Dead Witch Walking

I can’t even remember exactly why I picked the book up in the first place. Most likely, there was an internet discussion about which urban fantasies were worthwhile and why, and after the Harry Dresden and Anita Blake books[1], the Rachel Morgan series was the only one that struck my interest. Anyhow, between the amount of time I spend at various Half Price Books around the metroplex and the amount of depth on my to-read shelf[2], I can’t exactly be surprised that I’d bought five books into the series without ever having read the second sentence of Dead Witch Walking quite yet.

Mind you, I have now. It was not bad. There’s this girl Rachel, and she’s a witch. And she has a job capturing the bad elements of the magical world that humanity is stuck with, however unhappy it makes them. But when she decides to get out from under her boss’s oppressive thumb and go into business for herself, things quickly go from bloody to deadly. Soon, she’s caught between her old boss’s hired assassins, a potential and unwanted relationship with her vampire business partner, and a Cincinnati councilman / criminal overlord of unknown lineage and power. And that’s just for starters.

Okay, truth be told, I’m not sure I would have finished the book if I hadn’t already bought the next four. Our heroine took a while to get past whiny to likable. (Honestly, she may not have managed it yet, and it’s more that I got used to her voice finally, complainy-pants and all. She for damn sure isn’t as good to her friends as I would prefer.) The plot took a little while to quite get revved up from a simple problem to be solved into actually interesting events. Most troublesome was the setting, though; the average urban fantasy, in my still-limited experience, works as closely as possible to our normal world, with only limited variation to explain all the fairies and werewolves and ubiquitous vampires roaming the landscape. This one took a different tack, diverging in, I think, the 1960s; and what a divergence! Half the population or better dead in America, far worse elsewhere, and with all the magical people suddenly taking center stage by virtue of not having been susceptible to the deadliness. All of which is fine and good, except that the author kept dropping modern pop-culture references into the mix. It’s not that J.R. being shot or Luke learning about the Force are all that impossible even in a changed history. But when she tossed in another three of four such references that I’ve forgotten, it began to strain the bounds of reason. I don’t want to be yanked out of my suspension of disbelief over such trivial matters, is all; if you want to call the pop-culture, just don’t change your world around that much; that pretty much handles the problem right there.

But in the end, it turned out to be a decent book, and I have enough questions I care about that I will want to see what happens next. My hope is that someone mentioned the wonkiness to her, and I won’t run into these problems by the time book two comes around.

[1] about which I already know plenty
[2] Now officially overflowed, if not quite extending onto a second full shelf yet.

The Day the Earth Stood Still (2008)

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Michael Rennie had no reason to be ill on Friday, The Day the Earth Stood Still. After all, the remake of his most famous role[1] had a lot of cool to it. Nice effects budget, Keanu Reeves in a role tailor-made for him, thoughtful science fiction examinations of humanity. It was, on the whole, a good movie.

Which, in an odd kind of way, is exactly what was wrong with it. I’m not sure if it’s peculiar to me, or if I’m objectively right about this: but it needed to be a great movie, to be successful. And it never reached that level. The acting was all eminently competent without being inspiring. The effects would have looked outstanding five years ago, but they only look pretty cool today. The central questions of the film, does homo sapiens deserve to thrive? and what about at the expense of other species?, are important ones that perfectly fits the sci-fi mold. And if there had been any doubt about what answers the film would provide, then the examination of the question might not have felt quite so shallow as it did.

I don’t know, maybe it is my fault, holding expectations a little too high. All I know is, I wanted to think it was great, the way I thought last year’s sci-fi hit was great. And I only thought it was good. Oh, well.

[1] I mean, as far as I know.

Punisher: War Zone

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Wednesday movie time! This week: Unexpected Awesomeness Edition! See, there are movies that I know will not be all that good objectively but that will be enjoyable to me, such as Death Race that I intended to see if nobody wanted to join me with better ideas. And then there are movies that I expect to have no enjoyment of even though they’ll get raved about, like Snow Falling on Cedars. And then there are movies that are so blah that I can’t imagine anyone actively wanting to see them, like Epic Movie, or Punisher: War Zone.

There are two things that are lucky for me right now. 1) Ryan picked the movie, and 2) it turned out to be incredibly awesome in every way. You may think you’ve seen over the top before, but I am not convinced you really have. I am not convinced I really had, for damn sure. Examples: the time when the Punisher punched a guy through the face; or the time when the stitch-faced bad guy ripped off Patton to inspire lots of ethnic gangs into a battle royale; or the time when a dude got blown up by a rocket launcher while joyfully backflipping across the rooftops. There is no plot but mayhem[1], and no spoilers but the surprisingly fantastic badness of every frame. I am severely wowed by this movie.

[1] Okay, wait, there is a portion of plot in which our hero tries to rebuild his missing family in the most disturbing way possible. Which just adds to all the rest of the perfected horrible!

JCVD

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And then, towards the tail end of the weekend, I headed back to the Angelika[1] to watch another movie chock full of subtitles, JCVD. So there’s this guy, Jean-Claude Van Damme, right? Martial arts movie star from the late ’80s and throughout the ’90s but who has been somewhat less popular of late. And he has kind of a sad life; sure, the Belgians back home all adore him, but he’s losing custody of his daughter and his attempts to revive his career are frustrated at every turn, most recently by Steven Seagal’s willingness to ditch his ponytail in pursuit of a role.

And then, on a perfectly normal day, J.C.[2] runs into the post office on an errand and finds himself locked into a twisted hostage crisis whose events are told several times in parallel, with a little bit more information about the truth of the matter revealed each time. What action there is follows the gritty cop drama formula more closely than the fantasy action you’d expect out of one of his movies, and there’s a substantial amount of comedy along the way. But underneath all that lies a serious examination of celebrity and the many ways that people interact with it that would never have happened if it had been a different man trapped in the post office with the rest of the hostages and criminals. The police and negotiators, the hostages, the criminals, the witnesses to events immediately preceding the crisis, the crowd outside, each brings a spin, and in each case only because they recognize that guy from some movies they saw a few years ago.

Which is kind of the point. Not to judge any particular reaction, but to make us aware of how profoundly differently we do react to our celebrities. Hell, it even happened to me. Knowing full well what point the movie was making, I was still frustrated once or twice that Van Damme didn’t take one of the opportunities to fight back against the armed men, take control of the situation when he was one on one. Intellectually, who cares how good he is at karate? He’s still a middle-aged man with a gun being held on him, and he’s allowed to be scared and not want to be any more involved than he must. But I was still rolling my eyes at him because of my own expectations abut his abilities. All of which to say, it’s cool when something can make you laugh and think both. Plus, there really aren’t enough films in the tragicomic category, and it’s always nice to see one more.

[1] In both cases, there was only this one theater showing each movie within at least thirty, and probably more like hundreds of, miles.
[2] This is probably the only movie I can think of where the lead character having these initials is not a sly reference to a messiah; and then again, the case could be made…

Låt den rätte komma in

This weekend, it has been all about the subtitles. After rolling out of work a little early on Wednesday, I fought traffic and a driving blizzard to get to the Angelika in time for Let the Right One In. Plausibly, there was no snow of any kind until the movie started; it’s hard to remember? In any event, there was plenty of snow to be had from the moment the credits rolled. And not just because the movie was set in Sweden, which presumedly is not locked in winter ice twelve months of the year.

Oskar is a bullied 12 year old boy and child of divorce, alone in his apartment most of the time, wishing for the courage to stop his oppressors, and already visibly embittering at his inability to do it. Into that unchanging snowscape arrives a man and a young girl, Eli, who have moved in next door. While Eli and Oskar begin to learn about each other and fumble toward friendship, the man is wandering the woods with his serial-killing kit, draining blood from his victims. Oskar’s new friend will turn out to be far more than she seems, and Oskar’s wishes may not be the boons he had always assumed they would. But then again, maybe they’ll be exactly what he wanted.

It was a very quiet movie, light on dialogue in most of the scenes, and I almost think that the ubiquitous snow and cold were characters in their own rights. Symbolically, I mean, as emblems of that quiet, and of the inner coldness of so many of the characters. There was a lot of beauty in that austere trackless white and cold, and, despite everything, in Eli as well. I said to Nicole that the movie was beautiful and tragic, and it was tragic; but it strikes me that it could have been merely tawdry and pitiful without that abundance of austere beauty. I think this marks the first time that I could see why someone would actively buy into that whole vampire obsession that’s so solidly in vogue these days. I’m not sure if it was the cinematography, the acting, or the script, but Eli was downright magnetic in every frame of film, no matter how innocent or brutal the scene.

It’s hard to really explain why I’m still so drawn in by the memory of the movie without going spoiler all over the place. But my estimation of it has only gone upward in the subsequent days, and I’d run off to watch it again upon pretty much anyone’s request. I really am impressed.

Fables: March of the Wooden Soldiers

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As entertaining as the previous Fables volumes have been, with their magic-mirrored reflections on politics and relationships and rivalries and so forth, there was something missing that I hadn’t really even placed as gone until Bill Willingham set it down in front of me. See, all the many and varied familiar characters in Fabletown only came there for one reason: a powerful Adversary conquered and enslaved their homes, one by one, and they fled to the one place he never showed any interest in, our mundane world.

Except, as you’ve already guessed, all that is about to change. March of the Wooden Soldiers chronicles the first escapee from the Aversary’s grasp in over two hundred years, and the brutal aftermath of that event, including (but not limited to) open warfare in the streets of New York City! Not only has this opened up rich new avenues of future storytelling, but it provided the surprising (to me, anyway) info that nobody really knows who the Adversary is; I had been imagining a Voldemort kind of situation, rather. And in the meantime, several outstanding storylines have proceeded forward in highly satisfying ways. I am pleased to have a new favorite ongoing series, what with the end of Y: The Last Man a few months ago. Hooray for good stuff!

Ultimate X-Men: Blockbuster

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Not that this matters to anyone but me, but I think I went off-schedule again reading this book when I did. Weird. Anyway, the new X-Men was largely dandy, continuing the streak of finally being actively good. The only thing that really stopped it from being actively great was how the Spider-Man crossover demonstrated the author’s active preference for a non X-Men character. Which, okay, I can understand it, but it doesn’t really match what I was supposed to be reading.

Character favoritism aside, Blockbuster had a great Wolverine-themed story that revealed a little more of Logan’s history to the subject and readers alike. Remnants of Weapon X are gunning for the project’s greatest success, and Wolverine’s questionable ethical decisions over the past few volumes have separated him from the safety of Charles Xavier’s Xtra powerful team of mutant teens. The theme that permeates every event and every interaction is that of consequences. It’s not a happy book, as you can imagine from that claim, but it is a damn fine one. I am really glad to see the series finally reaching for its potential. Hooray for faith paying off!

Oh, good news, I remembered that I’m not out of order after all. Plus, that crossover bit in the first half of the book re-mentioned an Ultimate universe event I saw a hint of in one of the early Ultimates comics, and now I finally know where it came from. I’ll be reading the books that tell that story relatively soon, too, so that will be nice to finally have back in order!

Quantum of Solace

So, new James Bond movie, which is almost by definition cool and only really needs to be compared to other Bond movies. I liked it enough to have seen it twice, and yet I’ve been stuck on the review for a while now. I think it wasn’t until I realized that and thought about why that I was able to come up with something, but it does all kind of make sense now.

What I liked about Quantum of Solace is what they’ve done with the franchise. Not only was was it a direct sequel to Casino Royale[1], but there are strong implications that an underlying arc will continue through at least the next film, if not several more. I’m also pretty okay still with the lack of gadgetry in favor of more direct badassery, though I think I maybe want there to be a few more gadgets than approximately none. The plot: in which a shadowy organization has various irons in the fire whose goals are the acquisition of more power and resources with which to acquire more power still. Or, okay, to be specific, they are propping up a Bolivian dictator in exchange for control of certain resources. Or okay, to be more specific still, the water supply. Which is possibly silly, but appropriately grandiose for the archetype. It fits, anyhow, so I like it well enough to not worry about it.

What I didn’t like was the lack of an iconic villain. Casino Royale had a guy who wept blood, for crying out loud! This only has a guy with a bowl haircut, which, y’know: enh. And he’s just the villain’s cousin! And, okay, yeah, I’m coming around on the gadgets thing. Awesome car chases are necessary, but they are not sufficient. These are largely quibbles in the face of my joy over a Bond with both a plot and a character arc. But I’m pretty confident it’s possible to have and eat my spycake, so I’ll look forward to that in 2010.

[1] I’m pretty sure they’ve only ever done that once before, and the time they did it, it was just a few minutes at the beginning that had no bearing on the rest of the flick.

Ultimate Fantastic Four: Frightful

I’m not really sure what was done differently, but the latest volume of the Ultimate Fantastic Four managed to be as busy as the last few have been while simultaneously not feeling like each individual story was rushed. If anything, it felt like a return to the madcap days of the ’60s where each storyline lasted for two or three issues and hints of the future or ties to the past bled into each individual magazine; in short, like there was an ongoing, somewhat-planned story arc. It turns out, I really dig that.

Frightful features time travelling adventures in which dimensional spiders stand ready to eat you if you cause a paradox, yet another return of Doctor Doom, recurring super-zombies, and a Lovecraftian threat of world-crushing proportions! Also, whatever has been wrong with the art lately, they sorted that out too. Best book in the series since the first one, as nearly as I can tell.

Death Masks

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The awesome thing about reading a Dresden Files book is that I’m guaranteed it will be good, between the quality of the earlier entries in the series and the universal acclaim it has received among my friends who have read them. Plus, reading them spread out like this means I’ll still have new ones ahead of me for at least months, if not years. The downside is that it’s really hard to convince myself to read something else instead once I’m done with one. Like now!

Death Masks follows Harry Dresden[1] as he fights a new battle in the war between the White Council (of wizards, which Harry is one; but you probably knew that) and the Red Court (of vampires, which you may also have known, but not as certainly), a war that some on each side would claim he is single-handedly responsible for starting, himself included. But since that’s not enough action for one book, he also needs to track down the Shroud of Turin[2], wage war against some arch-demons in pursuit of the apocalypse, and sort out his relationship with Susan, former paranormal reporter and current semi-vampire. Plus, quips, a little bit of the inevitable-for-the-setting sexy, and slathered chunks of extreme danger! Read it now! Unless you need to read the earlier ones first, or something.

[1] So, the Dresden Files are among my favorite books, and the Dresden Dolls are among my favorite music. What is it about that little bombed-out German town that holds such massive appeal?
[2] Yes, that Shroud of Turin.