More Thoughts on the PCA/ACA Conference

Now that I've told the story of my PCA/ACA Adventures, let me say a few thoughts in general about conferencing. I must admit, to start, that the $300 my university gives me to travel to conferences didn't even cover the $500+ for my plane ticket, let alone the $240 for a shared hotel room, the $50 shuttle ride, the $10+ on public transportation, and the $100+ on meals, including fries and chips so hard they left the insides of my mouth feeling like I had brushed my teeth with a dagger. One the other hand, that three hundred bucks did soften the blow a bit, and I'd gladly pay the rest to go hang out with some erudite Howardians. Part of the reason I go is also because some curious people might come over and be introduced to Howard who wouldn't otherwise pick up his work. At one of the panels, a young lady said she came because she was writing a paper about Black Mask magazine and wanted to know how people talk about the pulps, and a young gentleman said he came purely randomly. If those two leave and tell their friends how interesting that Robert E. Howard character seems, it's a job well done.

More than the actual price of being in Boston, it's the fees associated with going to the conference that bother me. We have to pay registration fees, fees to be members of the organization, and we also have to buy the journal they put out. I truly appreciate the opportunity the PCA/ACA gives us to come together and share our interests and scholarship, and I genuinely believe that a large conference like this is necessary, since it allows us to cross-pollinate and raise interest, as I mentioned above. And yet I wish it didn't come with such a prohibitive price tag.

When it comes down to it, I suspect this might be because "popular culture studies" just don't have the kind of academic heft that, say, Victorian studies or Shakespearean studies do. Maybe popular culture studies doesn't get the kind of funding support other areas do. I feel the struggle for legitimacy that we experience is a little hypocritical and short-sighted. After all, how many other disciplines have gone from "popular" to academic? In the 1800s, reading novels was considered low-brow and was even accused of corrupting peoples' morals. In Shakespeare's time, people looked down their noses at the theater, and they were considered so revolting that they stuck them on the other side of the Thames in London (I guess that was the Elizabethan equivalent of the train tracks). And yet now proper academics with patches on their tweed jackets and everything spend their time researching this stuff. Especially now, when there's such a big movement to discover and rediscover voices of minorities who have until now been ignored in the literary canon, I think that "popular" writers such as the weird fiction writers should be embraced and given the due they have so long been denied. The literary world is full of people who talk about the importance of literature and authors' voices; how can we draw a line and say whose voice is meaningful and whose isn't? We are in an age when ignored writers, those who wrote experimentally or went against the grain or were women or minorities, are being rediscovered and lauded. How can we say the contributions of writers once labeled unacceptable were unfairly dismissed and need to be honored, and then turn around and say, "But not those other writers over there!"?

Weird fiction came from a time of change, when the rise of steam, internal combustion, and electricity had all but destroyed the frontier, when social and class awareness rose in the face of the brutal factory system, when science and philosophy were rearranging the place of humans in the cosmos, and when the Great Depression made life brutal and bitter for millions. All of these are reflected in the stories of weird fiction writers. The kind of scholarship I believe will raise these writers in the esteem of academia will focus on examining their use of genuine literary talent to explore the themes of their age, not to mention more general literary analysis of their artistry, examining their work not just in terms of broad themes but looking deeper by using critical theory to analyze their work. I have been delighted to see this taking place at the PCA/ACA conference, with critical readings including gender, imagery, and the use of certain literary devices.

As I prepare for my comprehensive exams, I intend to look at the way weird fiction writers spoke to the class and economic situations of their time. I don't want to just say "they were shaped by the Great Depression" or look at the way they interacted with a mostly lower class literary form, but I rather want to look at ways they responded to this, even subverted types and played on reader expectations. For a group of men and women writing for a magazine that routinely had half-naked women writhing on the cover, they were a remarkably well-read and scholarly bunch, and their interest in history, literature, and science was amazing. They all defy what you might expect "pulp" writers to be like, but that's part of what makes them interesting. As they wrote in a "weird" genre which routinely pushed boundaries, they had the perfect form in which to explore ideas and themes that were taboo to discuss otherwise, and that allowed them to speak vitally and vibrantly to their generation and to literature as a whole.

PCA/ACA - Conference Adventures!

On April 11, I packed my knapsack, put on my traveling cloak, kissed my mother, and set off from the homestead to find fortune in the greater world. After a trip in a van, two airplanes, a bus that went underground, and another train, I found myself in front of the Boston Marriott at Copley Plaza. In the spacious lobby, I saw a motley assortment of my colleagues, who had arrived for the annual PCA/ACA National Conference. By this point I was so addled by having gone up and down so many times, not to mention the sheer Transformers-like boggle of having been in a bus that hooked up to electric cables and went drove through an underground tunnel pretending it was the metro, I managed to stammer my way through getting my room key. After riding up to the twenty-sixth floor, I deposited my stuff in a room I was sharing with my friend and went in search of adventure.

My first experience was inauspicious: at registration, I put my name card in my pocket, couldn't find it in my bag, and went back to ask for it. Only when the no doubt overworked but extremely patient and polite gentleman told me to look in my pocket did I realize my mistake. Feeling a sheepishness not even my all-black outfit could fully overcome (no doubt due to the fact that I was still wearing white sneakers; I was going to be doing a lot of walking!) I wandered around the conference, checking out the book tables and marking the panels I wanted to go to the next day.

That afternoon, I ran into an old friend from my undergraduate/MA years, who now lives near Boston and showed me and my friend from my current university around. We met up by the huge old library that had murals on the walls and a fine collection of nineteenth century manuscripts, including original letters from Poe and Hawthorne, and set off for Chinatown. We received some second-hand martial arts wisdom and bought some squid jerky, and we also went into a small cafe to buy some bubble tea. We waited perhaps ten minutes in front of the display case while every other customer to walk into the store after us went right up to the counter, pushing aside whoever was already there to place an order. When we finally did order, the nice girl recommended that I try the tea I ordered hot, and then asked me to make sure it was sweet enough after she prepared it for me. It was a surprising bit of kindness after the mild frustration of waiting.

We took our obligatory photos by the big touristy gates, then had dinner at a restaurant that used to be a theater. The walls were beautifully painted with scenic illustrations, and the walls had decorations of carved dragons and other mythical beasts. Although the room was huge, there were only a few families there, and we didn't get to experience having dim sum brought to us on carts. Instead, we ordered from menus, and ended up gorging ourselves on the various still-steaming balls of meat-stuffed dough. When we were done, we told our waiter we wanted our check split three ways, which caused a bit of tension and meant we shuffled out of there as fast as we could, considering the size of the meal we had just eaten.

The day done, I turned in early, and I got up early on Thursday to start attending panels properly. I was surprised to see two of my Howardian cohorts at a panel about science fiction and fantasy, so we touched base and went out to lunch. (I ended up eating perhaps the most expensive burger I have ever eaten, a blow which was only slightly softened by it being stacked so high I had to eat it with a knife and fork.) I couldn't get over how fantastic it is to talk to people who knew much more about one of my favorite topics than I do. Hearing some of the experts in the field of Howard studies discourse about his writings is the reason I went back to the PCA after last year. Sometimes I think I know a thing or two, but the level of understanding and background knowledge these guys has always leaves me listening wide-eyed and trying to remember as much as I can. At one point, I mentioned that the Howardian mountain man Breckenridge Elkins is bearded, but at a later panel every picture showed him clean-shaven. I guess I just assumed, given how often he's compared to a grizzly bear. My paradigm got thoroughly shifted.

I ended up on the last of three panels in the Pulp Studies field. I felt every panel was very interesting, though I admit I had a bit of trouble keeping my eyes open for some of it. (You can see me coming close to nodding off in the second row in a picture on Mark Finn's blog on the same topic.) This was no reflection on the quality of the presentations. One of my comrades-in-arms wrote about C.L. Moore, Margaret Brundage, and the portrayal of female adventurer Jirel of Joiry in Weird Tales (I particularly remember the part that in one scene in Moore's story Jirel changes out of armor into a fresh suit of armor; for her, there is no 'change' between selves--the identity in armor is her real identity). There was also a bit of debate about whether the horrors in At the Mountains of Madness represented immigrants, blacks, or a giant poo monster. There was an interesting connection made between the Necronomicon and censorship (forbidden knowledge!). One of my favorite readings was Mark Finn's presentation about gorillas in Howard's writings. I've often remarked about the frequency with which Howardian heroes come to grips with giant apes, and Mark made some great connections with race, barbarism, and evolution.

If anybody asks why I didn't go to George Takei's talk, I was learning about Robert E. Howard and killer gorillas, which is probably the best excuse I can think of for missing something like that.

As for my own panel, it's frankly a bit of a blur for me. I can't say much about it other than I was terrified, nervous, and I realized that my paper barely made sense to me as the writer, and anyone who was listening was bound to be even deeper in the dark. Everyone was nice about it, though, and I made a thorough mental note to write something more reasonable and straightforward next time and leave connecting Howardian heroes to political philosophy for people who understand that stuff a lot better than I do!

After I collapsed gasping and panting on the other end of my ordeal, we went out for dinner and drinks. This was my favorite part of the conference and worth the price of admission. The topic ranged from Weird Tales, movies, video games, collecting, comics, roleplaying games, and all sorts of other stuff. We ran into a young gentleman we talked to the last year who was in game studies, and we set up a time we would all get together to chuck some dice and talk about elves on Friday night.

My panel completed, or at least over, Friday was a lot easier for me. I attended my UNL friend's presentation, which was stuck early in the morning in a suite up on the thirty-somethingth floor, so the attendance was sadly thin. One day's other highlight panels for me were the Western panel on which one of my Howardian colleagues read about Breckenridge Elkins and rough-and-tumble fighting, which I never knew was a particular fighting style with its own techniques and rituals. The next highlight was the gaming panel about mapping. I had never put that much careful thought into the science of mapping out a roleplaying world, whether as the DM or as a player. While it's certainly true that Conan never carries around a compass and sketches out everywhere he's been, creating a map of the world one visits is an interesting 'living document' mixing elements of cartography with storytelling.

The Friday night Dungeons and Dragons game (I'll admit, it wasn't technically D&D, since we were playing the rules set developed by one of the gentlemen there, called Adventurer Conqueror King (and let me take another parenthetical to say how perfectly that title for the game matches up with playing with a bunch of Howardians)). We played for a while in one of the conference rooms, but then we moved out into one of the lobbies because the night crew had to come in to clean. We were there so late they even shut down the escalators. The adventure was a great deal of fun, though we didn't get to see nearly all of the dungeon or accomplish any of our goals. It captured the missing element of many of the games I had been in before: that sense of going into the unknown with a bunch of untrustworthy cutthroats (including a Family of vermin killers, an elderly priestess of a shall we say reproductive deity, a trio of mad priests worshiping a god of decay, and more kill-crazed dwarves than it is entirely safe to be around). Without modern hand-holding such as balanced encounters and linear paths, we experienced the true paranoia of exploring a mysterious dungeon where everything was trying to kill us, an experience made all the more terrifying by our precariously low hit points and the horrifying results of being incapacitated (having to roll on a chart to see our crippling injury). We spent most of our time not fighting or exploring but debating about which course of action was least likely to lead to our awful demise. Amidst a table crammed with snacks, we played in our imaginations, making only crude diagrams to show our marching order and not relying on figures to mark our places on a board. This made the game much more colorful for me, since it all happened in my mind, which has an even better budget for special effects than a well-stocked game board. Overall, this is exactly the kind of roleplaying experience I most enjoy.

After staying up to around two in the morning (after everyone announcing around ten how beat we all were), I staggered into bed and returned the next day to my university, staggering in a semi-conscious state through the airports. When I got back, my head was still buzzing and a list of things to research. If I find my camera, I'll add pictures to this blog. For the moment, it's lost in Movingspace, the place things go when you move and can't find them while unpacking.

"The Last Incantation"

I haven't written for a while, so I thought I'd say something, even though I don't feel I have much to say. I've found, while writing a blog, that it's sometimes difficult to try to reconcile three things I think are essential to a good blog post: a topic I find interesting, a topic my audience might find interesting, and a topic I can write at significant length about

At any rate, moving on from navel-gazing to the meat of the thing, I've been doing a lot of reading in the old Weird Tales-esque sword and sorcery genre. In moving beyond Robert E. Howard and H. P. Lovecraft in the genre, I have been reading Clark Ashton Smith. I find Smith's writing in general weaker than either of the two masters I mentioned. His characters are flat caricatures, his prose is excessively stilted and at times purple, and in general his stories feel more like sketchy anecdotes of strange misadventures than they do full stories. That being said, I've found one story I felt moved by: "The Last Incantation."


For your perusing pleasure

It's not long. You can read it in a few minutes.

There's some pretty classic evil sorcerer stuff going on here: the long-bearded ancient magician, the viper familiar living in a unicorn's skull, the ancient and unholy knowledge that no man should possess. But, at its root, the story is about love, melancholy, and remembrance. Even all the power of the universe cannot make Malygris happy, nor recall the happiness he had as a young man who had neither the knowledge nor the magic he possesses in his old age. He doubts even before he begins that the spell will bring him what he wants, and yet he must attempt it.

The emotion is subdued in the end. The magician is neither heartbroken nor furious; I get the feeling he is too old and withered to feel much even from this final disappointment--he has nothing left to him but his weariness and anguish. There is no single dusty tear; the only sign that he is moved is that his voice has become "thin and quavering." This withheld emotion is what makes the story work for me. Nylissa does not recoil from what he has become; she responds empty of emotion, leaving the scene's resonance squarely on Malygris.

Malygris, living alone except for his familiar, has long since seen all that is to be seen and conquered all that he had to conquer. He has sucked the juices out of life, and only the husk remains. He lives in dust and shadows. Even in this last scene, in which he performs an impossible and beautiful miracle, he is only an old man who has outlived his passions, waiting to die alone.

I do think the story is at times over-written, despite the restraint I praise. Smith, as he does in many of his stories, tells the reader what the reader already knows. For instance: "He could believe no longer in love or youth or beauty."


Or later, when Malygris refers to the "Nylissa whom I knew, or thought I knew?", the "or thought I knew" again hits us over the head with the theme.

And, if we still missed it, we get the familiar's Aesop-like endingline: "This, my master, was the thing that you had to learn."

Also, this would make for a wonderful low-budget short film.

A Memory and a Dream

When I was a boy, I caught a snippet of a TV show in which I saw a child speaking with a life-sized animatronic monster in someone's workshop, the monster having come to actual life in her dream. I remember the child going into the vast room and seeing the creature, at first hanging limp, come to life and speak intelligently. It was the kind of creature effect they used to use in films and TV before they had CGI: limbs moved by pistons and a face of plastic and steel covered in rubber.

I was leaving the house at the time, so I only saw a few minutes of this show, but it stayed with me. This grabbed my attention so much that I dreamed with it many times, repeating the scene so often in my mind's eye that I felt almost as though I knew the whole story. It is one of my memories--if I can call something so distorted a memory at all.

The image of the child speaking with the half-made animatronic monster, only partially skinned and yet fully alive, entered into my own dreams. There was something about this thing, at first built to have the appearance of life, and yet taking on true life and intelligence, that moved me deeply. With the usual power of dreams, the image of this TV show segment became both distorted and sharper. One of the tricks of dreams is that they return our memories not as they were but as we felt them. The most remarkable features become amplified, with additions that our fancies use to build the vision even more. I can still clearly visualize the scene as I saw it: in my story, the story that I dreamed, the character speaking with the monster is a little girl, and her older brother is building this creature in the basement for a movie. The creature comes alive and speaks only to her, when she is asleep. In my dreams, the monster is a mix of the Gmork from The Neverending Story, which had a profound influence on me as a boy, and a dragon. The girl is curious and a little afraid, the monster is terrifying and clever, and yet doesn't mean her actual harm. He is malevolent, but not to her. He wants to be completed. She was afraid that if her brother completed the monster, the creature would kill her brother.

This scene came back to me through the years, and I think it stayed with me because it became such a potent symbol of the imagination itself. The imagination, like the maker of an animatronic monster, creates something in the image of life which isn't quite real, but seems as though it is. And yet that false memory feels just as real as things that really happened. That image, like the monster in my dream, takes on a life of its own, the representation becoming a unique living thing in its own right. To me, the story was about wonder, a little girl who doesn't quite understand what forces make an animatronic "live", and yet in whose imagination sees beyond the machine to the true essence of the monster. To her brother, it only is made to seem real. But to the girl, even half-built (and obviously not alive), it is real.

I had tried to find the show through internet searches, but couldn't locate it. I didn't know what keywords to use. Was the main character even a girl? A boy? How could I express an animatronic monster coming to life in terms Google would understand? And yet I didn't try very hard. I wasn't sure I wanted to find the original source. I preferred my own story.

All of this would have remained a vague memory that came to me once every so often, but about a week ago Netflix recommended something new on streaming: "Monster Maker," an episode of The Jim Henson Hour which aired in the late 80s and early 90s. And there it all was: the half-made creature that seems to come to life, the child, the conversation no one else seems to see. But in this version there is no brother and sister, just a boy. The things they talk about are completely different from what I remember. The story is about an imaginative British boy wanting to work for a legendary creature effects designer who lives in his neighborhood. The plot is fairly mundane; the show says some wonderful things about the power of the imagination, yet its main arc hardly involves the creature at all.

As I watched the episode, I was struck by these differences. I was sure, despite having seen this program more than twenty years ago, that the things I remembered were part of a real show. As it turned out, I was only partially right. I had to face that the show I remembered, about the little girl and her brother, never existed. I had been wrong. I had misremembered. This was the real show.

Or was it? When asked about memories years later, people vividly tell stories of things that never happened. To them, they did happen. And if there is no proof otherwise, who's to say what really happened? Maybe other children, like me, came up with their own versions of that show, versions that became a thousand different, unique stories about children and animatronic monsters. If I had never found this program, the story I made up would have remained real to me. And part of me hopes, even now that I've been 'set straight,' that I'll still dream about my version. After all, it did exist, in a way.

In my dreams.

Because I Try to be Balanced

I found this on Facebook. Now, of all the things they could have highlighted in a game about Conan, things like an awesome fantasy setting, exotic locations, high adventure, weird magic, the chance to be a hero; they had to go with violence and people wanting to ban it? I love Conan and the Hyborian Age and everything sword-and-sorcery, and I love video games, and yet this ad still fails to get me the least bit excited for playing this game. Do they really think people are going to devote hours of their lives to something every week just because it's violent? Sometimes I swear the people who write the ads for Facebook are 14. Or they're probably not 14, they probably unhip old dudes trying to fumble blindly at that demographic based on focus groups they didn't understand and what they occasionally overhear their own kids saying. Conan is so much more than just violence, and it's definitely better than just trying to attract attention by being controversial. Come on. That puts it on the same level as GWAR. You don't want to go there. It's about adventure and mystery and heroism and wonder, not about getting your mom angry when she catches you playing it.

I have a better idea for an ad. It goes, "Know, o Prince, that between the years when the oceans drank Atlantis and the gleaming cities, and the rise of the sons of Aryas, there was an Age undreamed of, when shining kingdoms lay spread upon the world like blue mantles beneath the stars...."

Now that's something sure to get me hooked.

Don't even get me started why they're using some chick with cleavage instead of Conan himself. Reminds me of that ad with the half-naked woman for some game that was always popping up everywhere a few months ago. Just who is their target audience, considering the game is rated 18+? (That's a rhetorical question.)

Just a Little Friendly Ribbing

So I saw this ad at the bottom of a story by Cracked.com and I got a chuckle out of it, partially because it was on a story about people being obnoxious. The cheerful, clean-cut, good-looking young people embracing, the logo cut off by its own picture, and the general optimism of a dating site gave me a good giggle. Plus there's that motto, "Find God's Match for You", which they're proud enough of to trademark. As though God has a match for me, and this site is the way an all-powerful divine being is going to make that match known to me.



But then I had a weird idea. Dating sites usually (not that I'd know) have a drop-down menu that allows me to search for various combinations of sexes. For instance, there's usually the option of male/female searching for male/female/both. Some of the sites even have transgendered or "other" options. So I got curious: what would the sexuality options be like on this squeaky-clean Christian site? So I just had to click the link.



Yep. I reckon.

Conan movie review

This is just my opinion, and I don't claim to be an expert in movies or in Conan, though I love both. If you thing I'm wrong, please don't comment about it, but you're welcome to share your opinion. I welcome discussion, but I'm not interested in an argument, and I'll just delete such comments.

(I try to avoid spoilers, but no promises.) (Another note: I watched this movie in 2D since it wasn't available in 3D in my town, and considering how messy I found some of the scenes in 2D, I can only imagine how it must look in 3D.)

It's pretty inevitable that after coming back from the first showing of Conan the Barbarian in Lincoln, I should sit down at my computer and write up some of my thoughts while they're still fresh in my mind. I have been reading Conan stories since I was a kid. I'm a huge Conan fan, and I presented a paper about Robert E. Howard (the writer who created Conan in the 1930s) at a conference last Spring. I am fully aware and sensitive to the issues in the work, especially the ethnic and gender-based ones that don't sit well with me as a modern person, but Conan and Howard stir something in me that I can't deny.

They showed the movie in the biggest theater, clearly expecting it to be the weekend's biggest movie. I got to the theater an hour early and sat in the best seat in the house, dead center and right in the aisle where I could stretch my legs. By the time the film started, there were perhaps ten people in the theater. At least three of them walked out, including a mother and her perhaps 13 year old son after a grisly torture scene. (A brief note: some of the gore really does get over the top. If you have a sensitive stomach, stay away.)

First things first: there was a lot of talk about whether Jason Momoa could play a good Conan. By what I could tell, he put some his whole heart into the role. I tip my hat to him. He was alternately funny, scary, and badass, just as Conan should be--he had gigantic melancholies and gigantic mirths. Though they didn't digitally give him blue eyes, as some Conan fans endlessly demanded, I see no problem with that. Jason Momoa played a great Conan, and Jason Momoa has brown eyes, so that's the eyes they gave him in the movie. I really don't think anyone could have done a better Conan, and his performance is miles better than Arnold's. I really can't say enough about how good he was in this movie. It's a shame that the adventurous, fun-loving Conan he gets to play early in the movie eventually gives way to a hard-edged killer of men whose demeanor stays a little too constant, which I felt was more the fault of the writers than the director. Really, I can't say enough what a good job he did with the character. He looks and acts like a Frank Frazetta painting come to life. If this movie doesn't do well in the box office, I certainly don't think Jason Momoa should blame himself for it. He gave it his all, and it really shows.

The movie gets off to a great start after the intro. The first thing we see is battle. The scene is bloody, intense, and went right for the gut. Ron Perlman does a solid job as Conan's badass father, and the kid who played young Conan looked plain dangerous. About twenty minutes into the movie, I was starting to have hope that they actually got it right. I could see myself texting (if I had texting) my friends that this could be a Conan movie well worth seeing. They were doing so well. After a bloody childhood filled with emotional twists, Conan becomes a wandering warrior, and we get to see him raid a slave camp, kill the slavers in a blood-drenched free-for-all brawl, sweep a beautiful (and topless) woman into his arms, and celebrate in a tavern. For better or worse, that's what a Conan movie should be, and my hopes were high.

But after the intro, things really slow down. There are long sequences where just about nothing happens. I felt like the movie sprinted out of the gate and got winded before it was even a quarter done. I blame part of this on the way it was filmed, in which CGI and too-close camera work is used to make up for the lack of broad, stunning landscapes and interesting locations, probably for budget reasons. Instead, we get a lot of moving from place to place. A more than two hour action-adventure flick is pretty rare, and this one had a lot of fat that should have been cut.

The film makes copious references to Robert E. Howard lore. It references the siege of Venarium, mentioned as Conan's first battle against the Aquilonians in "Beyond the Black River," and it also talks about Conan stealing the Heart of the Elephant and slaying the sorcerer Yara, from "The Tower of the Elephant." That being said, I didn't see much color in the actual film. There are a few rough-and-tumble cities where Conan spends most of his time in taverns, but not much happens there, and most of the fights take place either in the woods, in stone rooms, or in hallways/tunnels. In a world that should be stunning and exotic, the locations that really matter feel generic, which no adventure movie should ever be.

Many of these locations are forgettable, including a room at the top of an abandoned citadel where the villains taunt the captured damsel (if you think the fact that the girl gets captured is a spoiler...). They taunt her and then they leave. Nothing happens, and the bare-bones set of columns and polished stone floors felt like something whipped up half from a sound stage and half from CGI. The final fight takes place in a cave complex that really didn't have much going on, either. It's just a lot of random stone tunnels leading nowhere. It sure did have a lot of guardrails, though. Seriously, if you watch this film, watch for all the chain railings over the yawning chasms. They might be a bunch of evil psychos, but they take safety very seriously. Earlier in the film, the ruined city turns out to be just a single city square. If only they would have had the budget to do more. It's like the filmmakers didn't know what the audience would want to look at. During the ruined city scene, every time one of the sand monsters gets killed, we have to stop, zoom in close, and watch it fall apart. Every. Single. Time. It was cool the first time, but come on! I get it. They're made of sand. I didn't think the fifth one would be made out of cotton candy or something.

Jason Momoa does a bang-up job, but the rest of the cast is a mixed bag. They threw in two sidekicks for Conan: a black pirate and a one-eyed thief. The pirate did a great job with his dialogue, though he felt like he was there more to provide background for Conan than to play an actual role in the movie. There was one utterly pointless fight scene with him in it that I felt was probably there just to give him something to do other than talk about what a hard character Conan is. The other sidekick was pretty worthless, and didn't do much at all apart from trying keys into locks until he found one that fits. That's a lockpicking skill even I have. Plus he had an outrageous accent that he seemed to lose when he got excited. Ugh.

I know the damsel, played by Rachel Nichols, was supposed to be eye-candy, but she wasn't even particularly good at that. They dressed her character, Tamara, up in costumes that were neither flattering nor imaginative. Though they tried to involve her in the fights, it felt so half-hearted that I would almost have preferred to see her in the back hiding or clinging to Conan's leg. In one scene, she gives up her wimpy dagger for a sword Conan tosses her, which she then uses to kill a guy. In the next scene, she's right back to the dagger. So much for character development. I felt the filmmakers made a major mistake letting her perspective take over halfway through the movie. Her character is just boring, and she never seems to have much motivation beyond surviving, and she doesn't even seem all that concerned about that. I know Conan needs a woman, but the original world of Robert E. Howard has quite a few strong, powerful women, and Tamara just doesn't cut it.

As the villain, Stephen Lang does well... sometimes. Sometimes he is menacing, bombastic, and scary, and I ate it up even though he is over-acting to the hilt. But other times, I felt he is just delivering his lines. It's like he decided he would put in a solid half-hour of screentime and make up the rest with just being there. Then Rose McGowan, as the villain's evil daughter, is pretty cheesy-awesome, weird yet sultry, except that she was just too obsessed with the silly finger-knives she wears . Whether she is cutting someone with them, scraping the furniture with them, or just waving them around, she just can't keep her hand at her side like a normal person. I swear half the character description must be "evil crazy sorceress" and half "finger knives."

I have two more major complaints. The first is the writing. The dialogue is okay at times, but just flat in others, partially because it rarely carries a sense of real urgency. Conan stories are known for their adrenaline-fueled frenzy, but I was never sure what the movie's plot really meant. Was it more about Conan avenging his people or about the villain taking over the world? How, exactly, did he intend to take over the world? What happens if he's successful? Howard's dialogue can be clunky at times, but it's always heated with emotion, and some of the conversations about the fate of the world felt a bit like guys deciding what to have for dinner.

Speaking of Howard, the pervasive themes of barbarism vs civilization that Howard is known for only appears in a few lines of dialogue, spoken by the pirate, which only reaffirms my belief that he was added purely to build up a Howardian hero. We never even get to see a civilized city; the only cities are a pirate town and a city of thieves. There's also a monastery, which seems pretty copacetic, and there was none of the decadent, fading civilization that Howard does so well in his stories.

The film could still have been really solid, budget and generic problems and all, if it hadn't been for the way the movie never really let me see what was happening in the action scenes. Overall, I can deal with poor sets and shallow dialogue. It's a sword-and-sorcery flick; that's expected. But the filming style (cinematography? I don't know terminology), particularly in the fight scenes, is just awful. I've complained before about modern cinema's tendency to string together a fight scene from a series of half-second shots from all different angles, but it was particularly bad in this movie. I yearned for even a single glimpse of a wider shot to establish who was where and what was happening. Instead, I got plenty of shots of faces, swords, biceps, and blood, but it all felt so disconnected that I just couldn't enjoy it. On top of that, it was so zoomed in I couldn't even enjoy the choreography, since if you zoom in far enough even a couple of kids knocking sticks together can look action-packed--though you have no idea where they are or who's winning. For a movie that put such emphasis on the fights, I was hugely disappointed.

There's one especially egregious fight scene in which Conan battles a guy on a giant wheel. It was very nearly something out of the Pirates of the Caribbean movies. After a while, two guys swinging swords at each other just gets boring, because you know neither is going to get the other until the over-elaborate fight scene comes to the conclusion.

I'm not sure if the action sequences were due to bad editing, bad direction, or just bad luck. During one scene, I was thinking: "Now she's fleeing the bad guys... wait, Conan is there... where are the bad guys? ... now she and Conan are talking... okay, there are some bad guys, about time they showed up ... now the bad guys are chasing them ... now Conan is killing bad guys ... wait, how did the bad guys get in front of them? ... now she's being attacked by bad guys. did Conan leave? how did the bad guys get past him? ... never mind, there he is, fighting some other guy in some other location ... no, wait, he's back again and saving her!" There was a scene in which we get repeated shots of Conan fighting someone and Tamara standing there watching. The sequence cuts back and forth between her watching and him fighting, and then she hands him something. Hang on! You mean she was five feet away the whole time? What I wouldn't have given for some wide, long shots to wrap my head around what was going on.

There's a scene in which Conan fights a tentacled water-monster that features prominently in the trailer. Conan has to negotiate saving his friend, fighting off enemy warriors, and dealing with the monster. I felt it was quite good, though the camera work left me feeling confused. I felt that what could have been a brilliant set-piece was wasted. The elements were all there: a scary enemy, a cool monster, an intimidating set, and a bunch of tasks for the hero to have to juggle, all with dire consequences. It's a shame I couldn't just sit back and watch it unfold. The camera was constantly shoving my face into someone's armpit or sliding it down the blade of someone's sword.

Also, where is Crom in all of this? I was expecting Conan's god to get a proper shout-out, but it just never happens.

The movie ends with what feels like a rushed and disappointing culmination. Perhaps if they had made the film shorter, they could have focused on the good stuff instead of trying to stretch their budget and resources across so many different elements, many of which end up feeling flat and half-assed.

Overall, I wouldn't say it's a bad movie. It's easily better than the second Conan movie and could even be better than the first. But there was something in the old movie, a giddy exuberance, that seems to have been buried under all the CGI and the rapid shots between weird camera angles. Jason Momoa's performance and obvious dedication to the role should have deserved better work than this, and it feels like a film with all the right intentions but without the traction to really make them count. It has a lot of good ideas, but also a lot of generic ones, and by the end what was a promising blood-and-guts adventure flick turns into just another fantasy movie. I harp a lot on the way it was shot, but if that kind of Transformers-style rapid-cut action is your thing, you might even enjoy it.

Personally, I enjoyed it. I went in wanting to enjoy it, and for all its warts, it had enough to keep me, if not happy, at least content. There was enough there for me to walk away feeling like I had seen a Conan movie. The atmosphere (when it wasn't generic fantasy blandness) was brutal, just as it should be, and some of the locations do look cool. As the biggest highlight, Jason Momoa really nailed the character, and that alone was worth the price of admission. I came to see Conan, and I got quite a Conan.

At the start of the film, Stephen Lang's character commands an army of hundreds that devastates a village of hard-bitten warriors in a truly epic fight sequence. At the end, his entourage seems to have dwindled to two dozen men who disappear halfway through the scene, with no signs of his army or even of a colorful world beyond the dusty, dimly-lit set. I think this sums up the film as a whole for me

A Quick Thought

On Saturday, I got back from the PCA/ACA conference in San Antonio, where I had the real pleasure of taking part in a panel on Robert E. Howard. I hope to write about my experiences later. For now, I just had a thought I wanted to share that's been bumping around in my mind ever since.

During the conference, we discussed that Lovecraft is more popular in our modern culture than Howard. People also made a few jokes about the way Lovecraft's influences keep appearing (and being credited!) in our modern society. As a result, I think I have one possible explanation why Lovecraft is more generally known. I think it's because Lovecraft's singular style can be mapped onto a whole host of things. Something can be "Lovecraftian" just because it invokes an unspeakable horror born from some madness-inducing impossibility, or even just because someone slapped some tentacles on it, particularly if those tentacles are "squamous," "ichorous," or "rugose." Because we identify so many things in modern culture, particularly modern horror and monsters, as Lovecraftian, we see Lovecraft everywhere.

As a result, I'm going to start referring to everything that even remotely involves a decadent civilization being opposed by strong-hearted and clear-eyed barbarians as "Howardian." With luck, this will eventually get picked up and used in popular parlance.

Just about anything can be Howardian, from Westerns to superheroes to video games. Whether I'm talking about Unforgiven or God of War or Sin City, I'm thinking I'm going to try to get one "Howardian" a day into my conversations....

What's your favorite Howardian text?

(I hope I don't have to add that I mean this entirely tongue-in-cheek, and I hope it will be received as such!)