Monthly Archives: July 2010

Predators

One of the things I liked the most about Predators (and make no mistake, there were very few things I didn’t like) is that it did not concern itself with reasons. Why are there skillfully violent people being dropped out of the clear blue sky? Who armed them to the teeth with things they know how to use? How did they even get here? That doesn’t matter, all that matters is, here they are. And they’ve got to find a way to survive against the deadliest hunters in the universe, all while learning to trust each other, work as a team, and somehow keep Eric from That 70s Show alive (as he is also here for some reason). Or they’ve got to die messily, one by one, with no hope of rescue or escape.

Which is another thing I like about the movie, it did not waste any more time on the premise than it did on reasons. Within five minutes, the movie is going all out and it doesn’t ever really stop. It’s possible that the original Schwarzenegger-driven Predator is the better movie, but only possible; I have seen no better movie that had a Predator in it, without a doubt. This is probably not the best sequel ever, but it is hard to imagine crafting a sequel to a movie that would fit the spirit of its originator any better than this one did.

Despicable Me

You know how people describe some kid movies as being funny for adults too? Just to give you an idea of how this played out in Despicable Me, the joke that stands out in my head involves supervillain Gru going to the Bank of Evil to take out a loan to finance his plot to steal the moon, and seeing the notice that the Bank of Evil was “formerly Lehman Bros.” So you see.[1] On the bright side, the kid part of the movie was reasonably okay. Gru, who I already mentioned is a supervillain, is in competition with the rest of the supervillain community to pull off the world’s greatest heist. Along the way, he adopts three girls for use in a cookie-selling scheme, and learns valuable lessons about the importance of placing family above work. And I mean, it really is that facile, but it was occasionally funny in ways that were not directed at adults and it was sweet as well, in the ways you’d expect a kid movie with orphans to be. I liked it well enough to regret neither the time nor money, though certainly not well enough to seek it out again. Whether my like can be correlated to the half of a 40 ounce margarita that I imbibed over the course of the flick can be left as an exercise to the reader.

[1] Dear adult readers of Shards of Delirium, please fill out this simple survey. Do you find the referenced joke a) funny or b) an eye-rollingly insulting and yet simultaneously ultra-apt demonstration of the phrase “funny for adults”? Please do not fill out the survey if you are a child reader of Shards of Delirium.[2]
[2] In the interest of equal time: dear child readers of Shards of Delirium, please fill out this simple survey. Do you love bunnies because they are a) fuzzy or b) fluffy?

Dinner for Schmucks

Imagine you work in “business”, by which I mean the generic everyjob that seems to only exist in Hollywood’s imagination, where people are trying to get a promotion for a corner office, and there’s a meeting in a long room with the boss at the head of the table and people throw out ideas and are called on one at a time and so forth. Got it? Now, imagine that you are about to get that corner office, only you have to impress your boss at a monthly dinner he hosts by (along with all the other invitees) bringing along a complete moron, convincing these people that they’re awesome and up for a prize, and then setting them loose. I mean, it can’t be just any moron, it has to be someone special, like a blind fencer or a ventriloquist who is married to his puppet, or a guy who creates dioramas out of mouse taxidermy. You are now in the midst of a moral quandary, because you’re basically an okay everyperson, and yet this is your only way up the ladder. Oh, and you’re also in a screwball French comedy.

I believe I have now adequately described Dinner for Schmucks, excepting only to add that it was quite a bit funnier than even the fairly decent previews indicated and that it really made a point of working that Steve Carell connection to get a lot of Daily Show people on screen. Good for them! If you like watching funny movies in theaters, you should give it a peek in a couple of weeks when it actually gets released.

Silent Hill: Dying Inside

They say you can never go home again. Then again, they also say that home is the one place where, if you go there, they have to let you in. What is interesting to me about Silent Hill is that it is somehow the opposite of both of these things at once. Silent Hill is a place where, if you go there, it slithers inside of you and you can never really leave again. Which is why I find the games compelling enough that even though I only ever beat the first one, and with the worst possible ending, I still want to go back and play through the whole series. Which would I suppose be easier if I owned any of them.

This makes it all the more disappointing just how non-good the (apparently first in a series) graphic novelization is. Dying Inside follows a film student, a lauded psychologist, and a punk chick as they interact with the disturbingly empty (although, often it is even more disturbingly not-empty) town of Silent Hill, where a person’s bad thoughts have a way of doing more than haunting them, and really of haunting more than just them. It’s like a horrifying state of mind given flesh, and sidewalks, and hospitals and elementary schools. The story is sufficiently creepy, and has the seed of a really great concept, about a girl’s guilt over losing her little sister at the mall in pretty much the most horrible way imaginable. But the execution is almost total failure, with direction changes that come out of nowhere and plot elements that barely make any sense, even when taken as a whole after the fact. Or it’s possible that it would have been fine if I had not been so distracted by the art, which bleeds all over the page, one panel indistinguishable from the next. And that style could have been very effective as a means of demonstrating the breakdown in reality between Silent Hill and the outside world, except that it was used indiscriminately from the first page to the last. So it could be that it was the art I couldn’t follow and the plot was just fine, instead? I don’t know or really care, because I have forgotten to even write this review for the past two or three days. Not dreaded it or wondered what to say, but consistently forgotten I had even read the book.

That probably makes my point better than any of the rest. Still, it was in some way effective, because damn if I don’t wanna play me some Silent Hill! (Did I ever mention it was originally a video game? Oops.)

Lucifer: Crux

I have spotted my point of failure as a reader of the Lucifer series. All the way back in (judging by the covers[1]) the first volume of the series, there’s this performer named Jill Presto who is forcibly impregnated by a sentient deck of cards called the Basanos. And it’s an obviously important element of the plot of both the first and several of the later stories. And although in each case it’s obvious why she’s there and what’s going on, it is an inescapable fact that I cannot keep a sense of her and her doings as she relates to the arc of the story. I probably just haven’t tried, when you get right down to it? At least I know what I’ll be especially watching for when I do a someday reread. But it’s just sad to me that no matter how easily I can follow or at least unravel the rest of the plot and respectably examine the themes, there’s still this whole character that I have a blind spot for.

That said, the rest of Crux, the part that I was caught up with and able to follow along, I mean? Solid transition book in which I do, in fact, get to see more of Lilith, just as I had requested. I’m not sure yet if this was a mistake on my part. After the previous volume’s escalation toward Armageddon, every moment of Crux was set at that eponymous balance point before the plunge, getting the characters into position for the great conflict of our age. It was, y’know, successful at that, and even in plot-based transition Carey has a good eye for storytelling. Still, that next climactic book? I am hoping for big, unexpected things!

[1] Which you should never, ever do.

Knight and Day

I learned recently, and probably on the Daily Show, that Tom Cruise is a little bit of an adrenaline junkie, and thusly does as much of his own stuntwork as he can get away with. This is unfortunate, in that it ruins an otherwise accurate (albeit not punitive) claim that Cameron Diaz acted opposite his smile in the latest disposable summer action-comedy, Knight and Day. And man, do I ever wish I had more to say. I mean, it was good, right? Closer to cotton candy even than popcorn on the scale of movies-as-meals metaphors, but good. The actiony stuff was suitably actiony, the comedy was funnier than just that which appeared in the previews, the plot was reasonably well grounded[1], and Ms. Diaz’ lead character grows into the role of agent of her own destiny; I can’t even complain that she didn’t start that way, since she started the movie as a normal person chosen by a James Bond type as a dupe for his latest batch of spy games. So, y’know, nothing to complain about at all! But still, my overall sense of the thing is as delicate as spun sugar, and I’m sad to report that it will not someday be looked back upon as a classic of the genre.

Unless maybe that thing where a girl in an action movie developing her own agency is less common than I suppose, in which case that part should stand out over time.

[1] You can’t say it was grounded, full-stop, because, action movie. Right?

Ultimate Wolverine vs. Hulk

At long last, the weird forgotten story that languished for a few years in developmental hell even as the rest of the Ultimate universe was being tied up in a neat (by which I mean Gordian), tidy (by which I mean murderously violent) bow (by which I mean bow). After Ultimate Wolverine vs. Hulk, which I would for my sanity place after Ultimates 2 ended and before any of the Ultimatum prequel-storylines, I will be explicitly in the “after we killed the Ultimate Universe and launched a new line of comics” territory, which is physically marked by my buying them in hardback graphic novel instead of paperback. Plus also, I’m almost completely caught up and will soon run out of new ones immediately available, which is a strange feeling all itself.

As for the story, well, the title kind of covers it. There are definite twists along the way, plus also pointers to Logan’s fate in the post-Ultimatum landscape, neither of which I have any interest in spoiling. I can say that series author Damon Lindelof, famous as an integral part of Lost’s creative team, is clearly the same guy you would expect to have written both things. He plays with the narrative structure pretty much from start to finish, calling it an effect of Wolverine’s constantly tampered-with memory even though we all know it’s an excuse to tell the story out of order for dramatic effect. I have no problem with that, and I guess I can see why he felt obligated, in a world he never made didn’t create, to come up with an excuse for why it was happening, but mostly what I think instead is, come on dude, we know you did this only because you think it’s awesome, so why pretend there’s a valid in-story reason?

Anyway, though, Hulk and Wolverine? They totally versus each other, way more than that time when Iron Man was supposed to but it turned out pretty much entirely otherwise. Truth-in-advertising for the win!

Reaper’s Gale

If you’re wondering where I’ve been all this time, it’s a fair question. I mean, I’ve been wondering too, and this is speaking as someone who knows! But to answer you, no, I don’t have an incredible backlog of stuff that I need to get out in a rush, before I forget every little remaining detail of all those books. This is because, quite simply, I don’t have any backlog at all. I’ve been behind this one Malazan book the entire time. And after all this time, the better part of a month, I don’t have a lot I can really say. Reaper’s Gale is the seventh book of a ten book series, and it’s not just that I’d be worried about spoilers (although I would), it’s that it’s really no longer possible to describe the plot in meaningful terms to people who aren’t fellow readers, and I know there are not very many yet.

What I can talk about is the gamut of emotions each new book brings.[1] First of all, there’s the vividness of it all. I can cackle at one scene, cringe at the next, and feel terrible at the (almost never overblown) pathos of the random vagaries of life in a third. I can watch a genocidal war prosecuted and not really hate any of the characters involved in it even while feeling the horror, not just at the fact of it but at the separate fact that the characters know what they’re doing. It’s not just that almost every character is likeable in his or her own way, it’s that the entire series is most heavily concerned with redemption, and it’s available to everyone who really wants it. Happiness is often fleeting and never guaranteed, victory is as changeable as the sands of the desert, and justice, well, it turns out that justice is out there, but since I would link it with redemption, that just makes sense.

At the end of each of these books, I am torn between wanting to dive ahead and knowing that I have to move on to something else, and frankly wanting that pretty badly too. But sometime in the next few years after I’ve finished the series and let it settle, I’m going to have to go back and read the whole thing in a row, even though it will take me half a year or better. Not because I don’t remember what happened, but because I want to see how things look in development when I know how they will end. If you had asked me, I think I would not have predicted being this attached to a doorstop fantasy series that defines itself by who has died.

[1] Or at least what this one brings; after all, it’s been a while since I read any of the others.