The Grapple

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As anticipated, another alternate history of the many wars between the USA and the CSA was released, and then I read it. I mean, months later, also as anticipated, but that’s fine because there’s only one left, and now I can not wait a long time to see how things turn out, if that’s my preference. It probably won’t be, but, y’know. It’s nice to have options. Also, of course, it would probably be easy to keep on rolling the clock forward even after World War II ends, since the face of the planet is so different after eighty years of Confederate existence. America allied with non-fascist Germany, Russia still under the control of the tsar, Canada occupied… lots of differences.

The main problem with The Grapple is that the surprises are running out. Is there a crazy guy in charge of a downtrodden nation who has united his people in hatred of an outsider ethnic group, which group is now being slaughtered by the millions? Why, yes. Does this slaughter actively interfere with what could have been a successful war effort? On multiple levels, in fact. Does he at least have VX rocket analogues with which he can create a little bit of tension? You know he will sooner or later! Is there a top secret atomic arms race? Heck, that even happened in the aliens version of World War II that Turtledove already wrote, so no way is it going to vanish this time.

The one thing that does recommend the series is that it has spanned ten books now and three generations. As a result, I find myself interested in the individual fates of the characters, wherein some drama is still possible. I suppose I couldn’t expect the outcome of the war to be different, since there are stark lines between good and evil at this point. But it still hurts a series when you know almost exactly how it’s going to end and you’re only a little over halfway through it. (I mean, not that there will be twenty books, but that this particular war forms its own “mini-series”, if you will. That right there is a handy term. You’d think someone would have thought of it before now.)

Brief Lives

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a4bd3d100d9f3f35934316d5567444341587343I realized in the midst of all the graphic novels I’ve been reading, I had completely neglected my Sandman collecting. So I immediately ordered Brief Lives, and read it a much shorter than usual time afterward. (I mean, I buy stuff and then don’t touch it for a while, due to the stack.) And I’m so glad, because it’s probably my favorite one. I’m also glad because of how much more depth I’m picking up this time. Foreshadowing and all, sure, but there are just so many layers all over the place that I could probably re-read the series annually and not run out of things to love.

In Brief Lives, Delirium (which is to say, the personification of the human experience of delight, inevitably corrupted by time and perspective) decides upon a whim to go in search of her mysterious elder brother, frequently referred to in the series but never identified, who some centuries ago decided to abdicate his responsibilities to his family and to his role; after all, he claims, they’ll continue along this path whether I’m here to oversee things or not. The consequences of her decision are the driving force behind the now-inevitable climax of the series.

So, pivotal turning point, plus my favorite character in the cycle, from the moment I first laid eyes upon her. Some fictional characters just do it for me, I guess, in ways that are inexplicable to other people. Well, some of them are probably wholly explicable, but I fancy that the choices I can think of offhand aren’t. Laura Ingalls, when I was reading those books as a kid? A crazy, literally Endless girl that has the ability to render me insane almost in an instant, if she got it in her head that I had done something she didn’t like? (I mean, maybe I did, but maybe I didn’t. She’s crazy, remember.) Okay, I can’t think of anyone else offhand, so I guess it doesn’t happen that often. But still, these can’t be normal tastes. Despite all that, I remain convinced that Brief Lives, with its wide-angle focus on life and death and how much life is enough and which deaths are timely, plus the awesome plot part, is a high point in the Sandman series, if not the high point. But, as I’ve tried to imply, I might be biased.

World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War

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This book has in macrocosm what most zombie stories have in microcosm, the thing that has always attracted me to them. Here’s this world, usually Earth, with people going about their lives in the way that people do, and then suddenly everything is completely different, and it’s time to find out who people really are. World War Z has a pretty cool conceit behind it. During the rebuilding years after the Zombie War, a commission is established to report on everything that led humanity to its direst straits and the manner in which it extricated itself. This is not that report, but it is the personal stories and reflections that were gathered and then deemed to be outside the scope of the commission’s directive, published by the researcher who did the bulk of the gathering.

So there are these stories of survivors from all over the world: doctors, military personnel, human transporters, filmmakers, politicians. It’s never spelled out exactly what happened or exactly how, but there are enough stories from enough places to get a wispy, watercolor picture of how things were, and of the myriad ways in which the world is a completely different place in this future that is less than a generation away. It is surprisingly well done, by turns touching, engrossing and horrifying, for someone whose previous résumé is mostly in on-screen comedy writing.

Plus, of course, zombies. Right? Right.

Ghost Rider

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And now I will demonstrate the usefulness of lowered expectations. Going into Ghost Rider, I expected a big pile of badness surrounding some enjoyable special effects. The special effects were, as predicted, pretty enjoyable. Of course, the fact that they can be in a February movie says more about the current state of the art than it does about the care taken on this particular project. But my sense of wonder has not yet faded on this axis, so I’ll let that part slip by unnoted. Then there’s the plot and the acting.

Acting first, as it’s easier. The scenery-chewing characters chewed scenery appropriately. (The Devil, the animatronic actual Ghost Rider, the bad guy, etc.) Sam Elliot made the best of his restrictive archetypal role. Eva Mendes made the best of her role as Bringer of the Cleavage. And Nicolas Cage played per usual. Any time he tried to be funny or dramatic, I was forced to cringe. Any time he tried to be soulful, he was fine. Best of all, though, any time he didn’t really try to be anything, he was pretty good. Especially with deadpan humor, possibly because he wasn’t told it would be funny? I really don’t get how he can be so hit or miss, but he definitely had some amount of hit on this one, which helped a lot.

And then there’s the plot. Well, really, the two plots. They’re inextricably tied together, but still pretty distinct despite that. On one hand, you have the origin story. Why did Johnny Blaze decide that jumping motorcycles over things wasn’t enough to get out of life, that he had to melt off his flesh and go all flamey and collect evil souls? How did he get that awesome chain whip? How has it affected his romantic life? Will the cops disapprove? And so forth. This part was pretty good, more engaging than any of the other February Marvel releases I can remember. And on the other hand, you have the story of the Ghost Rider vs. some demons. This was choppy and boring, and the payoff at the climax was too little, too late.

I wish I was in junior high or something right now, because ‘Ghost Rider: A Study in Contrasts’ would make an excellently pompous title.

The Messengers

The last few years have seen a resurgence that I thought video had killed entirely. There have been a lot of decent to extremely good horror movies, multiple per year. And they just keep happening. I feel like a kid in a candy store some days, when I’m watching movie previews. Creepy, scary, bloody, occasionally naked… everything a movie should be. Well, maybe more naked.

Case in point: The Messengers, in which a family of erstwhile sunflower farmers is terrorized by the same dark forces that drove off (or much more likely killed) the previous inhabitants. Spooky Japanese-style ghosts crab crawl all over the place, frightening the teenage girl and mysteriously silent toddler while leaving the adults unscathed. Well, the mother has a recurring stain to clean. The point is, spooky stuff is happening, and the adults aren’t listening. Even handyman John Corbett, while sympathetic to what our young heroine is going through, has nothing to add in the way of evidence of ghostly happenings.

Also, there are a lot of ominous crows flying around. Like I said, pretty decent movie, marred primarily by my concept of one character’s role being better than the one provided by the writers. By the time the ending had somewhat disappointed me, I was already sold on all the good stuff that had come before, so that was okay.

Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Kid on Earth

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I think what keeps me from reviewing this graphic novel is the fear of being sucked back into the depression of it all over again. So I sit here staring at the blank screen that is in one incarnation or another over 24 hours old now. Which I’ll have you know isn’t all that uplifting itself, even by comparison. Therefore, I’m going to buckle down and power through it.

So there’s this dude, Jimmy Corrigan, right? He is named after his grandfather. In one timeline, adult semi-modern Jimmy is slouching towards middle-age in an apparently dead-end job with only his nursing home resident mother for real human contact. In the other timeline, young James is trying to survive his abusive father’s daily tirades while navigating the casually racist turn of the century Chicago school system. Both of these people are missing a parent, both of them are desperately unhappy with their circumstances, and both of them are due for a gradually worsening spiral from these rosy points of origin.

Without all of the misery bringing me down, there would have been a lot of interesting things to take note of. For example, the women in Jimmy’s life almost never have faces. (Notably, the only ones that do are women that James has seen.) Both men have vibrant fantasy lives; James’ allows him to briefly escape his genuinely tragic circumstances, while Jimmy’s is mostly farcical reimaginings of how his life might be going instead, each of them ending more pathetically than the already quite low reality. I suppose the point of the exercise is to watch each of them gradually get past their current lives and into a better place? I will opt not to reveal the secret answer to this question. I am willing to divulge that Jimmy Corrigan is not the smartest kid on earth. In fact, that may have been an example of this newfangled irony thing I keep hearing about.

Mort

41Q2E9H3D0LI have purchased more than half of the Discworld books by now, but I haven’t read any in a long while, because of a continued failure to find the actual next one. Then, last month, I finally did, which means books and books stretch before me before I need to have found the next missing link. Which is nice. I like it when little stresses disappear. I mean, it shouldn’t be a stressor at all, except that I wanted to read the books. So, then.

Also good is the book itself, Mort. For one thing, it is unquestionably funnier than its predecessors, relying a lot more heavily on situational humor rather than bits of random oddness. The random oddness is there, as it should be; it just isn’t the centerpiece. Also and perhaps due to the same root cause, the story is a bit deeper than at least the first two, if not necessarily Equal Rites. In Mort, our titular hero takes a most unusual apprenticeship and learns that even the least common of jobs can have their ups and downs.

Okay, that was trite even for cover-copy, much less a review. It’s like this. Death (the anthropomorphic personification, thin fellow, carries a scythe) opts to take on an apprentice, pass on the trade as it were. Mort learns the importance of the job that might one day be his, Death learns the importance of a vacation, and the reader learns, at excruciating repetition, the way that light and dark work on the Disc. But really, other than that (which I’m sensitive to after the last Anita Blake book), this was a fun, breezy book. The breeziest examination of causality and predestination I’ve ever read, in fact.

Smokin’ Aces

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So here’s a discovery. Ever since I started reviewing stuff, I’ve been more apt than previously to only see something I’m pretty excited about seeing. I hadn’t really noticed that trend, until last weekend I went to a movie wholly because someone else wanted to without much impetus of my own, only to discover that I’ve been able to come up with nothing much to say about it for at least three days now. Which is kind of sad when you consider that I still enjoyed it; it just didn’t seem to give me any kind of craggy surface to latch onto and get an impression from.

Smokin’ Aces is one of those collision course films. You take a lot of different characters, wind them up, point them at some common target, and watch the body count start piling up as they inevitably interfere with each other. In this case, magician Buddy “Aces” Israel is the common goal of a number of assassins, a few bail bondsmen, and an FBI protection team after word leaks out that the mob boss Israel is scheduled to testify against has promised to pay a million dollar contract to The Swede when he brings him Israel’s heart. Bloody violence, games of cat-and-mouse and occasional hilarities ensue. Also, it’s the Nevada mob, so there are a lot of hookers.

The film doesn’t have a lot of depth, which is okay; it’s not supposed to. It carries you through sheerly by force of adrenaline. In fact, the only bad thing I can say about it is that the closing reel has enough depth that it feels like part of a different movie. But if you can forgive that, there’s a reasonably star-studded list of journeyman actors and a beltload of bullets to get you from start to finish. If you’re cool enough to get past the velvet rope and the bouncer at the door, that is. It’s just that kind of movie, and it knows it full well.

The Walking Dead: Days Gone Bye

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Despite how it looks, I don’t read only on the weekends. It’s just that the graphic novels have a way of going fast, and especially so if I happen to be reading them on Saturday, aka “nothing breaks at work because nobody is messing with the network day”. So I suddenly find myself with free time on my hands, not all of which can be filled with illicit games of nethack. (I can hardly wait for someone at my place of employment to figure out this is me.) All of which is a clever(?) way of introducing a new graphic novel series into my rotation. This puts me at three now, but with a couple more pretty soon.

This one isn’t about the wellspring of mythology or coming to literal grips with religion, though. Nope, it’s about zombies! Days Gone Bye is the first volume of a thusfar ongoing series, The Walking Dead. Kentucky police officer Rick Grimes wakes up from a coma acquired in the line of duty to find that the world he knew has been blown away like a carelessly held handful of dust. Now he has figure out how to survive while civilization gradually winds down to nothing and find his wife and son. And okay, maybe this introduction isn’t that much different from Resident Evil: Apocalypse or 28 Days Later, but let’s be honest. It’s certainly a good way to explain all that early book exposition on how we got here. And from there, it flows straight into Romero territory. Which is a compliment rather than an accusation of plagiarism. Sure, the question is one that Romero has asked in each of his movies: when everything is gone except for the daily, hourly struggle for survival, is it still possible to retain humanity? But the beauty of that question is that it has so many avenues to an answer. About as many as there are people left to define possible answers. Sure, zombies have a special place in my heart (as, I’m sure, my heart would have a special place in a zombie), but this is something you can get out of any good post-apocalyptic story, and it’s a big part of why I like them.

Also from Romero territory is the black and white motif. I’m not sure what makes it work so well. Maybe it’s that it causes me to pay more attention to details, whereas my eyes take in color as part of the natural order of things and slide straight to the action. It seems to fit the theme of the world winding down very well, though, with the panels starkly black or white by turns as days and seasons progress. The people don’t talk too often, and that’s okay. Long speeches and angry shouts seem out of place in this world, and not just because it gives the walking dead something to hear and look for. It’s more that the words have run out and only actions have relevance anymore. Which is where those panels full of black or white come back into it: every word spoken feels as much of an intrusion onto the art as it does into the silence of the dead civilization or into the grief of our characters at each new or newly discovered setback.

Me Talk Pretty One Day

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Is there any book quite as intriguing as the loaned book? I mean, don’t get me wrong: I’ve devoted the majority of my life to the premise that owning books is awesome, pretty much since I had two coins to rub together. But the thing about someone loaning you a book is that they liked it so much that they are compelled to share it, and that they see a commonality in you and really believe that you’ll love it every bit as much as they did, if not more. That’s deep, meaningful human contact right there. And spiritual, too. They are giving you of their own book, that you might read it and think of them. It’s, like, The Last Supper, but without as much bread, man!

…too far? Anyway, my point is, I approve of this practice between people.

As you may have worked out by now, this most recent book was a loaner. Me Talk Pretty One Day is a book of essays by David Sedaris, who apparently is a reasonably well known essay writer. (At least, he’s in the top 5 or 10 people I see mentioned on eharmony, behind Dan Brown and that guy that pissed off Oprah and five heavenly dead dudes.) I was very amused to discover that his sister Amy is in fact actress Amy Sedaris, though. Anyway, books of essays aren’t really my thing, generally speaking. And it would be difficult to make the claim that I have much of anything in common with a 40-something gay art guy who spent most of his life in New York and Paris.

And yet, he grew on me. There’s just something about his voice as he describes his misfit childhood and drugged out youth that gradually converted my tolerant smiles into quiet chuckles, and by the time he got to the second half of the book and his expatriation to France (for example, right now I’m having a chuckle at how he’d hate it being characterized that way), I was bursting out with sharp laughter once or more per story. I’m pretty sure this doesn’t indicate that the early stuff in the book isn’t as polished; like I said, he grew on me. I think if I went back and read it from the start, I’d find a lot of it more funny now. I’m not likely to any time very soon, but I expect I’ll try to borrow one of the others before too many books have passed. Because if loaning is a great way to say ‘I think I know you well enough to know this is for you’, reciprocal borrowing has got to be the best way to say, ‘good call, you were totally right’.

Still, though. It might be my bias, but I’m pretty sure the stories that included Amy were the funniest.