Monthly Archives: September 2005

Endless Nights

Seven stories, one for each of Neil Gaiman’s Endless siblings. It wouldn’t seem like the best description to drum up interest in the newest (although not so very new) Sandman graphic novel, Endless Nights. At least, it wouldn’t to people who aren’t familiar with the series. If you are, seeing Neil Gaiman’s name attached to this property most likely comprises one of the few value guarantees out there. (I’ll try my damnedest not to gush further, when the next one of these comes up.)

Impressions: Desire’s story made me like it a little, which I’m not sure I ever had before. (Not that this lasted for very long.) Despair, although not an actual tale in the conventional sense, was gut-wrenchingly effective. Destiny is as uninteresting as he ever was, but I don’t think it’s his fault. Ten panels of Delight was enough to break my heart. Gaiman’s smart, to use her as sparingly as he has over all these years.

Finally, there are a couple of spoilers about the main sequence stories included here. That story is a lot more about the journey than the destination, but also these would probably be easier to appreciate by knowing the characters more thoroughly, anyhow.

La Marche de l’empereur

First of all, let there be no doubt that this falling behind thing is of the suck. It makes it really hard to adequately review serviceable-yet-mediocre fare when you’re a week or more after the fact. So, you’re asking yourself (or at least would be, if my titling scheme was not so utilitarian), what movie have you finally gotten around to seeing after a month out of the theaters? The Cave, surely. At the least, Red Eye, or maybe that Brothers Grimm thing, right? Well, no, instead, March of the Penguins.

There are two things to understand that will make sense out of this travesty of movie-going. 1) I do have some amount of interest in learning about things as well as stuff, and sometimes just for the sake of knowing things, not merely because of all the chicks at cocktail parties who hang on my every word and inevitably pay for the cab back to their respective places afterwards. 2) I really dig penguins. I mean, a lot. I blame Opus.

Anyhow, worthwhile movie? Yes and no. My instinctual reaction while watching was to assume that the Discovery channel is going to get a lot more advertising money over the next quarter or so. This is both its success and its failure. Excellent job of providing concise and comprehensible information about the world out there where most of us can’t afford to be. Terrible job of escaping the boundaries of a made-for-TV documentary. The only things that truly distinguish it from one of a hundred other such documentaries that have and will air on basic cable this year alone are a) a massive advertising budget and b) probability of winning an Oscar. Unless I’ve fabricated this into my days later memory banks, there were actual commercial break fades.

I forgot c), though. Probably, if this had not been theatrical, you’d have had Patrick Stewart narrating rather than Morgan Freeman. Of course, maybe this is his way of retiring and he’s hitting all of the big documentaries from here on out. Between this and War of the Worlds, he’s already off to a big start.