Dearly Devoted Dexter

51UeGHq5w4L Man. I am way too far behind right now. It is not pretty. But, so anyway, I read Dearly Devoted Dexter, the second book in the inspired-a-Showtime-series. I’m continuing to enjoy it all out of proportion to how much I think I should, though I believe this one was helped a lot by the series’ plotline divergences after the first book/season. Plotwise, Dexter and his sister and his nemesis Sergeant Doakes team up to face a killer who physically removes just about everything from his victims, while still keeping them alive and in perfect physical health. It’s… kinda creepy! (Well, technically, all of Miami homicide and CSI and whatnot are in on the team-up, but realistically, I mentioned the important people.)

I don’t know if he was written a little differently in the first book, or if I was so busy following along from plot point to familiar plot point that I missed it, but the Dexter in this book is hilarious. Yeah, he’s pretty good at stalking and killing bad people who probably deserve it.[1] And he’s good at realizing that he doesn’t comprehend people and their emotions, though I can’t make up my mind if that’s a character deficit or a choice, despite his claims. But he also constantly lauds his brilliance and ability to blend in among the normal people around him, even though the constant evidence of his descriptions belies it. He makes good deductive leaps, of course.[2] But he also falls into traps I saw coming miles away, apparently because of his not-acknowledgedly-pompous belief in himself. And for someone who does everything exactly right to keep from being picked out as odd by people around him, there are a lot of people who seem to recognize that something is off key, a fact he also rarely accepts. It is on the whole an entirely amusing confluence of unintentionally unreliable narrator, Scoobies mayhem, and disconcerting serial killer mentality.

That last bit is what I a) anticipate enjoying the most in future books and b) feel the most guilty about. Because, apparently, his girlfriend’s children are poised to turn into Dexter: the Next Generation, and of course he is delighted to teach them what to do and not to do, just as his foster father taught him. Instead of being all squicked out by sociopathic pre-teens, I really want to see where it goes. So, um, oops?

[1] If you don’t buy this central conceit of the book, then you are really guaranteed to hate it, and should not read.
[2] It is a mystery novel, after all!

I Love You, Man

The Walking Dead: Here We Remain

So, you know how I said I like reading about aftermath? I had not been thinking about the horrifying and unrelenting series of tragedies that marked the previous Walking Dead volume, but it was certainly a well-timed claim. All safety is gone, an astonishing number of survivors have been slaughtered, and those left are scattered to the winds. Here We Remain documents the struggle to survive what will almost certainly be the series’ low point, survive not just physically but mentally and emotionally as well. There is unexpected hope on the wind, though, and a possible new purpose beyond simple survival.

The thing about the aftermath, though, is the psychology of it all. Most and possibly all of these people have endured enough to break anyone, and only the lizard brain’s drive to survive has kept them going. The cracks are obvious in everyone after these most recent setbacks, and it will be interesting to see whether the new sliver of hope is enough to start them recovering. In any event, if this is yet another Kirkman mislead with a dire outcome waiting two or three books down the road, I won’t really be able to believe any of them can cope with it. Related to all this, I’m also speculating that the torch of series hero has been handed off from cop-turned-leader Rick Grimes to his constantly underestimated son, Carl. And I’m looking forward to seeing what else the kid can manage; thankfully, the dead world has removed any trace of plucky kid syndrome that would make the whole thing annoying.

Ultimate X-Men: The Tempest

Watchmen (2009)

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So my normal Mondays involve some beer, some bar food, and some zombie slaughter. It is a pretty sweet deal, y’know? This Monday had its differences, though, in that I skipped the beer and food alike in favor of a brief, ultimately successful struggle to get the media company to honor the passes they had sent out for a sneak preview of Watchmen. (Okay, technically, we relied upon the kindness of strangers. But the important part is, everybody had a seat!)

So I watched it for something like two hours and forty-five minutes, and I’ve spent the subsequent day or so trying to figure out what I can possibly say about it, that I haven’t already said. The layouts and scenery shift constantly between starkly beautiful and grimily seedy with almost dizzying regularity, as a perfect counterpoint to the characters and their actions and motivations and essential, almost unstoppable humanity.[1] It’s a highly political and moral tale set at the height of communist paranoia in an alternate, superhero-laden 1985, and the thing is, I really don’t want to say any more than that because it’s worth coming to fresh.

But if you’re one of the people who didn’t come fresh, because you’ve already read Alan Moore’s original book from which this movie was drawn, I’ll say this much more: it is very probably the most faithful and effective adaptation of a literary work I have ever seen.[2] Got anything going on Friday or maybe Saturday? At least, anything you can’t cancel? Because, go see this.

[1] I might be gushing. But the story and the characters really are that good.
[2] And I was pretty happy with almost all of Peter Jackson’s choices on the Lord of the Rings movies.

Ultimate Marvel Team-Up, Volume 1

I may have mentioned at one point my sudden realization that a lot of things I have read during my what, year-long now Ultimate Marvel kick, had backward-looking references to some books that came out right at the beginning and I had initially failed to be aware of. But I’ve found these, and they are now in the rotation. Which brings us inexorably to Ultimate Marvel Team-Up, in which various characters from the Ultimate universe, you know, team up with each other.

Or, to be more accurate, Spider-Man meets other characters in an explicit crossover format that comes from the late ’60s or early ’70s or somewhen, because Brian Michael Bendis mostly likes Spider-Man and wanted to revive that format for the new generation. The only problem is, brief historical curiosity aside, the stories weren’t that interesting. The strength of Marvel, past as well as present, has always been its ongoing storylines with long-term consequences. Yes, there’s a lot of soap-operaish returns to life and failed relationships, but they are at least consequential from moment to moment, instead of seen once and irrelevant ever after. Necessarily, one-shot stories are going to come off pretty cold in a world where everything else matters, quite a bit.

All that said, the stories themselves were about a conflict between Peter and the first appearance of the Hulk in this timeline, during which stuff got trashed, Spider-Man proved his own relative strength and durability to the audience, and any kind of climax was left completely by the wayside; about a meeting between the also-inaugural appearance of Iron Man (complete with origin story) and our good Mr. Parker, who actually do team up to stop some… high-tech Communists, I guess? And, best of all, a meeting between Peter and Wolverine in which they try to fight off Sabretooth (he’s an evil mutant who is basically the same as Logan, only, y’know, eviller) before lots of civilians get hurt. Unsurprisingly to me, that last story was the most compelling. I assume it has something to do with what mutually-sympathetic, outsider characters Wolverine and Spider-Man are within their respective worlds. So, yay inevitable chemistry.

The art, which I only tend to notice when it is particularly egregious or unusual, or when the story is boring me, was in this instance equally boring. I wonder if I just think most of the art is fantastic and forget to say so, or if I’m really picky about handing out praise, or if I think most of the art is workmanlike and that only bothers me because I’ve focused on it in search of something to hold my attention when the story is so-so. Probably it’s the first one, but the correlation in my (possibly faulty?) memory between iffy art and iffy plot has been high over time.

Yes Man

Return of the Wednesday dollar movie, yay. Less yay is that I still haven’t seen Friday the 13th’s remake yet. But that’s okay, because I will. What I did see was Yes Man, a very much by-the-numbers romantic comedy in which Jim Carrey meets the beautifully-voiced and pleasantly quirkily-featured Zooey Deschanel by virtue of saying yes to everything that comes his way.

Jim, you see, is this sad sack of a guy who got divorced several years ago and has pretty much given up. Whatever he does not commit to experiencing cannot disappoint him, so he commits to nothing. Except, he runs into an ex-coworker at an extremely low point and gets talked into a seminar about the power of “Yes!” From there forward, his life turns into a whirlwind of adventure and romance that has only one possible flaw. Well, okay, maybe two. I’d hate to spoil them, though.

Both the movie’s apparent message and especially its underlying actual message have a lot to recommend them, for anyone who is in shutdown mode. Pleasant though it would be, the world won’t come to you. (And I say that as someone for whom it actually did, once.) If you’re happy, that’s as far as it goes, and more power to you. But if you’re not, you pretty much have to stop waiting and get out there outside your numbed comfort zone and find the good things. And it will suck part of the time, but without the risk, you won’t ever get out of the hole. Also, though, you can swing too far in that direction. So don’t do that one either?

I guess my point is, if I didn’t think pretty highly of my present circumstances, I would find this movie inspiring instead of merely competently funny and exceedingly fun.

Danse Macabre

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So, here’s a possibly interesting tidbit about Danse Macabre. When I first knew of its existence in hardback, I wasn’t yet halfway through the series, and it looked like a lot of change was in store ahead. Anita was going from a zombie animator and vampire killer and unofficial detective to federal marshal? Cool beans! Pregnancy scare? Sure, fair enough, she’s got a boyfriend and maybe a second one. This would have been 2006, I guess?

Also, that probably wasn’t interesting at all, but it was pretty much the only thing I could think of to type that wouldn’t be dripping with vitriol, and it seems fair to give my readers a safe haven wherein they can decide to not keep going.

Because, Jesus God, this is a fucking terrible book. It spans 48 hours leading up to a vampire ballet performance, which latter part might have been pretty cool to watch, I guess? It was ten of the maybe fifteen pages where I didn’t want to claw my eyes out of my head while reading it, anyway, so I can’t help but look upon the scene fondly, y’know? In the meantime, there are these five hundred pages spanning these 48 hours, in which nothing of any interest happens. Anita might be pregnant, and she’s going to be sure to be strong about it except for fighting with all of her friends, or maybe that should be the definition of strength instead of an exception. But she also just might carry a bunch of impossible virii and be way stronger than anyone yet suspects, instead of being pregnant. All those Master Vampires they’ve invited to town for the ballet might have been a bad scary idea that will destroy their lives, or maybe they’ll gain all kinds of new power by having giant vampire orgies instead. She’ll certainly have to manage the expectations and feelings of her myriad emotionally crippled boyfriends, sure the normal ones like Richard and Nathaniel and Jason, but let’s not forget all the awesome non-names we can throw around, like Haven or Wicked or Truth or London or Asher or for fuck’s sake Requiem! And as if that weren’t bad enough, the Master of Chicago is named Augustine, which would be like a breath of fresh air except that he’s older than perennial fan favorite Jean Claude, and yet everyone calls him Auggie. AUGGIE!!!!

It’s like… well, I know I’ve mentioned Mary Sue before, but to sum up right quick, Mary Sue is a character in Star Trek fan fiction from probably the ’70s, who was written as a stand-in for the author, and she shows up every main character you’ve heard of on the Enterprise, she’s the one person with all the special skills and talents to save the day, plus pretty much everyone wants her in the worst way. It’s not that Anita Blake is a Mary Sue kind of character. It’s not THAT SIMPLE. It’s like, in these last few books, Anita Blake is the character that the original fictional Mary Sue would have written, if she herself were an author in addition to her many space-faring talents.

The worst part? I actually finished the book. I don’t exactly know how. I mean, at the beginning, I wasn’t angry, I just wanted to quit because it was so unpleasant. But it felt at that point like I was having an unfair personal reaction to some story elements, so I persevered. Eventually the relief of that part of the plot fading out of prominence got me through the interminable middle section in a bull-rush. And by the time I realized that every time I read more than a page at a sitting, I got angry, I was a) almost finished and b) didn’t have access to the next book I wanted to read. And by the time I solved that problem, I was really almost finished, and the old idiotic completionism had kicked in. But, seriously, I think I accidentally got a little drunk on Wednesday night because I was reading, and if I couldn’t focus on the book, I wouldn’t have to read anymore. I don’t so much no longer care about these characters as I sincerely want them all to die in a fire. And I’m in the unique position of being able to make that happen. But it seems like I shouldn’t?

Anyway. Here’s what does happen: Anita gets threatened in dreams by the First Evil, or the Queen of the Damned, or someone like that. The Mother of Night, there we go. Anyway, she’s the very first vampire, and she’s been waking up gradually for a few books now. And then later, Anita talks to a guy who was made a vampire by that one chick, and who might be the Arthurian Merlin instead of just a vampire with a similar name, and who is certainly the first dude in a long time that might be more powerful than our merry band of sex-starved heroes. Which might matter, except he wants to sign on with them instead of oppose them? I guess I just ruined the book, but if I can tell you every single plot event that occurred in only two-ish sentences, it may just be that someone else ruined the book first.

God! I can’t stop being pissed off about this!

And all the fucking horrible verbal tics! “That wonderful Gallic shrug that meant everything or nothing.” “[This or that sexual pecadillo] just flat did it for me.” The repetition between thought and action, along the lines of, say, someone asks a question, then our author types, “I didn’t know the answer to that. ‘I don’t know the answer to that,’ I said.” I mean, the first few and others that I thankfully can’t recall offhand, there’s no reason for you to read them and understand how, after a dozen books of the same phrases over and over again, I am boiling with fury at the memory. But that last repetition thing? Who is possibly allowed to write like that?!

Okay. Okay. I’m stopping now. Fuck!

Push (2009)

You know what’s cool? There are just so many movies right now that have science fiction and/or superhero themes going. And it’s much like the present horror renaissance, in that so many genre films coming down the pipe means a lot of them will be not so good. But the whole point of that is that you inevitably end up with the real gems now and again. Which brings us to Push, which in all honesty looked from the previews like someone had watched Jumper and said to themselves, hey, I can make that movie too!

And, okay, instead of teleporters and evil paladins, they have telekinetics and future-drawers and mind controllers and a whole host of additional powered people, plus the U.S. government and the Triads. And they all run around Hong Kong, trying to find a drug that the consistently-talented Dakota Fanning’s mom says will bring down the feds. Who are kind of evil, maybe? But not as bad as the Triads.

Here’s the thing. It has plot holes you could drive a truck through, and it is at core a little bit silly. But it was damn fun! And it had drunk Dakota Fanning! I’m pretty sure that in the next five to ten years, she is going to be an incredible actress, and good for her. And ultimately, I kind of figure that whoever made Push was basically making Jumper again. What I forgot to consider until the movie made me realize it is that it’s possible to make Jumper again, but to make a good version. And that is pretty much what this was. Yay, that.

Shards of Delirium

Fragments of Delight