Reviews

Book review: The Between

The Between by Ryan Leslie

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

The Between drew me in with something I’m always a sucker for: a portal to another world accessed through something mundane and ordinary. In fact, the previous book I read, Stephen King’s Fairy Tale, has the same hook, where the portal is inside a shed in a backyard. In The Between, the portal is behind a huge iron door buried…in a backyard! Reading these books may make you think backyards are way cooler than they actually are.

For a debut novel, The Between is pretty good. Author Ryan Leslie finds a tone and stays with it fairly consistently throughout–serious, but leavened by the characters reflecting on the unreal situations they find themselves in. The prose moves between macho pants banter between the main characters of Paul and Jay, and descriptions of the bizarre world of The Between and the rules that govern it, with the latter comprising the bulk of the novel. Leslie does a good job in providing enough detail for The Between to make it feel like an authentic place, while teasing details that suggest a lot more than what the reader sees.

But, as is often the case with a debut novel, it’s got a few flaws that bugged me. There are two that stood out. The first is The Between itself felt like a fusion of several different concepts the author had for the realm, and the inclusion of the ASCII computer game version seemed more a bit of a cheat for the author than something that added to the story, in that it allows a character to have a handy notebook/reference for The Between, but adds little else for the reader.

The other main issue I had was with the main character of Paul. He not only disappears for a large chunk of the story in the middle, but never seems to change at all, or have any real kind of arc, despite performing heroic deeds, especially near the story’s conclusion. The tense relationship that is fleshed out early on between Paul and Jay is also never revisited in a meaningful way once they enter The Between. There is some excellent work in showing how taking up artifacts in The Between confers powers and a specific role to the person wielding them, and can transform the person’s personality. This is used to great effect when Jay gets a knife that essentially turns him into an assassin with an insatiable bloodlust, but this never really gets followed up on at story’s end. Sure, there’s plenty of rousing adventure and the set pieces are full of action and derring-do, but if you take the time to create and explore relationships between characters and have them change in significant ways, I think it’s important to explore the consequences after all the gun fights and stabbings. By the end, I didn’t really know where Paul and Jay stood, except that I guess they were still friends.

Still, there’s a lot that works in The Between and I am confident Leslie will take what he has learned from writing it and incorporate it into future stories.

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May the 4th (be with you): Star Wars movies ranked

From the Star Wars page of Disney+

Continuing the trend of bad puns, this time in written form, it’s Star Wars Day. You know, May the 4th be with you, see? It’s funny to everyone except Jedi, and they’re not real, anyway.

Combining Star Wars and lists, here are all the non-animated Star Wars movies, ranked from best to worst, in my very much not humble opinion:

  1. The Empire Strikes Back (1980)
  2. Star Wars1Purists note: I am going by the original release title (1977)
  3. Return of the Jedi (1983)
  4. Rogue One (2016)
  5. The Force Awakens/The Last Jedi (tie2I will explain the tie below) (2015, 2017)
  6. Revenge of the Sith (2005)
  7. The Phantom Menace (1999)
  8. Solo (2018)
  9. Attack of the Clones (2002)
  10. The Rise of Skywalker (2019)

Notes:

  • The top two picks are non-controversial, though some says Star Wars: A New Hope is the better movie, and I can be swayed by these arguments if I’m in the mood. I still give the edge to Empire because I feel it’s a richer experience, with a more assured director at the helm.
  • Yes, Return of the Jedi ranks #3, even with the Ewoks. Yub yub! And this is for the original, not the special edition, where all the changes were uniformly awful.
  • The Force Awakens is a shameless retread of A New Hope, but if you accept that, it’s generally pretty good. I previously ranked The Last Jedi higher, but in retrospect, I think Rian Johnson may have pushed a little too far in subverting expectations for the middle part of a trilogy.
  • Yes, I really do think Revenge of the Sith is better than four other Star Wars films. That doesn’t mean I think it’s a great movie.
  • Regarding the above, even my second-worst pick, Attack of the Clones, is still a lot better than the gormless Rise of Skywalker, some of the most ham-handed, graceless “summer blockbuster” film-making ever. The only Star Wars movie where I left the theatre unambiguously disappointed and shaking my head. I am still shaking my head.
  • Some of these movies I have never seen more than once. If I revisit them, the order above may change.

Book review: Fairy Tale

Fairy Tale by Stephen King

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

When I hit a reading slump, as happened when my long commute went away at the start of the pandemic, I often struggle to find a book to get started on. On the one hand, I enjoy giving unknown authors a chance, but this often leads to, if not disappointment, then an underwhelming experience where a book is perfectly decent, but feels like eating a bland meal. It does the job, but nothing more.

In this case, I decided to turn to the author I’ve read more than any other (hardly a novel claim, if you’ll pardon the pun), and tackled Stephen King’s latest, the generically-titled Fairy Tale.

There will be spoilers below. A spoiler-free summation would be: Buy it if you’re a King fan, if you’re not super hardcore about how fantasy worlds should “work”, or if you are a sucker for alternate dimensions/realities–like I am.

The story is divided into two parts. The first third establishes the relationship between Charlie Reade, an athletic 17-year-old high school student, and a reclusive old man named Bowditch, who lives in what is termed a “Psycho house” at the top of a hill on the street where Charlie lives. Charlie hears Bowditch’s cries for help after he has fallen off a ladder while trying to clean the gutters of his house, breaking his leg. Charlie becomes something of a local hero and he and Bowditch form a friendship during Bowditch’s recovery.

After revealing that he has not much time to live, Bowditch tells Charlie about a secret in the locked shed in his backyard, where Charlie had previously heard a strange skittering sound. Describing it as a burden rather than a blessing, Bowditch leaves Charlie his estate, along with some hurried instructions on tape regarding the shed, recorded as Bowditch suffers a fatal heart attack.

Charlie unlocks the shed and enters a tunnel that leads deep down into the earth and eventually emerges into another world with two moons, called Empis.

From here, the story takes on the fairy tale of the name, where the people of Empis, suffer under a curse by a possibly-not-quite-human-anymore king named Elden. The people see Charlie as their saviour prince, which, of course, turns out to be true.

Empis is one of these strange worlds that King likes to write about, mixing high fantasy tropes with anachronistic modern touches, like electric trolleys. King deliberately avoids trying to explain everything. Indeed, Charlie, who narrates the tale, notes this himself, surmising his time in Empis as one with many mysteries left unsolved.

Some might be impatient with the slow burn approach of the story, which spends hundreds of pages in the small town of Sentry’s Rest before moving on to Empis, but in this opening third of the novel King effortlessly makes the mundane not just interesting, but compelling, peppering the story with hints of weirder things to come.

In Empis, the story becomes a retelling of sorts of Rumpelstiltskin, filtered through King’s version of a magical, high fantasy realm where magic exists, both good and dark. There are noble sacrifices, dungeon escapes, gladiatorial games, dubious astronomy, truly evil villains and through it all, King adroitly drops in the kinds of details that make the place and its people feel authentic.

There are also more spiralling staircases in this story than in any other I’ve ever read. If you have an unnatural fear of spiral staircases, be warned!

Overall, I enjoyed Fairy Tale. It may seem trite by now to call any King novel “vintage King” but it fits here. King clearly had a lot of fun creating the world and people of Empis, and fusing it, Dark Tower-style, to our modern one. It even has a happy ending.

Recommended.

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Movie re-review: The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring

Yesterday, I spontaneously decided to start watching The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring on Prime Video. My plan was to split it up over a few days, because even this original, non-extended version, is about three hours long.

I ended up watching the whole thing, of course.

It still holds up. The special effects mostly still hold up, too.

Let me start with a few aspects I didn’t care for, which match my recollection from when the film first came out in 2001 (22 years ago!). Peter Jackson does a great job here, but his strength seems to lay more in the character moments than the giant action set pieces. These set pieces are still well-done, but he has a penchant for showing cuts of slow motion action, which is really hard to pull off without looking hokey. There are times when it just looks hokey.

The score also swells just a bit too much at times, a case where I think less would have been more. But it is still an excellent score, and this is perhaps more something of personal taste.

I’m still somewhat divided over Hugo Weaving’s Elrond. On the one hand, his arch, exaggerated performance does fit with the idea of a thousands-year old elf not exactly being like your regular guy, but it still seems a bit hammy. Just a bit, though.

The cast, in general, though, is outstanding. Jackson knows what he wants from each of them, and he expertly draws great performances from everyone. Ian McKellen provides a definitive performance as Gandalf, and I love that Aragorn is played by Viggo Mortensen, who does not have a typical “hero” voice. Sean Bean dies, of course, but the death scene is both touching and ridiculously over the top. The actors are just fun to watch.

The other two things I’d highlight are the pacing and the writing. The film is a masterclass in moving between quiet, character moments and large (or small) scale action scenes. There is, despite the running time, no flab here, where scenes linger too long, or exist for no reason. The thing moves at just the right speed for nearly three hours.

The writing stays true to the original book (as far as it matters), and the dialogue manages to avoid sounding arch, again mainly due to the great performances of the cast.

Jackson uses the rugged scenery of New Zealand to great effect, of course.

I think I might have an even more favourable view of this movie now because it takes place in an entirely different world with no connection to a larger universe. It’s nice to just soak it in without worrying about how it ties into 500 other LOTR movies, TV shows and whatnot. The characters are not glib, quipping superheroes, which I feel like I’ve seen enough of to last this and several additional lifetimes.

Overall, this was and remains a delight. On a scale of 1 to 10 Gollums Lurking in the Shadows, it rates a 9.

Book review: Them

Them by Whitley Strieber

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Whitley Strieber returns with another book about the entities he calls the visitors, and while Them is perhaps a bit unfocused and doesn’t tread much new ground, it does allow Strieber to test out some new theories on what the whole visitor experience may mean. The tone is also generally a bit gloomier than it’s been in the past, with less emphasis on the transformative parts of the experience and more placed on the darker aspects–abductions, violent confrontations with civilians and the military, and whether the intentions of the visitors are benign or more sinister.

On the latter, he at least assures the reader that they’re not probably not harvesting us for food, since reports of abductions have dropped off sharply in recent years and if we were a food source, they’d still be ordering take-out, so to speak.

Apart from one late chapter, this book does not cover his own experiences, except mentioning them where relevant to others he discusses.

The first half of the book consists of letters pulled from the 200,000+ Communion letters archive, with each followed up by an analysis. Each case is chosen to help illustrate a particular aspect of the visitor experience, and the overall impression one gets–if the assumption that everyone having these experiences is not simply experiencing these things in their minds–is that the visitors are not a monolithic entity with a single purpose, but rather an assortment of factions, some with more noble goals (help us evolve), others less so (using us as playthings).

A point Strieber drives at repeatedly, is that the visitors themselves are responsible for all the secrecy concerning their presence, and governments and their agencies have been compelled to play into this, creating a system of classification that has perhaps forever insured the full truth of what is happening will never be known. The tremendous amount of money the Pentagon spends that goes unaccounted for is no flight of fancy, and Strieber suggest it may be funding vast projects the public is utterly unaware of.

One of the more interesting aspects of the visitor experience that Strieber has talked about before is how it might relate to death, but while he brings it up multiple times here, he makes no further attempt to better explain or theorize on the connection, steering the reader toward other books of his, such as The Afterlife Revolution. Understandable, perhaps, but still disappointing.

The second part of the book mainly covers how the government and military have helped to cover up what is happening, then ends with a chilling chapter on how Strieber himself has been targeted recently for harassment, via hacking of his website, as well as intrusions into his home that compelled him to journey overseas to finish the book. It ends, as he notes so much of the visitor experience has, without any clear answers.

If you’ve read his other books on this topic, you won’t find a lot that is truly new here, but he still explores the subject in a way I find measured and compelling, never making bold claims about things he does not know, but neither standing back as a supposedly detached observer. As I’ve said before, if this is all an act, it is convincing enough to be indistinguishable from reality.

My biggest complaint is that the book never really pulls together in an overall narrative, it reads as more an overview on several broad aspects of the visitors, UAPs and government secrecy. But it covers these things well, and the book is an easy recommendation for anyone interested in the topic of the visitors or UAPs/UFOs.

(And yes, the title is a direct reference to the 1956 science fiction film about giant ants, Them.)

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Blockbuster burnout

I have a folder for blog ideas in Obsidian (my latest attempt to unify my note-taking with a platform-agnostic solution) and this is what I wrote for reference:

  • Jurassic World movies
  • Marvel movies
  • Star Wars
  • 16 Avatar sequels

Am I suffering blockbuster fatigue? Let’s find out!

One small pandemic changes everything

Another topic I pondered was how the pandemic cured me of going to the theatre to see movies. In early March 2020 a friend and I went to see Onward, which was a perfectly cromulent second-tier Pixar movie. A week or so later, all theatres shut down and by the end of March Onward was already streaming on Disney+. It would be a long time before theatres opened again.

Before that happened, I got a mirrorless camera (January 2021) and Nic and I substituted birding for going to movies. I find the birding a lot more enjoyable:

  • More exercise
  • We get outside
  • You don’t have to be quiet for multiple hours, which is a weird way to socialize when you think about it
  • Birds are neat! And real!
  • I enjoy going out and shooting photos in a general sense
  • Most stuff ends up on a streaming service or can be rented on-demand just a few months later (or even sooner)

Now that theatres are open again, I have no desire to go back, because birding is better and I’m fine waiting for big releases to come to streaming later (or skipping them entirely). Why is that? Let’s go through my bullet list in order.

Dinosaurs went extinct, dinosaur movies refuse to die

  • Jurassic World movies

I saw the original Jurassic World in 2015. To me, it felt like a basic retread of the original, albeit with the twist of adding “What if they actually opened the park, THEN everything went wrong?” but with unappealing or uninteresting characters. It also felt a bit mean-spirited and cynical. I had no interest in seeing the sequel Dark Kingdom, and even the usually faithful pull of nostalgia couldn’t convince me to see Dominion, either.

All three movies still made a ton of money. I just didn’t care about them anymore. They felt like product, not actual stories that needed to be told. Maybe I was becoming cynical!

IDK about MCU LOL WTF

  • Marvel movies

The fact that we have an abbreviation–MCU1Marvel Cinematic Universe to the one caveperson reading this and didn’t know.–to describe Marvel movies says a lot about how they are intended to be consumed: fully and completely. I did my part, watching all the movies as soon as they came out, starting with Iron Man in 1899 and going up to Avengers: Endgame in 2019 (I also saw Spider-Man: Far From Home in theatres, but this felt more like a dénouement to everything that came before). Then the pandemic hit, though the MCU movies still released in theatres, starting with Black Widow in July 2021.

With Disney+ arriving just before the pandemic, the MCU became even more of an obligation if you wanted to keep up on all the continuity. Now you had the movies (Phases 3, 4, 5, 297, etc.), plus Disney+ series that sometimes led directly to movie plots, with TV series WandaVision leading to Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness being a prime example. I kept watching the movies (on streaming) and shows (also on streaming) but started to let things slide. I skipped The Eternals entirely. I have not watched Wakanda Forever, and I don’t give a flying fig about the new Ant-Man movie (which is apparently a not-uncommon sentiment).

At an undefined point, the fun of watching started to feel more like an obligation. I don’t want everything to be connected. I just want separate, entertaining stories. I don’t need Easter eggs, I want a self-contained plot that works without having to reference everything that came before it. I get that some people absolutely adore the continuity, but for me, it now feels more like a burden that gets in the way of simply enjoying the movies and shows. Also, it doesn’t help that a lot of the Marvel stuff has become fairly empty CGI spectacle, the formula well-honed and predictable.

I had to look up what the next film is (Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3) and it’s another that I will get around to watching eventually. Maybe.

I have a bad feeling about this

  • Star Wars

You could argue that Disney has cranked out too much Star Wars stuff–and there is merit in that argument–but the biggest issue is that after acquiring the rights to Star Wars from George Lucas, they started with a new trilogy of movies with no vision or purpose for being, other than to be more product and sell more merchandise. The first movie (a monster hit, showing the pent-up demand for more Star Wars) was a retread of A New Hope, but had some engaging new characters and held out some promise. The next two movies undid that promise, the first (The Last Jedi) by trying to deconstruct Star Wars a little too much, and the last (The Rise of Skywalker) by being a relentlessly stupid and inept piece of film-making. After that movie, I had no confidence in what Disney might do with Star Wars, so I’ve only dipped my toes in other efforts:

  • Rogue One. A standalone (!) story that serves as an immediate prequel to A New Hope. Pretty good.
  • Solo. Completely unnecessary and a mediocre movie. The first real sign that the Star Wars franchise had no firm creative control at the top.
  • The Mandalorian. Pretty good, actually! Set in the post-Return of the Jedi era, it riffs on the familiar, but has lapses into shameless fan service.
  • The Book of Boba Fett. Also known as Mandalorian Season 2.5. Just OK, really, and annoying that they tied the ongoing Mandalorian storyline into it (there’s that continuity thing again).
  • Obi-Wan Kenobi. Not bad, but a downer, despite the fact that I love Ewan McGregor’s portrayal of Kenobi.

I’ve yet to watch Andor (which I hear is quite good, but also, understandably, also a downer). Overall, it feels like the TV part of Star Wars has fared better than the vision-free, fan service-heavy movies. Not all hope is lost, here, though I have to admit, I would still be reluctant to see a new Star Wars film in a theatre. I can’t imagine anything at this point that would spark more interest in me than, “hmm, interesting.”

James Cameron’s head in a jar to direct Avatar 17

  • 16 Avatar sequels

I saw an interesting line about how the Avatar sequel, The Way of Water, could gross $2 billion (as of this post it’s just under $2.3 billion worldwide) and still be culturally irrelevant, and I think that’s accurate. People will watch it and its inevitable sequels. They’ll make billions of dollars, but they’ll have no real impact otherwise. They’re just big movies with dazzling effects and technology, telling familiar stories in entertaining and, dare I say–crowd-pleasing–ways. And that’s all fine! But it’s not enough to get me into a theatre because I’m way past “dazzling special effects” being a draw. Good writing may not be something sexy you can market, but it’s a lot more appealing to me now that I’m not a hormone-boosted 15-year-old. But even good writing probably wouldn’t get my butt into a theatre seat.

It might get me to check out a film on streaming, though.

In the meantime, most of my current movie-watching has been a very specific kind of nostalgia, re-watching science fiction movies of varying quality from the 70s through the 90s. I started watching Independence Day again, which in many objective ways, is a bad movie. Heck, the disaster porn doesn’t even start until 45 minutes in (1996 was a simpler time). And yet, I watch because it’s dumb, but easy to digest, with no commitments. It’s anti-MCU.

And for now, at least, that’s enough.

Movie review: TRON

Technically, this is a re-re-review, because I saw this when it was originally released in 1982, then again in 2009 in anticipation of the sequel, TRON: Legacy, and again just now, in the year 2023.

It holds up! I’ve seen comments about how the plot is nonsensical or difficult to follow, but it’s really not. If you listen to what the characters say, they provide all the details you need. Basically, the programs need to blow up the Master Control Program (MCP) to clear the name of real-world Flynn, and to free all the programs being held under the MCP’s giant virtual thumb, so they can work for their users again. It’s basically a quest to defeat the Evil Wizard, but in a mainframe.

The dialog and exposition can be a bit clunky at time, and the religious references seem a little weird, like an idea not really fleshed out, and you really do need to just give yourself over to the whole system of metaphors they use to depict the inner world of the computer and programs. But if you get past these things, everything else holds up surprisingly well, more than 40 years later.

The good guys are earnest, particularly Bruce Boxleitner’s Tron character. The MCP is a complete bastard right from the start, gleefully blackmailing Dillinger in the real world and literally torturing his counterpart Sark to keep him in line in the virtual one. His dismissive “End of line” when he’s done speaking is awesome.

Jeff Bridges, who was in his early 30s, looks incredibly young and plays Flynn with the breezy goofiness that says this is Jeff Bridges.

The electronic score (with some orchestral parts done at the insistence of Disney) is perfectly pitched at capturing the otherworldly feeling of Tron. Its main theme is one I have been able to recall easily since first hearing it in 1982. The video game-inspired sound effects are also deployed to terrific effect, with buzzes, burbles and blips underscoring how different this world is, yet being perfectly suited to it.

And of course, the visuals. In 1982 CGI was new, expensive and labour-intensive. Stuff that can be rendered on a home computer today in minutes took hours for a single frame back then. And still, two things really stand out for me: The design of the CG world, and especially the vehicles, and how the simplicity of everything is actually a strength rather than a liability. Today, everything could be rendered in far greater detail, but in a way that would take away from the virtual verisimilitude. The simple clean lines and curves of the light cycles, or the minimalist design of the tanks makes them fit into this stark world of lines and shapes, pulsing with light. A denser, more sophisticated look would probably have been distracting. The people behind TRON had limited resources, but used them to great effect.

I give TRON 4 out of 5 glowing discs.

The Black Hole: Not quite a review

The Cygnus, full of surprises and murder bots.

I saw The Black Hole originally in 1979, when I was 15 years old. I thought it was great. I bought the novel!

I never read the novel.

I wonder if I still have it stuffed in a box somewhere?

Last year, I watched the movie again on Disney+. I think it was the first time I had seen it all the way through since 1979. It’s goofy and weird, very un-Disney in many ways. I suspect it got the green light due to the success of Star Wars, but at its core, it’s actually more of a horror/fantasy film dressed up in science fiction clothes.

Yesterday, I saw a YouTube video about it and thought, “I’ll just watch the opening sequence” and ended up watching the entire movie again and going to bed late. And it’s not even a good movie, really.

This isn’t a review, as such, but I wanted to collect some thoughts on the movie while it was fresh in my mind. This may be a bit scattershot!

  • The film starts with a black screen while music plays over it for about two minutes. I have no idea why. Are they trying to set the mood? Are they showing just how black a black hole really is?
  • They obviously had no actual visual reference for a black hole in 1979, but I like to think they could have come up with something better than what appears to be blue water swirling down a kitchen sink drain.
  • I like that they did some scenes in zero gravity, even if it looks a little goofy. There’s at least a pretense to realism here.
  • The cast is chock-full of big stars, very unusual for any Disney pic back then.
  • Maximilian Schell is great. I love his giant mop of hair and intense gaze. I also like that the killer robot also has the same name.
  • Speaking of the robots, it’s super obvious that none of them are made of metal, though they are obviously supposed to be. Vincent and BOB come off the worst here, each of them looking like painted wooden toys. With lasers.
  • And speaking of lasers they have this satisfying sound that is like a thunky pew-pew.
  • The scene with Vincent and BOB playing what amounts to a video game with the menacing former head robot is just weird. I’m not sure why it’s even in the movie. Maybe they felt they built all these cool robots, they were going to use them, dammit!
  • The Cygnus is an amazing ship design. It’s been described as a cathedral in space. If they ever did a remake, the ships need to be miniature models, not CGI. Get Chris Nolan to direct, he’s totally into that stuff.
  • The special effects are all over the place in terms of quality. The matte paintings (of which the film had roughly a billion) are for the most part excellent. The meteor tumbling down the interior of the ship could pass for an FX shot made today. But other stuff, notably most of the green screen work, is terrible, like they either ran out of money for those shots, or handed them over to an intern who never got hired on full-time.
  • The score (by Bond composer John Barry) is as weird as so many other things in this film. During action scenes, the score picks up, but it doesn’t really reflect the action, it’s just bombastic music.
  • I love how Schell scolds the robot like a misbehaving child after it slices and dices Anthony Perkins’ character. “Maximilian, you shouldn’t have done that!” Maybe this is where J.J. Abrams got the idea to name his company Bad Robot.
  • I love the initial mystery of discovering a ship that’s been missing for 20 years, hanging out next to a black hole without getting sucked into it. Alien (released the same year!) has the same kind of vibe in its early scenes, but with a lot more swearing.
  • The ending is still totally bonkers no matter how many times I see it. Schell and Maximilian appear to embrace while floating in space, then, uh, merge? So now Schell is inside Maximilian, his eyes looking about frantically from inside the robot’s visor as it stands on a rocky spire in…hell? Then there’s a long glass hallway (?), an angel (?) and suddenly the surviving members of the Palomino crew are A-OK and heading peacefully toward a shiny planet somewhere on the other side of the black hole. If they do a remake, I’d love to see how they’d handle the ending, though I suspect it would end up being a lot more conventional.

Is The Black Hole a good movie? No. It feels like it wants to be a bunch of different things–a fantasy epic, a horror film, a disaster movie, and the science fiction part is kind of bolted on. It’s an odd, uneven mix.

But the design is fantastic, the effects, though mixed, generally hold up, and the initial mystery is captivating. After that, the film gets a bit thin, and it’s only Schell’s scenery-chewing, the ever-present threat of what will Maximilian do, and Roddy McDowell making pithy remarks that really keeps you interested. And I’ll give a few points to the general destruction of the Cygnus as it drifts to its doom.

Why did I sit through the entire movie again, though? I really can’t say. I will ponder this.

Book review: Press Reset

Press Reset: Ruin and Recovery in the Video Game Industry by Jason Schreier

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Press Reset follows people working at some of the biggest publishers and developers in the video game business, and in doing so author Jason Schreier paints a rather depressing portrait of a dysfunctional industry that works on a boom and bust model, with layoffs and studio closures regularly forcing workers to seek out new employment, often requiring them to move to different cities, states or even other countries.

Amid the stories of mismanagement (and a few are epic, especially the tale of 38 Studios) some bright moments occur when small groups of devs band together, go indie and find success on their own terms, even as they grapple with some of the same long term stability issues, albeit on a smaller scale.

In the end there are a few suggestions on how to make the work environment better for the artists, programmers and others who make video games, notably through unionization (which has started to happen since Press Reset was published) and the idea of studios only having small core “creative” teams and hiring contractors for pretty much everything else, like level construction, art generation and so on. This is also happening to a certain degree.

For some people featured in the book, the ultimate solution for them was to simply get out of the video game business altogether, moving into jobs that pay better, provide more stability and generate less stress. Press Reset is an excellent, detailed look at an industry that should really be better for workers than it is, considering video games have been around for decades, and generating billions in revenue for many years.

Recommended.

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Movie review: Deep Impact

Yes, here I am reviewing a movie a mere 24 years after release!

NOTE: Spoilers ahoy if that matters to you.

Deep Impact is the “emotional” (I’m using Netflix’s word here) giant space object threatening Earth movie that came out in 1998. The other one and the #1 movie of that same year was Armageddon, which I’ve only seen the last 20 minutes of for some reason (it did not inspire me to watch the previous 120 or whatever minutes). Armageddon takes a more hands-on approach to its giant space object destruction, while Deep Impact actually reserves the disaster porn for the very end (spoilers!)

My summary would be: This was fine, but the investment in the characters just wasn’t there for me. I mean, none of them seemed like horrible people or anything, I just felt no real connection to them because the movie jumps from scene to scene quickly and features a fairly large cast of characters. It also has these weird tonal shifts where it goes from a hammy TV movie vibe to something more grounded and sober.

The score was distracting and nearly ever-present. This was probably the best example I’ve seen (heard) in a long time of a movie telling you how you should feel. THIS IS SAD. THIS IS EXCITING. THIS IS SCARY. THIS IS SAD. If there had been a score mute switch, I would have used it. EDIT: I looked at the credits and the score was by James Horner, who I usually like! Or so I thought. Anyway, I stand by my assertion that the score was heavy-handed all to heck and back.

The cast was strangely unremarkable. No one stood out, everyone just blended in. I mean, you can’t top Morgan Freeman as the President (ten years before Obama would win), but he didn’t really do much other than make speeches on TV and look presidential (remember how high a bar that was just a few years ago?)

The opening sequence, with (spoilers) Charles Martin Smith’s character getting early warning of the doomsday comet, was completely unnecessary, since it has no bearing on the rest of the plot. It was cute watching him type “Connect to server” to try to email his findings, but the server was down, ono. So then he copied the info onto a floppy disk (all of this is lovingly shown as it’s so very hi-tech and all), tosses it into a manila envelope, then dashes off in his Jeep down the long, scary mountain road to deliver the news.

Why he never used a phone is not explained.

Anyway, he and a driver of a big rig both coincidentally become distracted at the exact same moment, there is a collision and the Jeep goes tumbling down the mountain, exploding like it was carrying several tons of TNT, and the information is lost.

Again, this has no effect AT ALL on the rest of the movie. The movie picks up a year later, they still have had enough time to build a spaceship (spoiler) to plant nukes on the comet and divert it (spoiler). I have no idea why the scene with Smith was included. It’s like someone wrote an early draft and this scene accidentally got left in the shooting script.

The movie does pick up as the comet nears and every plan to get it out of the way fails. It looks bad, and there are noble sacrifices to save babies and kids. The spaceship crew, led by crusty old Robert Duvall, sacrifices themselves in order to nuke the larger chunk of the comet. It’s not explained why this works perfectly and failed totally when they did it earlier and just split the comet into two pieces, a little one and a big one. But with only a little chunk, the death toll is reduced to mere millions instead of becoming an Extinction Level Event (ELE), life goes on, and President Freeman gets to make a speech at what appears to be a terrible matte painting of the Washington Capitol under (re)construction and the babies will go on to grow up and post reminisces on TikTok or something.

Also, Freeman’s second to last speech is a bummer because he says the US and Russian missiles failed to stop the comet (this was when Russia was almost viewed as a good guy–again, how times change!) but now they know where the pieces will hit, and the little one is going into the Atlantic, so goodbye US east coast! The effects here are perfectly serviceable and relatively restrained compared to, say, 2012, but the scene in which Elijah Wood, his new wife and his new wife’s mother’s baby are literally running up a hill to escape the massive tidal wave reminded me of people trying to outrun the deadly cold in The Day After Tomorrow. This is not a good comparison.

Overall, on a scale of 1 to 10 asteroids nuking the dinosaurs into oblivion, Deep Impact rates 6 asteroids.

Book review: Gotta Read It!

Gotta Read It!: Five Simple Steps to a Fiction Pitch that Sells by Libbie Hawker

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

This short book is about pitches. The story kind, not the baseball kind. I got it as part of a book bundle and I love short books, so I dove in.

And it’s fine. Hawker provides plenty of her own pitches as examples and while it may seem ego-driven at a glance, it’s nice in that there is an authenticity to the pitches. She’s not “writing to the crowd”, she’s providing examples of work she has relied on directly to help sell her novels.

The writing style is light and the book can be finished in an afternoon, all the better to apply the lessons therein. I don’t foresee myself making use of it much with my own writing, but for those who may need to work on and use pitches, this is a concise and worthy resource.

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Book review: So You Had to Build a Time Machine

So You Had to Build a Time Machine by Jason Offutt

My rating: 2 of 5 stars

I wanted to like this more than I did. In the end it was a light, uneven parallel dimension romp that has tons of stuff in it, but doesn’t really hold together that well.

Also it is more about alternate universes than time travel, so the title is sort of a fib, too. 😛

On the plus side, the smirking, sarcastic tone is carried off well. The characters all seem to know how ridiculous everything is and more or less roll with it. This does mean that “serious” character moments tend to come off as maudlin or out of place. As the “Miller waves” that prompt shifts in time and space grow more frequent, the changes grow more dramatic, from small stuff like street names changing to Earth being overrun by orcs. Apparently.

And this is also where the story lost me. Look, I don’t expect hard science fiction in a work that is clearly filled with gonzo tech and lots of hand-waving on how or why it works, but I still felt there was no coherence and the author just started throwing in weird stuff for the sake of being weird, with one character, a hulking bakery owner known as Brick, tossing off a line about how maybe worlds filled with dragons and such actually exist because writers aren’t imagining them, but are somehow tapping into the cosmos and really seeing them. Sure. So this means you get (spoilers, sorry):

– Dinosaurs
– Orcs
– Zombies
– Giant insects
– The Devil (?)

All of these could still work, I just felt the explanation for them was too glib to buy in, and it hurt the story.

I also felt the characters were treated strangely. I swear Brick starts out as one character and ends as another entirely. Skid, the purported hero of the tale, is an ex-circus performer who specializes in throwing knives. She uses this skill in the story, which is good! But her character seems almost emotionally defective and needs to be bailed out by brick, like a powerless princess. I wanted to see her kick ass, and she does kick some asses, but (heh heh) the number of asses felt too low. Other characters disappeared for long periods of time, only to resurface later without explanation (or to any real effect), possibly to signal the randomness of all this parallel universe stuff, but it just didn’t click.

Finally, the ending was strangely anti-climactic. It just happened and was done. It literally involved pushing a button. You could make pushing a button exciting. This was not exciting.

Still, I do appreciate that the author went for something a bit tonally different from your usual alternate dimension fare, and I admire both that and the fairly consistent wise ass tone that is carried throughout (though it should be noted that if this tone is something that would grate on you, stay far, far away).

Overall, I can neither recommend the book, nor warn anyone away from it. It’s not bad, just flawed and falls short of what it could have been.

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