels are still selling briskly, so we’re faced with the peculiar situation of having these series continue a ghost existence in print long after the parent shows are off the air (as first-run shows, anyway; the reruns of all of them will be around for years). Much the same is true of Sabrina, the Teenage Witch, whose producers finally admitted last year that their “teenage witch” was now in her late twenties and threw in the towel; novelizations of the series still march on, though. A new version of Tarzan swung onto the WB network, and almost immediately swung off again into oblivion. Tru Calling, a new fantasy series starring Eliza Dushku, formerly Faith on Buffy, The Vampire Slayer, doesn’t seem to be doing all that well either.
I think that the current craze for “reality TV” shows has hurt the survival-chances of genre TV shows (and maybe of fictional drama shows in general—although the craze for “forensic” cop shows such as CSI runs counter to the reality-show tide). Reality shows are so much cheaper to make than regular shows, especially genre shows that call for expensive special-effects work, and you can’t seem to make them so dumb or so repugnant that people won’t watch them anyway, no matter how hard you try (and some of them are trying pretty hard). So why make anything else, when you can make reality shows that will get much higher ratings than the fiction shows ever did anyway and cost a fraction of their cost to produce?
Not every genre show on TV was sinking in the ratings, though. Stargate SG1 and Small-ville are still doing well, as is Charmed, which was renewed for another season in spite of the fact that the show—never a heavyweight show at the best of times—has become so silly in the last couple of seasons as to be nearly unwatchable (I finally gave up when they did an I Dream of Genie homage episode). Joan of Arcadia, an updated modern take on the Joan of Arc story, became a surprise hit this year, although I doubt that it’s going to go on to replicate what became of the real Joan. I don’t get HBO anymore, but a new show there, Carnivale, seems to have been at least a succès d’estime for them. A new miniseries version of Battlestar Galactica, which to me didn’t seem significantly better than the lame old version, did well enough in the ratings on the Sci-Fi Channel to have apparently earned itself a regular series slot. The Sci-Fi Channel did a new miniseries version of Children of Dune that seems to have been popular, and is going to do a miniseries version of Kim Stanley Robinson’s Red Mars, which could be interesting.
Century City, a show about a law firm in the year 2030, is set to debut sometime in 2004. I suspect, somewhat cynically, that the network Suits see this as a great chance to recycle all the scripts from all their other lawyer shows, with only a few futuristic bells and whistles added to the episodes to justify them as Sci Fi, but we’ll see. It’s worth noting that this is the first genre show (particularly an SF show) to debut in prime time on one of the so-called “regular” or Big Three networks in longer than I can remember, and it’ll be interesting to see how well it does. Besides, it’s got to be better than the new updated version of Mr. Ed, which is also coming up for us sometime in 2004. (Doesn’t it?) (To say nothing—and please don’t—about the new TV version of Lost in Space.) (And Dark Shadows. Are there any old TV shows left that they’re not recycling?)
The Sixty-first World Science Fiction Convention, Torcon 3, was held in Toronto, Ontario, Canada, from August 30 through September 1, 2003, and drew an estimated attendance of 4,760. The 2003 Hugo Awards, presented at Torcon 3, were: Best Novel, Hominids, by Robert J. Sawyer; Best Novella, Coraline, by Neil Gaiman; Best Novelette, “Slow Music,” by Michael Swanwick; Best Short Story, “Falling Onto Mars,” by Geoffrey A. Landis; Best Related Book, Better To Have Loved: The Life of Judith Merril, by Judith Merril and Emily Pohl-Weary, Best Professional Editor, Gardner Dozois; Best Professional Artist, Bob Eggleton; Best Dramatic Presentation (short form), Buffy the Vampire Slayer, “Conversations with Dead People”; Best Dramatic Presentation (long form) The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers; Best Semiprozine, Locus, edited by Charles N. Brown; Best Fanzine, Mimosa, edited by Rich and Nicki Lynch; Best Fan Writer, David Langford; Best Fan Artist, Sue Mason; plus the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer to Wen Spencer; and the Cordwainer Smith Rediscovery Award to Edgar Pangborn.
The 2002 Nebula Awards, presented at a banquet at the Warwick Hotel in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, on April 19, 2003, were: Best Novel, America Gods, by Neil Gaiman; Best Novella, “Bronte’s Egg,” by Richard Chwedyk; Best Novelette, “Hell is the Absence of God,” by Ted Chiang; Best Short Story, “Creature,” by Carol Emshwiller; Best Script, The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring, by Fran Walsh, Philippa Boyens, and Peter Jackson; plus the Author Emeritus Award to Kathleen MacLean and the Grandmaster Award to Ursula K. Le Guin.
The World Fantasy Awards, presented at the Twenty-ninth Annual World Fantasy Convention at the Hyatt Regency in Washington, D.C., on November 3, 2003, were: Best Novel, The Facts of Life, by Graham Joyce and Ombria in Shadow, by Patricia A. McKillip (tie); Best Novella, “The Library,” by Zoran Zivkovic; Best Short Fiction, “Creation,” by Jeffrey Ford; Best Collection, The Fantasy Writer’s Assistant and Other Stories, by Jeffrey Ford; Best Anthology, The Green Man: Tales from the Mythic Forest, edited by Ellen Datlow and Terri Windling and Leviathan Three, edited by Jeff VanderMeer and Forrest Aguirre (tie); Best Artist, Tom Kidd; Special Award (Professional), to Gordon Van Gelder for The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction; Special Award (Nonprofessional), to Jason Williams, Jeremy Lassen, and Benjamin Cossel, for Night Shade Books; plus the Life Achievement Award to Donald M. Grant and Lloyd Alexander.
The 2003 Bram Stoker Awards, presented by the Horror Writers of America during a banquet in New York City on June 7, 2003, were: Best Novel, The Night Class, by Tom Piccirilli; Best First Novel, The Lovely Bones, by Alice Sebold; Best Collection, One More for the Road, by Ray Bradbury; Best Long Fiction, “My Work Is Not Yet Done,” by Thomas Ligotti and “El Dia de Los Muertos,” by Brian B. Hopkins (tie); Best Short Story, “The Misfit Child Grows Fat on Despair,” by Tom Piccirilli; Nonfiction, Ramsey Campbell, Probably: Essays on Horror and Sundry Fantasies, by Ramsey Campbell; Best Anthology, The Darker Side: Generations of Horror, edited by John Pelan; Best Screenplay, Frailty, by Brant Hanley; Best Work for Young Readers, Coraline, by Neil Gaiman; Poetry Collection, The Gossamer Eye, Mark McLaughlin, Rain Greaves, and David Niall Wilson; Best Alternative Forms, Imagination Box, by Steve and Melanie Tem; plus the Lifetime Achievement Award to J.N. Williamson and Stephen King.
The 2002 John W. Campbell Memorial Award was won by Probability Space, by Nancy Kress.
The 2002 Theodore Sturgeon Award for Best Short Story was won by “Over Yonde
r,” by Lucius Shepard.
The 2002 Philip K. Dick Memorial Award went to The Mount, by Carol Emshwiller.
The 2002 Arthur C. Clarke award was won by The Seperation, by Christopher Priest.
The 2002 James Tiptree, Jr. Memorial Award was won by Light, by M. John Harrison and “Stories For Men,” John Kessel (tie).
Dead in 2003 or early 2004 were: HARRY CLEMENT STUBBS, 81, who, writing as HAL CLEMENT, was one of the major figures in science fiction for over fifty years, author of the classic “hard science” novel Mission of Gravity, as well as well-known novels such as Cycle of Fire, Needle, Iceworld, Noise, and others; JACK CADY, 71, well-known fantasy and horror writer, winner of the World Fantasy Award, the Nebula Award, the Philip K. Dick Award, and the Bram Stoker Award, author of such novels as The Off-Season, The Hauntings of Hood Canal, and Street: A Novel, as well as many short stories, the best-known of which was probably the Nebula-winning “The Night We Buried Road Dog”; KEN GRIMWOOD, 59, World Fantasy Award-winning author of Replay, as well as novels such as Breakthrough, Elise, and Into the Deep; JOAN AIKEN, 79, prolific British YA fantasy author, whose nearly one hundred books include The Wolves of Willoughby Chase, Black Hearts of Battersea, Dido and Pa, and Cold Shoulder Road, among many others, and whose many short stories were collected in A Touch of Chill, More Than You Bargained For, and many other collections; HOWARD FAST, 88, who was better-known for his historical novels such as Spartacus and Freedom Road, but who also wrote the occasional SF or fantasy story, collected in The Edge of Tomorrow, The General Zapped an Angel, and A Touch of Infinity; JANE RICE, 90, author known mainly for short fiction whose stories appeared with fair frequency in magazines such as Unknown and The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction throughout the middle decades of the last century; PETER T. GARRATT, 54, British psychologist, fan, and author, a frequent contributor to lnterzone; WILLIAM RELLING, Jr., 49, horror writer; JULIUS SCHWARTZ, 89, agent and longtime editor for D.C. Comics, a beloved figure in SF fandom for many years who was also credited with revitalizing the comic book industry in the 50s and ushering in the “Silver Age” of comics; STEFAN WUL, 81, French SF writer, author of Le Tempe du Passe, Omsen Serie (the basis for the movie Fantastic Planet), and L’Orphelin de Perdide; KIR BULYCHEV, 69, Russian SF writer, author of Alice: The Girl from Earth and Half a Life; ZHENG WENGUANG, 74, one of the founding fathers of Chinese SF; PAUL ZINDELL, 67, author of the well-known play “The Effect of Gamma Rays on Man-in-the-Moon Marigolds”; DONALD BARR, 82, science educator and SF writer, author of Space Relations and Planet in Arms; JACQUES CHAMBON, 60, editor, critic, and translator, a major figure in the French SF publishing world; GEORGE and JAN O’ NALE, publishers of Cheap Street Press; MIKE HINGE, 72, SF artist, who did cover work for Amazing, Analog, and many other publishers; MEL HUNTER, 75, SF artist who did many covers for The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, as well as for other markets; DON LAWRENCE, 75, British comics artist; WARREN ZEVON, 56, well-known singer and songwriter, author of the classic fantasy song “Werewolves of London,” among many others; GREGORY PECK, 87, famous film actor, perhaps best-known to genre audiences for his roles in On The Beach and The Boys From Brazil; RICHARD CRENNA, 76, film actor, perhaps best-known to genre audiences for his roles in Marooned and A Fire in the Sky; BUDDY HACKETT, 79, comedian and film actor, perhaps best known to genre audiences for his roles in The Love Bug and as the voice of Scuttle the seagull in Disney’s The Little Mermaid; JOHN RITTER, 55, television and film actor, perhaps best-known to genre audiences for his role as a killer robot on a Buffy the Vampire Slayer episode, “Ted”; HUME0 CRONYN, 92, film actor, perhaps best-known to genre audiences for his roles in Cocoon and Cocoon: The Return; HARRY WARNER, JR., 80, Hugo-winning fannish historian, author of All Our Yesterdays and A Wealth of Fable: An Informal History of Science Fiction Fandom in the 1950s; LLOYD ARTHUR ESHBACH, 93, writer and publisher, editor of Fantasy Press and of the first nonfiction book about science fiction, Of Worlds Beyond: The Science of Science Fiction, author of The Land Beyond the Gate and other novels; WILLIS E. McNELLEY, 82, SF critic, editor, and academic, compiler of The Dune Encyclopedia and coeditor of the anthologies Mars, We Love You and Above the Human Landscape; ROY TACKETT, 78, longtime fan and fanzine fan; JOHN FOYSTER, 62, long-time convention organizer and fanzine fan, a major force in Australian fandom; LORI WOLF, 43, well-known fan and convention organizer, a prominent figure in Texas fandom; MARGUERITE BRADBURY, 81, wife of writer Ray Bradbury; HERB BRIN, father of SF writer David Brin; MARY C. PANGBORN, 96, sister and sometime collaborator of SF writer Edgar Pangborn, who also wrote some solo stories of her own; and GRACE C. LUNDRY, longtime fan and wife of fan Don Lundry.
The Year's Best SF 21 # 2003 Page 6
