Adventureland

Have you noticed how practically everything that’s going on in Hollywood in the past three or four years isn’t more than a degree of separation from Freaks and Geeks? Which was a short-lived NBC coming of age drama, in case you entirely failed to be aware of it. But then I doubt you’d have noticed this new thing. I’ll tell you who has, though: Terry Gross, that chick from Fresh Air.

The latest such endeavour connected to a failed-but-brilliant decade-old high school show is Adventureland, a nearly perfect fusion of coming of age drama and romantic comedy in which a kid whose failure to be Michael Cera I could only rarely get past loses his chance to explore Europe and find himself in the summer of 1987 between college and grad school, when his father runs into an economic downturn. Instead, he comes home to Pittsburgh and takes a job at the local amusement park. Hijinks as well as self-finding ensue.

There are two things that make the movie better than it has any right to be. The first and more universally applicable is that the characters are so fully realized. Lots of them are annoying as all get out, but even the ones for whom the audience feels little or no sympathy are still completely believable, with nary a caricature to be found. And the main characters are as flawed, sympathetic, and nuanced as you could really ask for. (Particularly Ryan Reynolds’ lothario of a maintenance man, who could easily have been one-dimensional with little to no quality drop-off for the film.) And the second thing is that the female lead hits all of my buttons for The Right Girl.[1] I know a movie can only give a cursory character study at best, but, yeah.

If you’re wondering why I’m leaving the Not Michael Cera guy out of this review? It’s mostly because I don’t want to spoil the experience of him.

[1] Also, I am not alone in this assessment, though this is not the first time Ryan and I have agreed on such things.

Knowing

Leave a reply

Nicolas Cage, right? Right?![1] So, he’s an astrophysicist, and his son comes into possession of a sheet of paper full of numbers. Said numbers have been locked in a time capsule for the past fifty years, but they also have predicted every major disaster worldwide over that period. And now that there are only a few numbers left on the list, Nic has a few mysteries to solve. Plus some overacting to perform, including some seriously iffy drunkenness that I actually know he’s capable of in other circumstances. And an out-of-place religious subplot to adhere to.

It’s not that Knowing was actively bad. It had a pretty decent hook, above-average effects, and a whole lot of angel-seeming dudes that all looked like Spike.[2] It’s just that the iffyness sticks out in my head far more, after the fact, than the upsides did. Also, the conclusion was a bizarre departure from the rest of the movie. It’s not really that I can say it contradicted the rest, there were just too many genres for one movie. Someone, somewhere, is far more pretentiously impressed with this movie than they have any real right to be.

[1] I really, really wish I had it in me to stop the review right there, including not having added this footnote.
[2] Said confluence of role and appearance leads to a pop-culture pun which pleases me to no end.

Louisiana Power & Light

I’m in a book club. Well, that’s not entirely accurate. As with all book clubs above a certain mayfly-like age, it has died an inglorious death, somewhere in the middle of the first book.[1] But I can say with pride that I did not contribute to that death. Yay! The book selected was one of those modern fictions in the sense that it was published since the middle of the last century and doesn’t have a particular sub-genre, but not in the sense that it was designed solely to fill me with rage. Which does make it rather a stand-out, and I’m glad someone put me onto it!

Unfortunately, the lack of genre convention makes it hard for me to describe Louisiana Power & Light without jumping right into spoiler territory. But I can at least minimize, one supposes. In 1970s small-town Louisiana, everyone is in everyone else’s business; in that sense, it reminds me a lot of some of Stephen King’s work, except with thoroughly Southern rather than Yankee sensibilities. The focal point of everyone’s attention for the previous century, though, has been the Fontana family, who all but literally crawled out of the swamp decades ago and have since brought forth a multitude of only male children who have, one by one, been brought down by tragicomic fates; in short, the very stuff of which local legends are made. But now, orphaned Billy Wayne Fontana, being raised by nuns who are grooming him for a life in the seminary, is the only one left.

And, that, ultimately, is what the whole book is about. The town has a collective narration, and that collective is primarily concerned with Billy Wayne’s outcome and offspring. It shifts rapidly between sympathetic and judgmental, ready for the Fontanas to finally stop blighting the locality with misery and failure at every moment and yet gleefully ready to recount hundreds of stories about minor setbacks and major tragedies wrought by his family’s history. And certainly the individual characters are equally concerned with his ultimate fate, though in different and often kinder ways. Untangling the motivations of the collective narrator and sifting fact from wishful thinking is a delight, though I admittedly always groove on untrustworthy narration, and the uniquely Southern digressions are one of the few things I miss in my mostly genre-fiction bookshelves. It’s just, people here really do talk and act like this, even at the very edge of the South, and it always amuses me to see someone capture it. But the very best parts of the book are the moments when Billy Wayne Fontana (and especially his younger son, who I deem not a spoiler since he’s mentioned pre-emptively in the prologue) notices and tries to act upon his own fate, instead of just floating like a ragdoll toward the inevitable thunderous waterfall just around the bend; because when that happens, the narrator is finally at a loss and we get brief glimpses of what the Fontanas really are. Legends have their place, but a dose of truth makes the legend that much sweeter, I figure.

[1] I acknowledge that many book clubs make it as far as the middle of the second book.

Hack/Slash: Friday the 31st

I’m not sure yet, and I’ve been… well, “burned” is a little strong, but I’ve been bitten by this before. Anyway, although I’m not sure yet, it looks like Friday the 31st marks the Hack/Slash series’ evolution from a novelty into something pretty damn cool. The character development that has always been its strongest suit (well, aside from the art) has been supplemented, in the form of people that slasher-slaughtering hottie Cassie Hack and her hulking companion Vlad have saved over the past couple of books, who are now banding together and offering to help out with finding new problems to solve and people to save.[1]

And at some point, I guess the series got picked up by a publisher, because after a normal one-shot (though, also as usual, continuity-influencing) issue co-starring Chucky[2], the book collects the first two storylines / four issues of the monthly Hack/Slash comic run, still apparently ongoing. The first storyline serves as a reintroduction to the characters and premise for people who might not have been aware of the haphazard schedule[3] under which all the one-offs were printed, and the second features a Cthulhian death metal band and more virgins than you can shake a stick at. And since there are at least two more books yet to go, I’m certainly looking forward to what they throw at me next. I mean, in several months when I read volume 4. Not literally next.

[1] And helping out with any unexpected costs or emergencies that might crop up. If the first such emergency and offered assistance is any indicator, I’m going to like the new Scoobies. Both directly and thematically.
[2] Yes, the evil doll.
[3] And probable spotty availability; though in both cases, I am purely speculating here.

Duplicity

1 Reply

I like it when movies are smarter than I expect them to be. Not the ones with paradigm-shifting plot twists in the final act, though I like those too if done well. It’s just, if I know there’s a twist, I can usually work out what it will be. No, I’m more talking about the movies that are created to be twisty and confusing right from the start, and revel in letting me know they know I know, but are confident I won’t figure it out anyway. And I can figure out a lot of those ones too, but not always.

Duplicity straddles the line. I kind of knew what was going on right away, but then I let all the nested switchbacks lull me and therefore dismissed my instinct, because the movie was cleverer than I gave it credit for. And this is exactly what I’m saying I like, so. The deal is, Clive Owen and Julia Roberts are retired spies who have moved into the private sector where they continue to spy, only now they call it corporate espionage. And they’re engaged in a steamy cat-and-mouse game between their respective companies, their respective teams, and (inevitably) themselves. The chemistry is not at all bad, but as the characters themselves acknowledge early and often, the main draw is to find out who will finally come out on top. …professionally, I mean.

It’s an entertaining movie, and I can happily recommend to anyone who likes a) to untangle puzzles or b) things that are fun.

Coraline

You would think that I’d have already read the long-published book Coraline, by Neil Gaiman. I mean, he’s awesome, right? But by the time I got my hands on a copy, I already knew there’d be a movie coming out, so I’ve put it off. Of course, I kept not seeing the movie, too, which really threw the whole thing out of whack, but Wednesday rendered itself convenient, and now I can at least put the book on my shelf.

Coraline is one of those cautionary fairy tales about the dangers of skipping out on the hard parents who have your best interests, in favor of the easy ones who probably have a catch. Unfortunately, the movie failed this test by making Coraline’s parents all too unlikeable, with only a hint of the tough-but-fair paradigm I think (or at least hope) they were trying to portray. Coraline Jones and those parents have just moved into the ground floor of a rental house out in the country, where they can pursue their dreams of writing gardening books, dreams which are made ridiculously implausible by their shared dislike of dirt. Of course, the larger issue is that they’re stressed out by their lack of success and resultantly treat Coraline more like an unwanted distraction than a beloved daughter. All of which would turn into a distressingly heart-rending After-School Special except that there’s a tiny, walled-over door in the rental house’s parlor which leads to a mirror world, through a glass brightly, if you will, where Coraline’s parents dote on her and are excellent cooks, and every tenant and local are present solely to entertain Coraline in a variety of kid-friendly ways, with just the correct hint of faux-danger. In short, every child’s dream come true, much less any child living under the whiff of neglect, and possibly a bit more than a whiff, that Coraline is.

Here’s the good news. Although the cautionary portion of the tale is undercut by her parents actually being kind of harsh, instead of merely not the picture-perfect givers that self-involved kids inevitably want, the fairy tale sense of mounting dread and rich climactic action are spot on. Plus, y’know, 3D, which never seems to suck. Because, of course Coraline’s button-eyed Other Mother is different from how she initially seems. (I distinctly remember mentioning, y’know, fairy tale.) Additionally, the cat is just delightfully… cattish. I can’t say what comparison there is between book and movie, though I understand from Fresh Air that one character was created entirely for the flick. But that cat has all the right notes that makes me certain Neil wrote him first. He just understands cats like nobody’s business.

Ultimate Spider-Man: Ultimate Six

1 Reply

So, a kind of a funny thing happened. I completely forgot to read this book. I had it in queue, and I guess it was in the back seat of my car or something, and I was so far behind on reviews anyway, and somehow I convinced myself I’d already read it. It could be that a new Walking Dead contributed to my misapprehension on this matter as well? I just realized, suddenly, that there was no review, and then while looking at the book with the intention of loaning it out to my friend Emily (who you will no doubt recall as the violently abused daughter in The Last House on the Left), it hit me that, hey, you did not at all read this. Both matters: rectified!

You would think, having finally caught up to the book I most recently finished, I would have it in me to do more than gush. There’s just something about Brian Michael Bendis writing Ultimate Spider-Man that leaves me incoherent with glee, apparently. I’d like to mind, but if that’s what it takes to get work this consistently amazing and this consistently able to top itself, then I’m not going to quibble overmuch. Ultimate Six re-envisions the first really big Spider-Man event of the original Marvel era, in which six of Spider-Man’s past foes team up to accomplish what none of them could individually: Spider-Man’s annihilation.

Of course, when I say “re-envisions”, what I mean is, “takes the kernel of an idea and demonstrates that, no matter how good Marvel really was in the ’60s, it has the ability to blow that out of the water in the modern era”. Four of Peter Parker’s previous foes, including the Green Goblin and the Sandman as a newly added fifth in a flashback sequence from a few months ago, are under S.H.I.E.L.D. imprisonment for illegal genetic modifications. The consequences of this unfortunate collection of villainy in one holding area are many and varied, ranging from the airing of Nick Fury’s significantly dirty laundry[1], to Peter’s identity being revealed to a significant portion of the Ultimate universe, to the likely psychological collapse of his once-friend Harry Osborn. And even these pale in comparison to what will happen if the Ultimates[2] cannot prevent the team of five (and their newest sixth recruit) from fulfilling their plan to strike at the very heart of the government.

[1] I like that I can trust this event will have future consequences to the continuity.
[2] For timeline purists, the Ultimate Six storyline (which was apparently independent of the Ultimate Spider-Man run, though I like that it was collected here) falls between Ultimates and Ultimates II.

Ultimate Marvel Team-Up, Volume 2

Leave a reply

After being underwhelmed by the first Ultimate Marvel Team-Up, I was looking forward to getting through the remaining volumes quickly so that I could move on to some of the side storylines I’ve been seeing in the future that look pretty awesome, and the moreso because apparently there’s some kind of big Ultimate Universe event coming up, and I can’t be more than halfway through the accumulated catalog yet. To my surprise, though, the second volume of the series’ rather short run was thoroughly enjoyable.

The stories are all short and fluffily irrelevant to solid continuity in a way that the other runs and one-shot storylines are not. But they are far more strongly written than last time, including another visit from the X-Men[1] to explain human-mutant relations that clearly predates the UXM series’ start, and a ridiculously non-canonical visit with the Fantastic Four that was over the top hilarious. It also included the origin of Dr. Strange via a direct rip-off of the first Spider-Man/Strange crossover story back in the ’60s. The best moment, Logan/Peter notwithstanding, was the Lizard-Man origin issue. Curt Connor’s tragic scientific success is one of the best “villain” arcs I’ve seen out of Marvel in either universe, even if there’s an underlying message about the consequences of meddling with nature that I’m not so happy about.

The art varied between perfect, wonkily appropriate, and just plain wonky. Really, the only thing I was unhappy with was that three issues were outright skipped between the first and second book, resulting in my need to either scour comic stores for the missing issues directly, or to rebuy the Ultimate Marvel Team-Up run in a single volume. Both ideas are pretty solidly meh, at the moment. But I’m sure I’ll do one of them, eventually.

[1] Plus, yay, more Logan/Peter interaction. Still easily the best Ultimate crossover relationship, though the Nick Fury/Peter and /Professor X interactions are quite interesting. It’s just, Fury is so damn unlikeable most of the time.

The Last House on the Left (2009)

Leave a reply

As you may have already noticed on your own behalf, remakes are big business in Hollywood these days. Luckily?, this involves lots of horror remakes. Actually, I’m pretty sure luckily does qualify a lot of the time. I liked Wes Craven’s original The Last House on the Left, both on its own individual merits and because it seems to mark the transformative moment between all the old monster movies and Hammer pictures and such and today’s modern horror genre, chock full of slashers, torture, and overblown morality.[1] While the Wes Craven-approved remake cannot possibly live up to words like “transformative moment in genre history”, I think it might have been otherwise better than the original.

In short, some kids (the important one of whom looked what turned out to be a disturbing amount like my friend Emily) get mixed up with the wrong family of murderers while on vacation at the lake. Some deaths happen, and some rapings happen, and it is generally speaking a horrible and uncomfortable thing to watch on the screen, on par with the horribleness of the first half of I Spit on Your Grave, and for mostly the same reasons. Because, when the family of murderers shows up in a driving rainstorm at the lake house where her parents are expecting her back tomorrow, and they are looking for shelter from those parents, and nobody yet knows about the tragedy tying them all together? When this point in the movie comes the audience is almost as bloodthirsty as the parents will soon become, and they needed that horribleness to get there.

I guess what I liked about it over the original is that it didn’t have quite as much direct correlation between teens having sex and doing drugs and lying to their parents the way teens will do, and violent, disproportionate punishment at the hands of crazy people who are nevertheless a little bit vindicated by virtue of being punishers. The more realistic the movies get, the more that particular message from the ’70s changes from amusing to disturbing. Plus, even once the main event is finally on the menu[2], there’s a lot more tension and cat-and-mouse to it than the kind of non-stop actual torture scenes you get out of the second act of a Hostel knock-off.

But still, it’s pretty brutal in pursuit of justifying a payoff that you may not have wanted all that badly in the first place (though, if you are trapped in a theater and made to watch, I predict you’ll want it by the time it comes due), so I really cannot recommend it to anyone who hadn’t already intended to see it anyway. Because, after all is said and done, it doesn’t even have the historical importance of Craven’s original, which I also probably wouldn’t recommend to most people.

[1] While I freely admit that doesn’t sound like a ringing endorsement, I guess we all have a tendency to cling to that with which we grew up.
[2] Get yer mixed metaphors Right H’yere! Piping hot mixed metaphors!

Ultimate Fantastic Four: Silver Surfer

Leave a reply

Being behind makes for subpar reviews. So, y’know. But I liked Silver Surfer more than I’ve liked the last few Fantastic Fours, even despite the fact that it was a fair bit more divergent from regular Marvel continuity than I’m used to the Ultimate universe being. Basically, Reed Richards is continuing to research the cosmic cube he was tricked into taking home a couple of books ago, and this time he accidentally summons a familiar-looking silver being riding a familiar-looking silver surfboard. And then the world kind of gets kidnapped. As usual, the FF are the most sci-fi series in Marvel, even when it doesn’t seem to match the rest of the continuity. Sometimes, that bothers me. This time, at least, it was a pretty damn cool story, albeit one with no apparent continuity impact. But I could be wrong about that, easily enough. If I find out otherwise, I’ll let you know!