The Descent

I have not been to the theater in freaking forever. It sucks. I have things I plan to see, and then I fail or get delayed by events and circumstances. Like, there’s this intersection near my house that’s under construction, right? And it has a right turn lane separated from the main road by the triangular concrete embankment? Only, due to construction, that thing is currently doubling as a hole in the ground. As I was driving by it one day, I imagined that thing where your car is dangling over empty space and you can’t back up or go forward, and you’re all trapped and helpless? It was no good. Then, just a few days later it rains for the first time in, so far as I can remember, the history of Texas. Naturally, people can’t drive in rain, and as I’m going by the intersection, this young couple has lived out my premonition. And it’s raining, so of course I had to stop and help, ’cause that just sucks. Net result: car freed after there were four people helping, my lower back hurt for about 48 hours, and I accidentally tracked mud all over the carpet at my destination. If I’d been planning to go from that destination to see a movie, but had been prevented by the stopping to help and then the cleaning the carpet? This would have been a perfect example of my point.

So, yeah, events and circumstances. Maybe I’ll get caught up, but usually I fail to, which is why I hate to get behind. For instance, this weekend I saw a completely unrelated current movie instead of one of the two or three from the past few weeks. But, see, it was a horror movie, and if I don’t get to those right away, a) who will? and b) they might be pulled early due to poor numbers, in that people keep screwing me over by liking movies about gay cowboys eating pudding instead of teenage camp counselors being murdered by pudding. (Y’know, basically. Thematically.)

Thusly, I saw The Descent, a British movie; you can tell by all the British accents, and by how the bulk of the film in the Appalachians contained neither overalls nor banjos to any degree at all. After an opening scene fraught with both tension and tragedy, we pick back up a year later with our band of intrepid and extreme female adventurers meeting up to explore a cave system and bring their sisterhood closer together than ever before. Only, instead there’s a cave-in followed by the mysteries of the earth, which mostly include dire personal revelations punctuated by bloody murder. From, you know, human cannibals evolved to underground living over thousands of years. I mean, I complained about the lack of banjos, but I have to admit these people do understand the basic nature of the Appalachian region.

Take one small part The Cave, one small part Carrie, and stir it into a bowlful of How the Blair Witch Got Her Groove Back, and you have this movie here, about which I regret absolutely no part of my experience. Watch especially for the dramatic framing in the last several scenes, about from the point where our heroine Sarah steals River Tam’s pose at the end of Serenity until the very end. If it wasn’t for the fact that I’m sure the director intended them to be serious moments of character growth and breakthrough instead of the sheer hilarity that they actually are, I think I could have a new best (film) friend.

A Feast for Crows

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Way back toward the end of last year, I got the fourth Song of Ice and Fire book. I was nowhere near ready to read it yet, even by my piles of to-read books standards, but on the other hand, sometimes books will be more discounted in the first few weeks than later on in the first few months, and it was anyone’s guess when I would be ready to read it. Thusly, action! In the form of buying a book from a bookstore, I mean, which some people might fail to characterize as an action-laden event. Nuts to them!

Let’s fast forward to a few months later, when I am in fact ready to read A Feast for Crows, fresh as I am from my rereading the rest of the series. Actually, though, that would be useless. ‘Cause, hey, look, there’s a book I haven’t read yet. How am I supposed to say anything meaningful about it? Answer: By going just slightly further ahead into the future, which is to say my recent past, when I finished the book. I’m a problem solver, you know. That’s how I got re-employed and all. Well, sort of. That is the field into which I got re-employed, though it’s possible that the talent also played a role in resolving the joblessness, too. Post-event analysis is a job for people who are not me, though.

Anyhow. Good book. I was wrong in my prediction of it being Sansa’s, though I certainly feel the girl has improved to a tolerable character. Considering that other people who improved to merely tolerable in previous volumes are now downright likable and interesting, I choose to take this as a good sign. Really, though, the book is Cersei’s. Despite certain unrelated characters and events, the bulk of the story is about the way she handles rulership of a kingdom shattered by war, famine, and soon the winter of endless zombies (perpetual motto: We’re going to be huge in the next book, honest!) Without going into spoiler-laden details, allow me to just say that I found her arc (and all of the arcs that whirled around hers, most notably Jaime’s) entertaining from start to finish.

Thematically, it’s every bit as dire as the title proclaims. Our continent of Westeros is teetering on the brink of eternal night, and even now, basically nobody realizes anything is particularly wrong. On the one hand, I’ve enjoyed the blindness theme immensely. On the other, the duration of it, despite being reasonable from a plot perspective, is starting to grow to Jordanian proportions. You can only have so much anticipation sans payoff before it starts to become burden instead of a delicious tease.

The next book, due out sometime in the next 6 months or so? Maybe? contains most of the characters I enjoy the most (although there are certainly a couple I enjoy in this one, lest you think this is actually a complaint), so I’m pretty excited for it to come out. On the downside, if I understood the structure of this pair of books correctly, not enough time is passing in the world for the amount of time that’s passing out here in real life between books. To cover what was supposed to be an unreferenced five year gap in events, Martin is going to have spent six or seven years in writing between the two books. Although the pace appeared to have picked up by the end of this one, that is still very much not an efficient timeline, and what with the rash of mysterious soap opera diseases that have been striking authors down lately, well, that makes me all the more concerned.

Mostly unrelatedly, I bet the new yearly Erikson is out. I ought to look into that.

Burnt Offerings

I had this whole big plan, I remember distinctly. Stay away from the vampire nearly-porn stuff for a little while. Alternate between the stack of hardbacks and the stack of graphic novels, knock out several reviews in a reasonably short time as a result. And, okay, the last part is likely to occur, or at least no less likely. But the problem with being on a plane (aside from all the motherfucking snakes, I mean) and not checking any bags is that it’s not worth it to try to bring along an unwieldy and damageable graphic novel when you could bring along a cheap paperback instead. And so, regrettably, I have read another tale of the exploits of Anita Blake.

Regrettable is an easy word to throw around in this context. For one thing, the vampire porn classification is getting to be more overt with each one I read. On the inside, sure, obviously, but I’m talking about the covers. Time was, I could pretend like it was detective fiction that happened to include the undead, and all was well. But it’s just really obviously porn to even casual passersby at this point. My street cred, always a precarious proposition at best, is taking a real hit lately. And then (getting back to the book’s steamy innards) the porniness quotient, vampire and otherwise, has risen as steeply as I was afraid it would after the last one. If the descent continues, it will be a romance novel next time, and the one after that should have its own special section in the used bookstore where the children can’t reach it.

Here’s the bad news, though. The paragraphs above do not contain my largest complaint about Burnt Offerings. Sure, okay, I was able to buy into it when our heroine graduated from ‘able to raise zombies’ to full on necromancer, with power over all of the dead. And I thought it was kind of cool in the first few books when all of the loose ends came together in a couple of climactic chapters despite seeming a Gordian mess just pages before. But now the girl is getting into all kinds of ridiculous abilities that are simultaneously overpowered and nonsensical, and simultaneously the plots are starting to feel like Ms. Hamilton has a page limit that she’s accidentally bumping up against (perhaps due to all the new and delightful sex?), which causes her to wave her wand of plot resolution and end the book on a dime. Not a good dime, either, one of those buffalo wooden dimes that are fake and worthless in every way, and by the end of the stock show you just find them laying on the street because nobody cares enough to hold onto them. Hell, not even that good. We’re talking buffalo nickels, here, people.

Oh, in case you care, the plot was about the visit of the vampiric master council, who are apparently in charge of all things vampire? Only, I guess not really, since they’ve never been mentioned before and seem to have little or no influence in America, just the Old World. That, and a pyrokinetic is maybe setting some fires around town, so Anita should help with that, since… well, for some reason. Maybe necromancers can squirt a lot of…. while I was typing that, the thought took an unfortunate turn in my head, so I’m going to stop now. Later, in what I hope will be a large number of months from now, fear for me when I get around to reading the next one, if it’s anything like this. ‘Cause, wow.

Kushiel’s Scion

From time to time, I browse my local Half-Price Books. Well, more accurately, there are two that are right close and another that is along a path I follow with semi-regularity, and I tend to be in at least one of them at least once a week. So, you know, a lot. I’ve always been okay with used books, and the thing where I have a lack of income has turned that into something more like necessity. But, my point is, regular freaking customer here. So when I saw a hardback copy of a new Kushiel book from Jacqueline Carey, completely without having been aware that the series was set to continue, I just snagged it and went. Only later did I learn of the unlikelihood of finding a used copy of a book that had only been out for about a week. So, hey, neat. Go, me!

And then, a pair of incredibly busy weeks made me not only read it more slowly than one might guess, but also resulted in the review being a solid week late. The details have faded a little bit, but I can only assume that Kushiel’s Scion is about the further adventures of Phèdre, discarded child, high class prostitute, and now peer of the realm as she attempts to select and customise an incredibly ugly and inexplicably popular rectangular car without bankrupting her beloved Terre d’Ange or allowing the swirling intrigues of the court to distract her from her goal. Or, possibly, it’s about something else?

So, yeah, no. In fact, it’s about her adopted son Imriel, whose legacy is nearly as convoluted as her own. Birthed as part of a plot by his infamous mother and Phèdre’s longtime adversary to steal the throne for which he is third in line, raised unwitting of his heritage or rank in a remote monastery, kidnapped into slavery and sexual abuse at a tender age (completely coincidental to his past), and now raised to adulthood in the household of the most famed citizens of the modern age, our young Imriel has had a lot to overcome. And this book is as much about overcoming it as it is about introducing the hero of a new trilogy full of the same style (and, I think, quality) of political intrigue, lush travelogue and vivid characters that made the original so enjoyable.

Best of all, it being an introductory novel in no way hinders any of the other qualities one looks for in a book. You have the tried, true, and almost never trite trope of exploring the present by revealing aspects of the past. You have a tightly contained and incompletely explored thematic question of what it really means to be good, a question that haunts Imriel daily due to the dark passions that came to him through his bloodline and his fear-disguising hatred of his exiled mother. And lest you think that ‘incompletely’ indicates a criticism of some kind, let me hasten to assure you that the opposite would be the case; the temerity to consider such a complex question as solved would be the point where I’d think far less of an author, rather. And you have an excellent hook into what promises to be an even stronger second entry. The downside, of course, is that I’m once again in the middle of an ongoing series I’d thought closed off and complete. But, you won’t find me complaining too loudly about it. I’m a sucker that way.

Superman Archives, Volume 1

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My recent birthday was marked by a non-anonymous donation of multiple graphic novels (I, for the most part, have been exclusively Sandman in that arena up to now) in order to get me jumpstarted on the genre, which I’ve always approved of in theory but managed to miss the age at which one gets in on the ground floor, as it were. So, for the most part, my comics education has been movie-based. Not that there’s a ton wrong with that, but it certainly has limits.

So, I went with comforting and familiar for my first hit. DC’s Superman Archives, Volume 1 contains the first four seasonal collections of the Superman material originally published in the first several Action Comics, as well as some newspaper daily stuff. (Superman in a 3-4 panel newspaper comic? That’s just really weird to me.) A particularly cool thing about the book is that it includes everything in the collections, including ads for contests or joining fan clubs and screenshots for the pages where you can order all kinds of stuff for absolutely free, no money necessary! Apparently, in the late 1930s, a lot of companies had as their business model ‘Get small children to sell stuff door to door for us in exchange for cheap crap that will break in the mail on the way to them’. And people make fun of internet companies that wanted to provide everyone in America with a free barcode scanner? Well, okay, that’s pretty dumb, but still, so is the child salesman approach.

But anyway, comforting and familiar, right? Yeah, I screwed the pooch on that guess. Original Superman is just weird. I mean, yeah, I knew he couldn’t fly yet. The superhearing and vision even waited a few episodes to show up. No kryptonite yet, which made him more than usually overpowered relative to everyone else, but that was certainly a feature in its time, so I won’t judge them negatively on it. And the spontaneous ability to control his heartrate and other such physical functions? Just a precursor of the wackiness that would come in later years. But that’s not really what I mean. No, it’s more the personality of the guy. He was just a freakin’ bully. Kidnapping innocent people for their own good, all kinds of vigilante justice, bodies littering the ground behind him as often as not and the electric chair for most of the people he bothered to bring in. Furthermore, he had all kinds of ludicrous detective-y skills that would have much better suited Batman, if he had been invented just yet. Seriously, the ability to perfectly disguise yourself as other people, only with the use of makeup? I mean, even if I were to cave on that aspect, where would Clark Kent learn how to apply makeup, other than from the magical study manual of Plot Necessity? Oy. Plus, he had a very adversarial professional relationship with Lois Lane. So, it was all very jarring. On top of that, the plots were really kind of twee. This industrialist is trying to corrupt that politician, in order to generate a war that will help sell munitions, or else maybe a construction company is killing folks in order to snag a lucrative contract. I hear rumors of an alternate history Kal-El who landed in a Siberian gulag instead of a Kansas farm, but the fact is, old school Superman was already firmly on the side of the people in their inevitable revolution against the corrupt capitalist system. Kinda redundant.

On the bright side, the end of the book showed promise, in the form of (just as you’d expect, really) mad scientist Luthor. Not that he’d quite worked out how to be a reliable nemesis, but the grandiose plots with extensive collateral damage classified as acceptable losses? Those were present right from the start, to the comic’s overall benefit. In that same span is when Lois turned into her own character, rushing off into danger in a most unladylike fashion at every turn, well ahead of the women’s lib movement. (And, okay, she did require a man to get her out of all these hairy situations, but it was 1939. You can only expect so much.) As she’d only been a foil to reject Clark and make people feel bad for him, that’s a definite improvement. And, towards the end, Superman was showing hints of his squeaky clean Boy Scout image. I know it seems bland and boring, but when contrasted against a figure with sensibilities as dark as Batman’s who also has the power to take over the world if he felt like it? Very uncomfortable to read about that guy in a superhero comic setting. Although it would probably be compelling in the hands of a modern, less pulpy writer.

The actual book is very pretty, although I have the impression that future volumes are drastically overpriced. The insides are also good, with multiple short stories in addition to the all the comics and random stuff I mentioned earlier. A weirdness toward the end is that the short stories and occasional single page comics have nothing whatever to do with Superman, and instead gravitate toward cop/detective or science fiction for the stories and lame cartoons about a wiener dog’s trials and tribulations. (One of the science fiction stories had a bit of awesomeness about someone visiting the Museum of Interstellar Travel, in 1982. When, you see, interstellar travel had been around for so long that it was historical. I love stuff like that.)

Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest

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Here’s what happened. I went to the movie, ’cause, dude, pirates! And I watched it (still no Snakes on a Plane trailer. Jerks.), and at the end of the movie… nothing. No opinion whatsoever. So I did what any sane movie reviewer would do. I joined my friends for their kid birthday party evening viewing and watched it all over again. And if I had substantially more income than I do, I might convince myself to perpetuate this lie through another showing tonight, as my house is dead. But in fact my income retains its non-existence, and at any rate I am overdue on this review and another one exactly like it. (I may even cut-and-paste, so if it looks like there’s an error with a review posted twice in a row, rest assured, it’s on purpose. (I’m still lying, here. (OR AM I???))) Without further ado, then, my completely honest and spoiler-free review of the movie. Spoiler stuff will fall below the cut, as ever.

First, the raw impressions: It was pretty well unforgiving of people who had not seen the original. Chock full of quotable one-liners. Buckles were swashed harder than ever had they been swashed before. The people who made this have with at least 96% certainty played Katamari Damacy. Sufficient Cthulhiana to put me well down the road toward being convinced that maybe Lovecraft had a good point about the ocean. The plotlines were substantially more adult than last time. The humor was correspondingly more childlike. I expected five returning characters, and got eleven (or thirteen, depending upon how you count), which is pretty cool. “Undead monkey!” A multitude of characters with complex motivations bumping up against each other in realistic ways, and the corresponding double- and triple-crossing that ensues. Plenty of thematic concern with who’s good, who’s bad, and why, concern that was left unresolved by the end of the film. (The scene with Jack swapping out hats during the barfight, for example, was particularly noteworthy.)

A lot of things were left unresolved by the end of the film, in fact. Going into it, I was reminded a lot of the Matrix trilogy. You have an initial standalone film, and once it succeeds at making bank, the creators carry on with their originally planned longer story. I liked the second Matrix movie a lot, although it wasn’t quite as strong as the original. Much like here, you see. The one bright spot is that I have no reason to believe At World’s End will spectacularly flop, so that correspondence is basically over. So, that was my impression going in. And coming out? I have no complaint with cliffhangers that will be resolved in a reasonable amount of time, as seems to be the case here. My impression of the trilogy structure was altered a little bit, though. And hmm, delving into that requires spoilers, so I’m going to have to wrap things up here.

In short: Slightly weaker than the original, mostly in that the humor wasn’t quite up to snuff. The storyline was darker, which I for one am all about, and the characters had a lot more depth. As time passes, I’ll probably end up liking this one better, but right now, no matter how much it made me laugh, the original made me laugh more and in better ways, and as a result of having watched it just a couple days ago too, it looms larger in my mind on that scale, as that was the expectation I had walking into the theater.
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The Killing Dance

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I probably got to the next Anita Blake thing a little too quickly, but sometimes you just need a paperback in a hurry, to avoid getting too wrapped up in something big. And I’m sure I had a good reason at the time, though I can’t really remember what it was anymore. Be that as it may, the more important part of this story is that with The Killing Dance, the vampire hunter / necromancer chick’s ongoing stories of mayhem and angsty love have turned a corner.

I like that the stories have continued to get more engrossing. This time, the main plotline is about how person or persons unknown have put out a hit out on Anita, to the tune of a cool half a mil. As if that weren’t bad enough, things are coming to a head with her werewolf boyfriend’s pack leadership issues and with her personal love triangle between said boyfriend and the vampire master of the city. Which, okay, is probably every bit as trashy as it sounds. But a long-standing characteristic of mine (let’s call it a feature) is that I tend to be a fan of trashy, as long as it is also competent. This series surpasses that bar, if not by an excessive amount, and so onward I read.

Except, that corner I mentioned? I saw it coming in the setup phase, that this was probably going to be the last volume that didn’t regularly devolve into softcore erotic lit. Little did I know, I had been too optimistic by exactly one volume. So, yeah, things have pretty much fallen apart on that front. The sad irony is that the plotting stuff has continued to improve, and so I really do want to know what’s going to happen next. I have a sense that in no more than two additional books, the scales will have shifted too dramatically, though. I am going to dub this particular quality (or lack thereof, really) in an ongoing series “porn bloat”. Proper usage goes something like, “Can you believe the porn bloat in Winter’s Heart? Does Jordan seriously expect us to believe that every single feminine ceremony in the world involves boobies? Still, I can hardly wait for HBO to pick it up! ‘Cause, boobies!” (It’s possible that a more proper usage of the terminology would leave off the last two sentences. Still, though. Boobies! (Can you believe the porn bloat in Shards of Delirium?))

Waiting…

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That thing about how I don’t go more than a day without typing up a movie review? It reminded me that I did watch a DVD last week without saying the slightest word about it, or really even considering that it needed to be reviewed. Perhaps this should be taken as an indictment of the film in question, though generally speaking I found it to be perfectly adequate in its teen raunchfest niche.

Marred only by an overly clever title and the sin of having reached its topicspace second, Waiting… is a tidy little grossout comedy about a day in the lives of the staff of a suspiciously Bennigan’s-like restaurant, including just about everything you’d be tempted to include if this had been your premise: annoying customers, tampered food, disaffected youth, incestuously intertwined love lives, and… okay, you probably wouldn’t have included the penis-showing game; that uniqueness is really what makes it the highlight of the show. Certainly the trite coming-of-age piece masquerading as the main plotline contributed far less to any potential enjoyment. So, okay, maybe it was marred by three things instead of two. But that’s forgiveable, because of how awesome the rap over the end credits was.

Outbound Flight

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A trend I have noticed: when I read a book and can’t make up my mind how I feel about it, I sit on it for several days without doing anything, in the hopes that my mind will clear up. In contrast, when I watch a movie and don’t know how I feel about it, I wait no longer than a day, and then if I’m still failing, I’ll tell a little story about some event that happened around the movie, and the haze will magically lift from my mind, and a reasonable review is sure to be born. It has occurred to me just now that perhaps there is a lesson there regarding how I deal with my book reviews. Which is easy to say, and all, but typically books take longer than movies, so it’s harder to encapsulate a relevant story from the timespan. Nevertheless, I soldier on, because the important goal to accomplish right now is the review; integrating stories can wait.

I think the biggest flaw in Outbound Flight that has kept me on the fence about it for so long is that it’s so much a vanity prequel. Sure, it’s Timothy Zahn, which means that it’s never less than competently written, and that it is frequently a joy to behold. (See the climactic tragedy of the final 50 pages, or any scene in which Thrawn is throwing his brain around.) But at the same time, there are great swaths of the story that I can’t convince myself matter to the overall Star Wars tapestry. Even worse, the inclusion of Obi-Wan Kenobi and his Padawan of Doom seemed so unnecessary as to be essentially a cheap stunt.

Ultimately, because of the author I’m going to rule it to be an okay book. But there’s a tightly plotted 80 or 100 page novella in here filling in the last missing pieces of a 15 year old jigsaw puzzle that would have been a horror to market and an absolute delight to read. I’ll say this, though: I’m lucky all my books are packed away, or I’d cave in to the compulsion to reread the original Zahn trilogy that kicked off the Star Wars resurgence. Not that it would be a truly bad thing (and in fact I’m sure it would be quite fun), but my backlog is much too large as things stand without that kind of digression.

The Sentinel (2006)

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Ah, Thursday evenings in the summer, when a young man’s fancy turns to the dollar theater to catch stuff that came out during the April lull. Because, you know, $1.50 for tickets and then $1 hot dogs are the perfect way to round out an evening. And these hot dogs, I thought I had remembered accurately that they were worth approximately a dollar, after a fair markup caused by people wanting to make profit off of using their labor instead of my own and all. My memory was faulty, though; I’m pretty sure $.50 would be a more fair price. ‘Cause, wow, these were bad hot dogs. And with packets of mustard from a manufacturer I’d never heard of, instead of a giant tub of squeezable. That’s just weird to me, that packet mustard could possibly be cheaper in bulk. And yet, you know it must have been, because why buy it otherwise?

Naturally, though, all of this mediocrity was counteracted by the film in question, right? The Sentinel, starring probably Michael Douglas as the titular President’s guardian (though maybe Kiefer Sutherland instead; I doubt it, but maybe) who has lasted through 25 long years of presidential details after taking a bullet for Reagan without ever once getting a real promotion, but that’s okay because he does his job for the love of his country. Unless, that is, he in fact is at the center of a diabolical plot (here, I exaggerate; it was actually a fairly generic plot, and I can’t even tell you now what the reason behind it was, other than the usual infidel pigdog claptrap you’d expect) to assassinate the current President, as everyone seems to believe. But is it he? Or the First Lady? Or Kiefer? Or one of the many other Secret Service agents around?

So, plot, editing, action sequences: all pretty pedestrian. Exactly the kind of thing that you’d expect to see in April, which makes sense. But the whodunnit portion was on the whole satisfying. I mean, rarely is the actual reveal all that satisfying, and when it is, that’s usually a great movie. But they kept the questions running through my head far longer than I’m used to, kept the possibilities open far longer than they should have been able to, and any movie where I don’t already know the entire layout by the end of minute thirty? I’m prepared to call that a pretty good movie, as long as the acting is serviceable too. And this was, so at a buck-fiddy, I’ll take what I can get. It easily topped the hot dog, value-wise.