Edge of Daybreak

Edge of Darkness, seen Tuesday evening Feb. 9 2010 at the AMC Loews W. 34th St., aud. #4, was a pleasant surprise. It's one of those films that could, from the credits, go either way. Do you encounter the director Martin Campbell who did Vertical Limit, or the one who did Casino Royale? Mel Gibson? Is that the Lethal Weapon guy, the Lethal Weapon 4 guy, the Mrs. Soffel guy? It turns out to be a movie co-written by William Monahan, whose screenplay for The Departed was an excellent adaptation of the very good Korean movie Infernal Affairs. It turns out to be a movie edited by Stuart Baird. Now, who pays attention to who edited a movie? But Stuart Baird is the long-time go-to guy for Richard Donner, starting with The Omen and Superman, and with Mel Gibson dating back to Lethal Weapon, Maverick, one of those editors who works with people forever the way Thelma Schoonmaker has edited Martin Scorcese since forever or Michael Kahn has edited Spielberg for over 30 years dating back to Close Encounters. It's the movie that takes an actor named Shawn Roberts who's done plenty of TV but nothing anyone's really noticed and puts him in and gets a well-textured and interesting performance in a small but important role, and is otherwise filled with interesting actors doing interesting roles. Critics have said, true enough, that Ray Winstone kind of steals the movie from Mel Gibson, but the movie's full of nice supporting turns. It's one of those things that says A people aren't worried to surround themselves with other A people because they have the self-confidence not to worry they're going to be overshadowed. A movie with some nice old-fashioned subtle musical scoring by Howard Shore (LotR).

It's a movie good enough that I really noticed when it fell short of the mark. It does so once out of necessity, lingering for a second or two longer than you'd expect on the face of a young policeman. So yes, this cop plays an important role later on that justifies that strange extra second or two of screen time, but... it's such an intrusive and glaring second or two that I wish there was another way. And there's one three minute stretch around 90% of the way through the movie that's just silly and entirely unnecessary, and I wish somebody had noticed in time to leave it on the cutting room floor. But most of the movie is reasonably taut and suspenseful and well-crafted.

So worth seeing.

And then there's Daybreakers.

Ethan Hawke is an actor whose done a lot of interesting work for over 20 years now, along with Robert Sean Leonard a real stand-out to emerge from the plentiful supply of male adolescence in Dead Poets Society. Seems to me he should have had more of a career than he's had, and in part that's because he makes two or three strange choices for every logical one, and then one out of three of those strange choices is interesting strange and the rest of them are just strange.

Daybreakers is definitely one of his interesting strange choices, and should probably go on double bills with the equally interesting and strange Gattaca from a dozen-ish years back.

It's a vampire movie that goes in some very interesting directions. What happens when everyone becomes a vampire, turning humans into an endangered but very necessary species because the True Blood efforts in this world aren't meeting with success. So human blood is a vital necessity, there are fewer and fewer humans to supply it, and the vampire population is not happy.

Ethan Hawke plays a hematologist for a pharmaceutical company that's looking for a cure while also farming humans in a large slowly emptying tank.

The movie heads off in some interesting directions. Hawke will find his way to a different cure that is not intuitive. That cure will have some implications that are kind of clever, leading to some final act twists on the standard vampire movie that are fun and intriguing. There are often some interesting things going on a little bit off to the side of the main movie. As with Edge of Darkness, there is some nice stuff going on with the casting, not just with Hawke but with Sam Neill and Willem Dafoe and an interesting turn by young Australian actor Michael Dorman in the same way you've got the interesting turn from Shawn Roberts in Edge of Darknesss.

But the movie matches all of the interesting stuff with a lot that is archetypal and familiar, battles between father and daughter, between brothers.

It's a whirlwind of the offbeat and interesting and the obvious and uninteresting, in the same line or same scene or same frame oftentimes.

If you're remotely interested in vampire fiction, this is definitely a must-rent. I'm certainly glad to have seen it, can see why its theatrical run has been a quick in-and-out, but wouldn't be surprised if it's a movie people are talking about and referencing for a lot longer than its theatrical run alone might suggest. Which I think is the case for Gattaca as well, and for other of Ethan Hawke's strange choices. I should be happier than I am that an actor who has the smarts and talent to be Big has instead chosen a stranger road.

Viewer Mail

One of my blog readers sent an e-mail to ask why we don't accept electronic queries at JABberwocky, which is actually a pretty good question that seemed worth answering.

Part of it -- the most important part for me -- is just the generation I'm from. I spent many years reading queries on pieces of paper, and I'm still very comfortable doing it that way. There are a lot of things that can be determined about the quality of a query just by looking at that piece of paper. First and foremost, is the query letter one page or two? It's much harder to get that sense from looking at an e-mail query, and I still think this is one of the most important tests. Even for a one-page letter, I can take that out of an envelope and see before I even start reading if there's a good balance of information about both the author and the manuscript, or if the bulk of the letter is an over-long description of the book. There are words of that letter that jump off the printed page -- good or bad -- in a way very different from scrolling along on a computer screen.

Then there are the process management issues. I could have people send a query letter as an actual attachment of a letter, a PDF or Word file. Do HR people at big companies that get all kinds of attached resumes look at all of those on isolated computers? Leave that aside (I can get paper cuts with hard copy queries, nothing in life is entirely safe), the time to download and open the files and then paste e-mail addresses into a response template is probably greater in aggregate than opening hard copies and putting replies into SASEs. Maybe I'm wrong, and an electronic query doesn't need to be recycled, but I'm pretty sure it's not a big time savings to have e-mail queries.

As another management issue, there's the "out of sight, out of mind" thing. Queries would need to come in to a dedicated e-mail address, and I'm not sure an e-mail box I wasn't checking would nag at me the same way a pile of hard copy letters does.

When the day comes that I have people working for me who are pushing heavily on having e-mail queries, I doubt I'll hold to my own stronger comfort level with hard copy. That day hasn't yet arrived. But there's no denying that for me I'm still happiest holding a piece of paper in my hand, just as I am happier on days when I get into Manhattan and buy a physical copy of the Washington Post, instead of reading it on line.

something else to worry about

Ian Randall Strock, the high poobah of the excellent SF news site SFScope, which anyone interested in the genre should bookmark or RSS, gives us all something else to be depressed about. As he points out here, the e-book age makes record-keeping and auditing a little more challenging. We don't as yet have a tracking system for e-books like Nielsen Bookscan does for printed books. And with printed books, the publisher and maybe its distributor are responsible pretty much on their own for shipping books and processing when they come back, and these things can be tracked and checked in different ways if the need arises. But for e-book sales, the publishers are almost entirely dependent on third parties, who can decide to play games in their reports to the publisher. And if the author goes to check on the publisher, that third party piece of paper is the only thing to look at. Hmmmm. Can we force the publisher to audit an e-book retailer if we think the retailer is playing games? Thanks, Ian. This will help me sleep better at night.

& when the fog lifted...

So what did it mean to have Amazon's "buy" buttons removed for certain Macmillan titles?

I could do a really thorough Nielsen Bookscan research project and check 62 things, but I do have a day job so I'm limiting the investigation to books by my clients which I'd be checking anyway, though drilling down a little further into the numbers than I might do for just my ordinary Wednesday report card check.

When we looked over the Bookscan #s for Week #4 ending January 31, all of us at JABberwocky cried, because it was a kind of depressing week all the way around. Numbers on most things were down. And that had really nothing to do with the Macmillan/Amazon dispute. That started at the very end of the week, and since Bookscan gets the figures based on when books shipped, pretty much the entire effect of the disput would be seen in Week #5. And overall, Week #5 was a stronger week for the JABberwocky list than week #4 was.

So for the week when the full impact would have been felt...

For mass market paperbacks, the typical Brandon Sanderson book, the Mistborn series or Elantris, was on average down maybe 1 or 2 percentage points. The typical Charlaine Harris book, which are not Macmillan, was up maybe 1 or 2 percentage points. The Lost Fleet books were up or down but on balance a little up. No pattern to a Simon Green.

But when we drill down one step, there's a breakdown on Bookscan between "Retail" and "Discount and Other," which includes the major internet web sites as well as places like Costco, Target and BJs. For most books, the "Discount and Other" line therefore just means "internet" because the books aren't available at the discount stores. So for Elantris, the Retail line is up 7%, and the Discount line is -67%. So it looks like this was a disaster for Elantris? Well, yes and no. For the typical mass market paperback, which Amazon does not discount, internet sales are relatively smaller than for hardcovers -- and for boxed sets -- where people go on-line to seek out the discount. It's possible that the Macmillan/Amazon dispute cost 25-35 copies in sales.

And we do see some real damage when we look at the boxed set numbers for Brandon's Mistborn trilogy. Sales on these can weight very heavily toward the internet, because the same 3 books that Amazon won't discount singly get a very sweet discount when purchased in the box. For its entire lifetime, Mistborn in paperback has 18% of its copies sold on-line, 17% and 20% for the next two books in the series. The boxed set has sold 35% of its copies on-line. And for that boxed set, retail sales were down 8% from the week before -- and the boxed set was down 45%. Then again, the last week, the boxed set had been down 38% retail/30% discount because fewer of those sell as we get further away from the holiday and gift card season. If I compare -8 to -45 that's a lot, -45 to -30 not so much, but I think it's safe to say that the boxed set had a big hit.

And what about the hardcovers? Well, The Gathering Storm was down -4% retail, -50% internet. The total drop in sales was only 15%, and that's not an atypical drop for a book that's been out for three months, but we may be looking at 150 or 200 fewer copies. We may be looking at fewer copies for Warbreaker.

Halo novels? The mass market of Cole Protocol by Tobias Buckell was -3% retail, -37% discount, -19% "non-traditional" which are supermarkets and drug stores and airport newsstands, and for this book the discount line may include Target or other non-internet discounters. The trade paperback is -9% retail, -31% internet. But this isn't very significant, because the internet sales are a very small portion of the total, as an example 10% of the lifetime sales for the Cole Protocol trade paperback. So even though these books are selling very nicely, and even though the percentage differences are huge, the actual number of copies represented is no more than 10 or 20 lost sales.

But where we really see a major impact is for those books where a few copies are making a big difference, and the balance on retail vs. internet sales is more pronounced.

As an example, Michael Schiefelbein's first "Victor" hardcover for St. Martin's was Vampire Transgression, and sold 26% of its total copies on the internet. The new book Vampire Maker is just out. This isn't a big bestselling book. The series sells steadily in trade paperback and has for many years, but when it loses -72% internet vs. -26% retail, that takes this new book that needs to sell decently to hold its shelf space and you might be losing 8 copies, but that's a significant percentage of the total number of copies that might have otherwise sold last week. Jeri Westerson's Veil of Lies trade paperback was +32% retail, and down 81% on the internet, and might have lost one-third of its total sale last week. Her new hardcover might have lost half or more of its total sale. Jeri's building an audience for her historical mysteries and like Michael Schiefelbein selling steadily. For these authors, even when we're only talking a few copies, we're talking something significant.

So what does it all mean? The Amazon/Macmillan dispute clearly did cost some sales, perhaps even in the hundreds of copies for The Gathering Storm, though even that may have been only 7% of the total number of copies sold last week. For authors lower down on the totem pole, we might be looking at 5 or 6 copies sold, but that could have been half of the expected number, so it's less significant one way but very significant the other. Some of those sales might just get pushed back into the current week. Some of them might have gone to marketplace sales, and in that case if some of the lower-priced marketplace copies were grabbed up last week thus skewing toward higher-priced marketplace copies now, there may be a slight long-term switch in the next two months where people buy a new book instead of a marketplace copy. Other than for authors whose books were going on sale last week or the week before, the blips are probably survivable. For both Macmillan and Amazon, the dispute was attention-getting but any losses to either probably insignificant against what both sides saw as their potential gains in fighting the battle in public.

It's like they're twins

There's supposedly some kind of big game today. I'm guessing it's a hockey game, cuz it's winter time.

Is there a ball game of some sort today?

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Male fantasy writers represented by JABberwocky Twitter about the Super Bowl. Can you guess which Tweet goes with which writer?

Apocalypse Now

In the past six months, we've had three movies full of debris-ridden interstates, broken pavement, downed bridges, overturned shopping carts as symbol of dead nomadic humans.

The first of those was Zombieland (seen in October 2009 at the Regal/UA Kaufman Astoria 14), which arrived during my blogging interregnum, and which I consider to be a thoroughgoing delight. If it wasn't written with its two leads in mind, it was certainly impeccaby cast with two actors who took full advantage of every opportunity the script had to give them. Woody Harrelson has had a very strong year ranging from his excellent deadpan laconic zombie killer here to the equally laconic but totally different soldier he plays in The Messenger. I'm not sure Jesse Eisenberg is yet capable of bringing life to an inert script; he certainly doesn'tmake Adventureland sing. But this young actor wasn't even 20 when he made Roger Dodger sing, barely old enough to drink when he delivered a performance of confused teenage snarak in The Squid and the Whale, and he does it again in Zombieland. We've seen the humorous horror movie before, from American Werewolf in London to Shaun of the Dead. Eisenberg's voiceover totally nails Zombieland and helps elevate it above even those good movies. It's not perfect; I didn't totally buy it when Eisenberg's character started thinking with the part of his anatomy around two or three feet down from his brain. Perfect, no. But fresh, fun, quick-witted, and a definite one to rent.

Awards season presented us with The Road (seen Saturday January 2, 2010 at Landmark's Sunshine, Aud. #4) . This was marketed as quintessential award bait, and that's a problem when you get the kind of mixed reviews this one did. On account of the reviews, I was ambivalent about going to see it, but a strong recommendation from Peter V. Brett ultimately pushed me into the theatre, and I'm extremely glad that I saw this. What makes the movie work for me is its pitch-perfect blend of a harrowing post-apocalyptic setting with a heart-warming father-and-son story. The film pulls no punches in its depiction of what the world would be and should be. Horrible things happen at almost every turn. They're often handled with as much directorial delicacy as I think the subject matter could allow, but because we're viewing them through the lens of characters we care about quite a bit, the events have real emotional power. We're not able to distance ourselves. I think this might be one reason for the surprisingly mixed reviews. If you take the topic and make a dull, leaden movie... well, you can call that art, and then easily say nice things about it because of the dulling, distancing effect it has. So David Cronenberg can make you squeamish and get great reviews because you're set apart from it all, and here you don't have that luxury. Viggo Mortensen is excellent as the father, the son is played by Kodi Smit-McPhee, who isn't entirely immune to a kind of youthful over-emoting but for the most part plays this unnatural role with winning naturalism. Charlize Theron is tender as the mother. And Guy Pearce, who had a brief but powerful role in The Hurt Locker has another excellent cameo here.

And talk about your odd juxtapositions, I also saw a midnight showing of The Muppet Movie, the very next movie in the exact same auditorium, didn't have to leave my seat.

And then finally, we come to The Book of Eli (seen Sunday February 7, 2010 at Clearview's Chelsea, Aud. #9). Occasional commenter Myke keeps questioning my taste in movies so he will be quite disappointed to know he was right to warn me away from this. Here, you've got Denzel Washington as a Mad Max type of post-apocalyptic traveler. I like Denzel a lot and don't miss much that he's in, but this movie does pretty much nothing to show off his star power and charisma. So why did he pick this, and why pick him to waste him? Gary Oldman has some fun in a bad role that's been done 609 times before as a post-apocalyptic villain. The first two thirds of the movie are taken up with a lot of been-there done-that very uninteresting battle scenes. Toward the end of the movie, there's a very nifty twist that puts the movie a little into Sixth Sense/Fight Club territory. I think it may work. Part of me would love to go back and see the movie to see just how well the twist works, which in Sixth Sense is near perfect and in Fight Club really not at all, except to do that would involve having to watch 90 minutes of really un-interesting apocalyptic fight stuff. Furthermore, these kinds of twists work best in movies that have some underlying smarts, while I think this movie is essentially very stupid. Where does Gary Oldman get fuel for his fleet of cars? Why isn't he dethroned when his loyalists are decimated by Denzel Washington? Why doesn't he look to check out that the Bible is for real the moment it's given to him? And then in the crowning stupidity of the movie, after we've gotten the neat Sixth Sense/Fight Club/maybe even a bit of Twilight Zone nifty twist, we get this shot of the precious Bible (no spoiler here that this is the eponymous Book) being tucked on a shelf between The Torah and the Qu'ran. Nobody involved with the movie is aware of the fact that The Torah is the first five books of The Bible, so that it's at least a little bit wrong and I'd venture to say a little more than that for characters to act like there isn't a Bible to be had in the world? OK, yes, the Torah is only part of the Bible, no New Testatment, no Prophets, etc., having a copy of the Torah isn't having a copy of the Bible. But let's just say that a few minutes before the movie was getting totally jazzed about the opening verses of Genesis -- which are sitting on the shelf next to the Qu'ran at the time. Stupid, stupid, stupid.

I was much happier afterward to see Dear John (seen Sunday Feb. 7, 2010 at Clearview's Chelsea, Aud. #8). I saw this every bit as much to see Channing Tatum as I'd gone to The Book of Eli to see Denzel. I don't want to say that Dear John is genuinely good, but it delivers totally and pretty much without apology on what it promises. It's sappy but charming. It's almost 19 years ago to the day, also in the Chelsea, that I saw the pretty dreary Once Around by director Lasse Hallstrom, which was followed by the really good What's Eating Gilbert Grape, and that's the kind of career Hallstrom's had, careening wildly from the insufferable to the intriguing to the overly or overtly sentimental. This is well-cast genre fare. There are worse date movies or chick flicks for guys to be dragged along to.

customer in the middle

A few quick idle links on the whole e-book thing...

Timothy Egan is an excellent writer who worked for the NY Times for many many years as a reporter and now does an on-line opinion column for the Times. If I had more time for pleasure reading I'd love to read one of his books, but I settle for now to read his column for gems like this on the iPad: "it's a big iPhone, allowing people to carry all their movies, tunes, books, magazines, newspapers and the Web itself in something that still won't fit into a coat pocket, and will not withstand beach sand." Well, for the record, a Kindle could fit in some sufficiently big pockets if it wasn't covered, like the ones on my cargo pants. But please do read his whole column here.

My client Peter Brett has an interesting back-and-forth with a reader who's wondering how the e-book wars fit into the reader's own book-buying habits. It's a good question, and a good answer, and you'll find it here.

The reader, in his e-mail to the Peter, mentions LPs and MP3s, and I was thinking a little on the music business comparison earlier in the week when I was talking with another client about the 15% cover vs. 25% net question (earlier blog post here). Because I do worry a lot about file-sharing, and I worry about what will happen if publishing follows the music industry path, which would make the last week seem modest in comparison to the fun times ahead.

But there's one significant difference between the two. When the CD came around, the music industry kind of stopped supporting the idea of the 45 RPM single. Nobody had turntables for those, attempts to have CD singles were pretty half-hearted. When I was in high school, you really could spend $.99 or $1.49 to buy a single of something you really liked, even the good B side. I got Baker Street on a .45. Didn't buy an entire Gerry Rafferty album. When I was 35, you had to buy an entire album or not buy the one song you wanted. In publishing, people don't buy most novels because they like the 2nd chapter and the 8th chapter and don't care so much for the rest of them. There are some exceptions, like with travel guides for a big country where you just want to find out about one city. But big picture, people buy books. And the same book has been available at different price points at different times for 50 years, the hardcover branching to the remainder and the paperback, the library offering books for free, used books a more common thing than used records. Yes, some people having tasted the $9.99 e-book will say that it should always be thus. But how many people can say they were totally screwed to have to buy all of Dune when really all they wanted was the chapter with the sandworms.