War of the Worlds

Spielberg has still got it. …well, sort of. If you want a special effects-laden summer extravaganza, of the type that Jerry Bruckheimer will try to sell you every year or so, Spielberg is definitely the top tier guy. From the moment Tom Cruise sees figurative storm clouds on the horizon until nearly the moment that the credits roll, well, critics use words like eye-popping, and I have to say that it applies. War of the Worlds is probably the prettiest film you’ll see all year. (Yes, Star Wars, but the fact is that it’s nothing Lucas hasn’t accomplished before, and yes, Serenity, but Whedon doesn’t have that kind of budget, and furthermore, his primary focus has never been on popping the eyes.)

If you can easily read between the lines, stop here, because I’ll end up spoiling the movie’s conclusion for you. Here’s the downside: The man has gotten maudlin and sentimental, and castrates the movie in the last non-narrated frames. Technically, I suppose I should blame the script-writer, but I’m not gonna, because Spielberg should know better than to have agreed to that part.

Child actor watch: I predict that Dakota Fanning has more Anna Paquin in her career-future than she has Haley Joel Osment, if you see what I mean.

Land of the Dead

The good thing about a George Romero zombie movie is that you’ve got awesome social commentary if you go for that kind of thing, you’ve got zombie mayhem if you go for that kind of thing, both if you’re like me, and if you like zombies but hate social commentary, it’s not like you’ll notice.

The bad thing about them is that for people who like social commentary but not so much with the zombies, you can never really convince them that a zombie movie can have intrinsic value. I (of course) mean here intrinsic value of the type that everyone recognizes in movies like Sophie’s Choice or Snow Falling on Cedars or bullstuff like that. The intrinsic zombie movie value of Land of the Dead, with its extensive gore, random zombie strippers (CORRECTION: random regular strippers), gratuitous undead attacks on lesbians, and senseless violence against midgets, well, it has all of that, too. But I’m talking about the Romero-style commentary you get in his zombie movies, the part that lets you see past the zombies and realize he could have made the exact same movie without ghoulish hordes, but was cool enough not to.

Is it my place to say what the themes were this time? Clearly, it is. The movie is set years or possibly decades after the original zombie outbreak; a few walled cities contain the vestiges of humanity, and the zombies cover the rest of the earth. The divide (social, intellectual, perhaps even moral) between zombie and human is rapidly narrowing from both directions. It reminded me a lot of I Am Legend, for whatever that’s worth. On top of the dark mirror motif, there’s some (perhaps meant to be relevant to the world of now?) extensive Circus Maximus keeps the citizens happy while the Huns rampage just outside the walls of Rome imagery going on. I think there’s something to be said for the idea that the two themes are intertwined, but then, I’m just a guy who types with two or three fingers, so what do I know?

Also, there were boobies.

House of Chains

Sometimes, it is unreasonably hard to keep up, for no particularly good reason. The upshot of all the happenings in my life (and various irrelevancies that also slowed me down, mind you; I’d never claim after being more than a week late that it was exclusively the fault of how busy I am) is that I have far less to say about Erikson’s fourth tale of the Malazan Book of the Fallen, House of Chains, than I feel like I ought to have.

Four books is a long way into a series to feel like one finally has a handle on what’s going on, it’s true. I can completely see why it would put people off. And it’s not like I can explain the first book well enough to talk people into reading it, so far. What I do know is this: despite consistent four-digit page counts and a real struggle to figure out what’s up, these are the only new books in the past several years that have made me want to drag them out and avidly reread them, despite a hip deep to-read pile. (As opposed to, say, the Martin series, which I feel like I should reread to know what’s up, but the task fills me with dread.) Mind you, I won’t be doing so for some months yet, but my point is, I resent that I don’t have time to.

In summation: it’s nice to read a book where the human emotion and the sweeping events are balanced well enough that readers looking for either one as their key ingredient will think this is the right fantasy series for them. Gardens of the Moon is available in America these days, which means (as I probably already said once before when I did book three) people should start reading these now. Lots. (Caveat: Yes, the cover is terrible. But it looks like all the other books are being published with their original covers instead of stock fantasy crap covers, so don’t let that fool you.)

Batman Begins

mv5bmje3njqyodexmv5bml5banbnxkftztywnzyxmti3-_v1_As you can see, I’ve been kinda busy this weekend, with all the movies being watched and whatnot. The thing is, the whole moving thing has pushed me way behind. Even now, there are two theatrical releases I’d like to hit, and two more just days off. So, it’s nice to take a few moments of breathing space and enjoy myself. Which I did do, and the result is all this.

To wit, Batman Begins, the apparent start of a new DC movie franchise to finally compete with 5 years of Marvel supremacy. It’s tempting to claim that the franchise had small shoes to fill, what with the oddity of Batman Returns and the horror of the two later sequels to the original, but this was a genuinely good superhero movie in its own right, in the same quality tier as Spider-Man.

With so many quality stars in supporting roles, of course the acting was great. The leads did well too; Katie Holmes hit her usual eye candy marks with ease, and I’m not very sure what the complaints I’ve heard about her acting were based on. She did perfectly fine in every scene I watched. Nothing that cried out for an award, but not everything has to.

As with all origin stories that are completely familiar to the viewer, a big part of the fun was in watching the characters come together. Jim Gordon’s first meeting with Batman, Alfred transitioning so smoothly into the parental role, the very first Bat signal: all as iconic as they should have been.

Thematically is where it was a giant, though. In the opening act, the movie did a better job of explaining the Jedi/Sith dichotomy than George Lucas ever has, no matter how hard I’ve tried to read between the lines. The League of Shadows’ method of improving the world one fallen city at a time despite the individual cost in lives perfectly nails everything that Anakin Skywalker never had a sufficiently good script to say in the second and third prequel films. So, that made me fairly sad for my fandom, but happy for the potential future Batman movies, as long as they keep the same team working on scripts and direction.

Also: Serenity trailer. Shiny.

Mr. and Mrs. Smith (2005)

There’s not a lot for me easily to say about this movie, because the premise is so simple. It all worked, I’ll say that. Good comedy, good action, good acting, a few bits of true cleverness. It made me (and the rest of the sparse early Sunday audience) giggle throughout.

The previews spell out the plot pretty well, so I consider this plot synopsis to be spoiler-free: Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie (who looks as good as ever, I must say) are assassins who don’t know about each other despite several years of marriage. The marriage is drying up, when suddenly they discover the Truth. Hijinx ensue.

I spent the first forty-five minutes or so enjoying myself, but slightly confused. It was moving way, way to slowly for the action-comedy I was expecting to see. Then, something shifted in my head, I reclassified it as a comedy of manners but with assassins (dark, sure, but not even black comedy), and instantly it worked better than ever. Probably better than the average comedy of manners if you’re me, because of how assassins are more interesting than the rich people that usually fill out that subtype.

Citizen Kane

A new feature in my life is the weekly movie night on Fridays, this whole big thing where a group of my local friends and I gather together and watch a movie. Not always good, not always important, often both. I’ll never know what it is next until the day comes, and that’s just how it’s gonna be.

This week, Citizen Kane, the original spoiler-at-the-end film. If you don’t know what Rosebud means, I suppose I can go ahead and not say. In some ways, though, I think viewing the movie was more enjoyable for knowing and being able to watch it happen, instead of wondering the whole time like the audience was supposed to back in the day.

As far as the brilliance of the movie, well, it had its good points. Lots of innovative cinematography that I was unable to appreciate. In a way, it’s hard to credit that film is the same basic physical thing it was 65 years ago; the part where the way it’s used has changed dramatically was inevitable, so innovative for then gets as far as looks pretty decent for now. The acting was top notch, which doesn’t surprise me. It had better be, if you’re going to call something the best movie of all time, AFI.

The downside was the plot. Sure, the quest for Rosebud worked fine, but all the little stories on Kane’s life that were the true point of the movie? I felt like those failed me. There was some crucial point where Kane shifted from youthful idealism to nonchalant decadence, and I was completely unable to tell what it was. I have my guesses, and maybe the point is that we don’t know how it happened, only that it did. But it felt like a missing piece of the movie, and considering how engrossed I was in the story, it was very disappointing to have this sudden paradigm shift in character and not be able to understand what happened.

Anyway, if you haven’t seen it yet, you should; it’s that kind of movie. But don’t feel pressured about it or anything. It’ll keep.

Zero Hour

So far, there are seven books in the Resident Evil series; of those, five of them are based on entries in the videogame series of the same name. The most recent, Zero Hour, is a prequel in much the same way that the game Resident Evil Zero was. Well, ha ha, that’s an understatement, since it’s not only a novelization of that game, but also the most by-the-numbers novelization of the whole series.

Credit where it’s due, the author has taken on a somewhat herculean task here. It’s hard to write the book of a game whose main focuses (after shooting zombies, I mean) are holding onto ammunition and solving crazy spy puzzles, without devolving into ridiculous parody. Somehow, she manages to take it all seriously, in part by paradoxically keeping the characters aware of the farce of it all. There are things you accept in a game that nobody would in real life, and the ability to roll their eyes at having to light the lamps in the right order to release the gate is exactly the same kind of ability that keeps them sane in the face of bio-engineered hordes thirsty for their blood. And, y’know, their juicy, delicious brains.

On the downside, like I said, this is the least good adaptation. Sure, the characters are allowed to get out of some fights in a way that the game characters are not, and sure, they laugh at the craziness, but I’m pretty sure I don’t remember ever reading a quite so faithful account of what weapons and ammo are picked up when, and how close they are to running out. But, other than how badly that grates, it’s a perfectly serviceable book of its type, and as in other entries in the series, she adds touches here and there that make the book hers outside the confines of the games. Still, if you don’t just absolutely adore the whole Umbrella-verse, there’s no point to picking it (or any of the others) up.

Long Way Home

In retrospect, I’m glad I didn’t figure out how deeply flawed the final volume of that Buffy/Angel crossover series was until the last 50 pages or so. Because, I have this habit of not letting things go, however terrible, until I’m through with them, and it would have sucked to bitch to myself constantly for 300 pages instead of only 50. Seriously. There was this bowl of queso at lunch yesterday that tasted truly awful, but I kept re-tasting it because part of it reminded me of some other taste, and I couldn’t quite put my, er, tongue on it. Meanwhile, my co-diner was actually throwing up due to the chemical poisoning from whatever plastic thing had melted into the queso mix. I’d like to think that if she’d been throwing up before I kept re-tasting, that would have stopped me. I really, really would love to think that.

Sadly, that story was more metaphor than digression. There are good Buffy books out there, as much as any randomly farmed out novelisation franchise can have quality. This trilogy, as I’ve said basically from start to finish, does not reach that low watermark. The banter and adventure is, y’know, fine. The storyline, though, got just about as bad as it could have. The thing I figured out 50 pages from the end is that they had no possible way to satisfactorily conclude the story. I was wrong in that, and I admit it; they wrapped up without taking any cheap shortcuts as I expected. No, I spotted the real problem after the fact, which was that it should have been those 50 pages all along, and that the 250 previous pages were nothing but an artificially induced delay to make it long enough to be a trilogy, since that’s what the authors had promised to their bookfarm foreman.

My point being, Long Way Home is easily the worst-plotted book of a pretty bad trilogy, in which the first volume failed to deliver on even a freaking crossover. There’s a Batman book I read in my middle youth, in which someone decided to write a polemic decrying the child sex trade (a topic which until that moment had been mostly the subject of widespread praise, I’m sure) and thought that it might be fun to have Batman involved. This trilogy is like that, except about urban gang warfare or possibly the Soviet bloc. Buffy and Angel are about as poorly shoehorned into the plot here as Batman was in The Ultimate Evil. Credit where it’s due, though: regardless of how bad a fit Batman was in that story, at least the story itself made a lick of sense. This one, not so much.

The Stupidest Angel: A Heartwarming Tale of Christmas Terror

The Stupidest Angel41sZwL1CraL is another entry in the set of books that can be read over the course of a mostly lazy midafternoon, or a one timezone flight, say. On top of which, it’s reliably funny almost throughout. It’s recommendable on those bases alone, but it even has a few other things going for it, such as quirky characters who, due to the length of the book, cannot possibly have time to wear out their welcome, plus a plot twist tailor-made for my personal enjoyment.

By and large, though, the plot isn’t the point; the point is just the laughing along the way. In sum, it’s a week in the life of a forested NoCal village on final approach toward Christmas as the characters deal with murder and the romantic problems it can bring to couples, the violent and bloody loss of a child’s seasonal innocence, a dysfunctional nod to O. Henry, and of course an angel with perhaps the worst plan ever to fix things. If you have an empty hour or three, check it out. Sometime later, I’m going to glance at the author’s (Christopher Moore) other books, I think.

Star Wars: Episode III – Revenge of the Sith

I am jumbled, and I wonder if I oughtn’t wait until another viewing. But screw it, first impressions are important, on top of which it’s one of my few first shot times, so I’ll take it. And then cheat by first talking atmosphere. I know I go on about the Alamo Drafthouse mystique, but it was in fine enough fettle tonight to run down. Someone went to the effort of editing up the Cartoon Network Clone Wars endeavour down to its essential “here’s the bits that are related to the movie” bones, and then showed it, interspersed with all kinds of Star Wars filmed coolness and uncoolness, from Troops to Anakin Dynamite to a Muppet Show appearance to the Turkish Star Wars rip-off to the much maligned (and rightly so!) 1978 Christmas special. A very pleasant way to pass a couple of hours while waiting for the last big event movie of quite a while, and I commend them once more.

Then, there’s the movie itself. The scroll cleared the screen just in time to drop into an unrelenting action spectacle with all the right touches of humor and explosions alike. And then… well, things got a little wooden. Never bad, but never quite great. Motivations that were a hair off, decisions that very nearly made sense, enemies that were inches south of believable. Nothing enough to make me stop enjoying myself, but so much that came close to working perfectly that I had to be disappointed when it didn’t. The real irony I think is that it was the longest Star Wars movie, yet really needed another ten or twenty minutes of scenes expanded in just the right ways to achieve the brilliance it was in sight of.

That said, there’s a moment that I choose not to ruin[1] in the main portion of this review past which everything comes together again. It’s still never quite as perfect as that opening sequence, but the complaints from that moment on are nits to be picked, not faults to regret. It’s a hell of a thing, to know essentially everything that’s going to happen (not due to spoilers but to the logical consequence of having already seen the galaxy twenty years down the road from that moment) and still be kept on the edge of my seat, wondering what will happen next, if there’s a way out of it, how it came to this. For that, I’ll offer Lucas my thanks and my kudos. When he got to the important part, he made it work.

If you watched the other two movies, like or dislike, go ahead and see this one, at least the once. Even with the mis-steps, it’s worth it.
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