A fistful of reviews

While I ramp up for writing more original fiction in 2008, I’ve been making an effort to read more books and watch more movies. Here’s a brief look at some of the things I’ve come across recently that I think are worth your time and money.

Books

Hammered

This is Elizabeth Bear’s first novel, and it kicks off the Jenny Casey trilogy that’s continued in Scardown and concluded in Worldwired. It takes place in a dystopian world that was plausible enough to give me chills, and is the first book I’ve read that I’d admiringly call post-cyberpunk.

Jenny Casey is a cybernetically enhanced former soldier living in post-war Connecticut, dealing with the ghosts of her past. When those ghosts come back to life, they ensnare not only her, but some of her closest friends, as well.

It took me longer than usual to get into the narrative, because the story changes point of view a lot in the beginning, but once I got all the characters straight, I was on board and it was difficult to put down.

This was one of those books where the main character is compelling, but the supporting characters are magnificent. I just loved it, and as soon as I finish Atrocity Archives, I think I’m going to finish the trilogy.

Coraline

Coraline lives in a boring house with uninteresting parents surrounded by strange people. But when she goes through a forbidden door and finds herself trapped on the other side with her Other Mother, her life suddenly becomes very interesting. It’s not quite horror, it’s not quite fantasy . . . I guess I’d call it a "dark fantasy," sort of the way Neverwhere was a dark fantasy. It’s a quick and thoroughly enjoyable read.

I wish this had been written when my kids were still young enough for me to read to them. I have number 238 of the limited Subterranean printing.

After Halloween

I got this book from Daniel Davis when I spent the weekend next to his
Steam Crow booth at Phoenix Comicon. It’s a children’s alphabet book
about what the monsters do to make a living after Halloween. ("E is for Ealwatte, a mage
of the dead / Now he crafts hats to adorn your bald head.") It’s all
rhyming, it’s charming and funny, and the illustrations are ridiculously awesome. In a world
where everything — especially children’s books and stories — are so
mindnumbingly banal and similar, After Halloween is unique and
wonderful. It’s another one that made me wish my kids were little
enough to enjoy it.

Graphic Novels

WE3

Grant Morrison is with Warren Ellis, Neil Gaiman, and Alan Moore on the list of authors I’ll buy anything from without even reading the back cover, so it’s weird that I just got around to reading WE3 now. (Actually, I started it when I was working on NUMB3RS, and just finished it on Friday. I got distracted, I guess.)

WE3 is about three domestic animals — a dog, a cat, and a rabbit — who are kidnapped by the military and turned into cyborgs to be used as weapons. When the project is going to be terminated and the animals destroyed, they’re set free by a well-meaning researcher. Much of the story is about them trying to survive outside of the lab, while they’re hunted by their former masters. I found it sad and touching. It’s also a story that, I think, only works as a graphic novel, making it pretty unique.

Batman: The Man Who Laughs

A new take on the introduction of The Joker into the Batman universe, this is set right after Batman: Year One, and could be a companion to The Killing Joke. I loved the writing, the shift in narrative between Jim Gordon and Bruce Wayne, and the artwork was perfectly unsettling, without being disturbing. I’m a lifelong Batman geek, so it takes a lot to impress me with a Batman story. This impressed the hell out of me.

Fell Volume One: Feral City

Richard Fell is a detective sent over the bridge from a city that feels like New York to a totally fucked up place called Snowtown. In Snowtown, everyone has something to hide . . . including him. It’s classic detective stories, filtered through Warren’s sublimely twisted lens. I liked it so much, Fell could be the fourth comic to make it onto my single-issue list.

Movies

A Scanner, Darkly

My expectations were really low for this movie, after talking to some
friends about it, so I was pleasantly surprised. I thought the
acting, music, and animation combined very effectively, and I thought they did a better than usual job of
staying true to PKD’s story. Admittedly, this isn’t saying much, but it shouldn’t be misconstrued as a back-handed compliment. I genuinely enjoyed this film.

The King of Kong: A Fistful of Quarters

One of the most engrossing documentaries I’ve seen in years. On the surface, it’s the story of two men trying to achieve the highest score on Donkey Kong, but the story ends up being about much, much more than the quest for a high score on a video game; it’s about a group of petty sycophants doing everything they can to protect a cowardly tyrant whose tiny fiefdom is threatened by an honorable man. I lost a lot of respect for Twin Galaxies by the time the film was over. I also wanted to go spend a hundred dollars in an arcade.

Cloverfield

I saw Cloverfield yesterday afternoon, early enough so I could avoid a theater filled with douchebags. I understand that this was a good thing, because people I know who saw it at night with the aforementioned douchebags were so annoyed by them, and so pulled out of the movie by them, it seriously fucked with their ability to enjoy the film.

If you haven’t seen it, I recommend it. I gave it 3 out of 5, but only because the first-person shaky camera stuff made me violently seasick, causing me to look away from the screen more frequently than I did with Blair Witch (a movie, by the way, that I enjoyed as much as "meh" can be enjoyed, and which doesn’t deserve to be compared to Cloverfield, IMHO.) On story and effectiveness, I give it a 4.6 out of 5but the camera stuff really messed with me, and I suspect it will mess with other viewers, as well.

Assume there will be spoilers in comments, because I’m starting the comments off with my extended commentary on the film, which you should not read if you haven’t seen it yet.

The Bad Astronomer (who I owned in a Techonobabbloff yesterday) has some nitpicks and a review that I agreed with pretty much all the way, too.

The Return of MST3K

I was twenty years-old the first time I saw MST3K. I was sitting on the couch with a friend of mine, looking for something to watch on a Sunday morning, when she stopped on some crappy old horror movie.

"What’s this?" I said.

"You’ve never seen this before?"

"No," I said, "That’s why I asked ‘what’s this.’"

"It’s a show about this guy who is trapped in space with robots, and is forced to watch horrible movies. So he and the robots talk back to the screen."

It reminded me of this show I first watched on KDOC here in Los Angeles when I was a freshman in high school, called Mad Movies. I became a fan for life in a matter of minutes, and developed a list of favorites just as fast: Manos, the Hands of Fate, Rocketship XM and Lost Continent are a few that come instantly to mind.

MST3K’s Joel Hodgson once said, "We don’t ask ourselves, ‘will anyone get this?’ We tell each other, ‘the right people will get this.’" I was inspired by that philosophy, and when I wrote sketch comedy or did improv (both pursuits inspired by MST3K and the British Whose Line?) I used it, and I still use it today, even when I’m not writing comedy.

So now that there’s some context for how much I love MST3K, you’ll understand how excited I was when I saw that most of the original crew has reunited for Cinematic Titanic, which I believe can be safely called The Return of MST3K:

Cinematic Titanic is a feature length movie riffing show and is an
artist owned and operated venture created by Joel Hodgson, the creator
of the Peabody award-winning Mystery Science Theatre 3000. Cinematic
Titanic features the original cast and writers of MST3K, which is
Hodgson (Joel Robinson), Trace Beaulieu (Crow), and J. Elvis Weinstein
(Tom Servo). Filling out the ensemble is Mary Jo Pehl (Pearl Forrester)
and Frank Conniff (TV’s Frank).

While this is exciting to me as a fan, it’s also inspiring and validating to me as a creative person who lives on the Long Tail. Instead of waiting for a network to give them the opportunity to bring their show to viewers, they’re distributing the show on DVD themselves. Between this and Riff Trax, we Misties have a lot to celebrate these days.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I have some rock climbing to do.

MY PRECIOUS!

I just saw, via Propeller, that Peter Jackson has signed on to produce The Hobbit.

Director Peter Jackson, New Line Cinema and Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Studios Inc said on Tuesday they have agreed to make two movies based on the book “The Hobbit” by J.R.R. Tolkien, ending months of legal wrangling.

Jackson, the director of the smash hit “Lord of the Rings” movies, and producer Fran Walsh will executive produce both a “Hobbit” movie and a sequel, but no decision has been made about who will direct the films, Bob Shaye and Michael Lynne, co-chairmen and co-CEOs of New Line told Reuters.

The good news is, it’s going to take two whole films to contain its awesomeness. The (potential) bad news is, he won’t be directing. That’s offset by the (potential) good news that it will make its way into theaters before 2011.

King Kong showed that Peter Jackson isn’t infallible, but it’s clear that he loves and respects Tolkien’s work, so I’m sure I’m not the only geek who would be willing to wait until 2011 or 2012 if that’s what it takes to get someone who loves it as much as we do behind the camera. I mean, we’ve waited for decades for this; what’s a few more years to get it right?

Can media conglomerates afford to pay the writers?

As someone who hopes to be in the WGA one day, and as a current SAG member (and former member of the Board of Directors) I am in complete and total solidarity with the Writer’s Guild. It’s quite heartening to me, also, to see that so many people refuse to be fooled by the lies that the six companies who control all of the media have been trying to spread.

The AMPTP has been successful (and helped by the news media they own) in spreading FUD about the things the writers are asking for. This post at United Hollywood puts some important numbers into perspective:

"But can the corporations really afford to pay you what you’re asking for?"

Let’s
set aside for the moment the issue of what the congloms say in their
press releases to us (which is basically "There’s no money! Ever! And
if there was, we spent it all on other projects that lost money so it’s
gone! Forever! We’re broke! We’re having to rent our yachts!") and focus on some hard numbers thoughtfully provided by Jonathan Handel on the Huffington Post yesterday.

He
writes an excellent (I think) and even-handed analysis that takes into
account the effect pattern bargaining will have in calculating real
numbers of what we’re asking for, and what it will cost the companies,
individually, to pay us.

It comes, by his calculation, to $125 million per conglomerate per year — if we got every single thing we’re asking for.

That, by the way, is less than the $140 million Disney spent to fire Michael Ovitz for 15 months of work.