Weekend etc.
Over the weekend, worked on taxes a bit, went through some papers, read the week's worth of submissions, obsessively checked Google News. Did a little editing. Scouted out a park for my birthday party. Fretted about whether to have a party given late notice. (One easy way to identify a Jed in the wild: if he's not fretting about something trivial, he's probably not Jed.)
Also indulged in rampant escapism.
Friday night I stopped by the video store, knowing I didn't have quite as many things to do as usual this weekend and wanting some fluff to take my mind off the real world. And wanting to catch up on the backlog of movies I haven't watched; I've seen almost none of the Oscar nominees.
They had DVDs of all three Back to the Future movies, for two-day rental, and on a whim I picked them up.
Over the next 24 hours, two different people indicated that the second and third ones were terrible, so I got a little apprehensive. But I figured I'd skim through the first one, anyway, to remind myself of key characters and the general story, to prepare for the others. And the first one was so charming that I watched it all the way through.
When I first saw it, back in '85 or so, I was very distressed at certain key plot points, notably the fading photograph; I thought it made no logical sense. Since then, I've read an awful lot of time-travel stories that don't make any logical sense, and have become somewhat inured to them; also, I've learned to appreciate fluff even if it doesn't make logical sense, if it's charming enough. And how can you not like a movie that has a credit for "Delorean Time Travel Consultant"?
(Also, Michael J. Fox was awfully cute. But can I just note: he and Lea Thompson were both 24 when this movie was made! And Thompson was 26 when she was in Some Kind of Wonderful! I knew teenage characters in movies are often played by actors who are a little older, but I would never have guessed in this particular case. And now I see that Mary Stuart Masterson (be still, my beating heart) was actually 21 in Some Kind of Wonderful, and Eric Stoltz was 26. I wonder if their being older made them more attractive somehow. I am now going to resist the temptation to go look up the stars of every single John Hughes movie and see if they were all over 20. At least Winona Ryder was only 18 in Heathers, and Christian Slater was 20 or younger.)
Ahem. Yes, I am a product of my generation's mainstream media experience, despite my best efforts; why do you ask?
Anyway. Where was I? Ah, yes, Back to the Future. So I enjoyed the first one quite a bit, and I decided to give the second a try. Figured I could always skip the third if the second one turned out to be terrible.
Well, the second one wasn't really all that good. There were a couple of very funny bits—the penultimate-or-so scene is brilliant—but there's also way way too much exposition. I would've guessed that the exposition was necessary for non-sf-fans to follow the time-travel stuff, but I'd heard a bit of the director's-commentary on the deleted scenes for part 1, in which the director noted that he and his co-writer had a tendency to write too much explanation. So I suspect that in part 2, they were just too rushed (since they were also working on part 3 simultaneously) to excise the unnecessary explanations. Let this be a lesson to you, my writerly comrades.
I was also amused to see that the credits in part 2 list Michael J. Fox, in addition to his obvious roles, as playing "Marlene McFly"—Marty's teenage daughter. I was completely oblivious.
And as with part 1, there were some great little background touches. You know you're in a grim 'n' gritty alternate reality when you see an abandoned cop car crashed at the side of the road in a bad neighborhood.
Anyway, I was figuring I might well just skip part 3, because part 2 was a little tedious despite the good bits; but then part 2 ended on a major major cliffhanger. I'd known the two were made semi-simultaneously, but I hadn't realized that they were basically one long story.
And I'm glad of that, because part 3 turned out to be a lot of fun. Not quite as much fun, and not quite as charming, as part 1, and the moral of part 3 (which they started setting up for, heavy-handedly, right at the beginning of part 2, despite there having been no indication of that particular character trait of Marty's in part 1) was rather annoying every time it came up; but the situations were over-the-top fun, the running gags really hit their stride, and Christopher Lloyd in love was purely charming, and his love interest was a cool character with a great smile. (And by the way, nobody in the business can do wild-eyed lunacy like Christopher Lloyd. When he wasn't busy saying "Great Scott!" (which grated on me after a while), his facial expressions throughout were almost enough to carry the whole trilogy.)
So anyway, overall I would actually say that the trilogy is worth watching. It's not brilliant by any means, but fun escapism.
Unrelatedly, the other thing I frittered away time on over the weekend was messing with the database. I've added a gender field to the author database, and am beginning to mark down authors' genders whenever it's obvious from their names. There are a surprising number of gender-ambiguous names. I'd be reluctant to draw any conclusions based on the incomplete data so far, but my guess is that the percentage of our submitters who are female is even lower than the 40% it was looking like when I did a very rough count last year; also, most of our most prolific submitters are male, so I suspect the percentage of submissions by men is even higher than the percentage of authors who are male. But that's all speculation; more comments when I have more/better data. In the meantime, if anyone reading this submits to us using a gender-ambiguous name, feel free to drop me a note letting me know your gender; don't worry, it won't bias us one way or t'other, it'll just give me better data to work with.
