War Inc.

War Inc. (Netflix)

a parody movie

I know I saw a preview of this when it was out in theaters. I know I didn’t hear anything about it in between then and now which sounds like it would be a dis-recommendation. However many movies exist about which I have never heard, things like The Station Agent and Bagdad Cafe and several others. So a movie’s level of invisibility has nothing to do with  whether I will enjoy it. With that said, this movie sucked.

Most of the time I find that things either are funny or they are not and trying for the funny causes the humor to fail.  This movie was so busy trying to be funny that it ended up looking like a narcissistic advertisement for washed up actors. There was no chance to sit back and enjoy the movie because things that were supposed to be funny were constantly being shoved in the audience’s faces.

The movie is supposed to be an obvious parody of the current US occupation of Iraq.  The problem is that I think it is probably close to 100% accurate, including the horrible parts that were supposed to be funny because they were fake. As soon as you don’t see soldiers risking their lives and buzzing on caffeine after having not slept for 5 days as an exaggeration, showing that while a soldier is dropping off someone’s dry cleaning seems like the kind of thing that probably happens in real life. How can that possibly be funny?

In a very strange way, I watched this movie like I watch The Daily Show, where they are incorporating as much humor as they can find because that’s the only way they will be allowed to show the truth. Once you have that perspective, that this is a horror documentary masquerading as entertainment, the people trying to make it funny seem warped and dementedly sick in the head.

John Cusack tries to carry this movie but is not believable. Joan Cusack is bizarrely miscast in this. Hilary Duff is plastic and unappealing— no idea whether that was great acting or her normal personality. There wasn’t anything redeeming in the acting for this movie, unless the definition of success was making the audience loathe all of the characters universally.

Not recommended.

Princess Academy

Princess Academy by Shannon Hale

After reading the previous Hale book, I wanted to see if her other work was as promising. Another book from the children’s section, Princess Academy was just as nicely written and just as nicely edited. It is a previous work, and I think Shannon Hale’s writing has improved with experience. I might have thought I just preferred the other story, but if you had asked me to choose by summary, Princess Academy would have been my first read.

Princess Academy is about a world where the Prince is told by the royal diviners where his bride will hail from. So all the eligible girls are sent to an ad hoc princess academy. [Speaking of ad hoc... I mean that in the "assembled for a specific purpose" sense, not the "thrown together haphazardly without care" sense... this is an important distinction that Cory Doctorow neglected to mention throughout his entire work, Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom, which depended upon that definition. Without understanding that there is a completely contrary definition to the common usage, most of the Doctorow book made no sense. He kept saying that his bizarre "whuffie" system made perfect sense because it was designed by an ad hoc committee--- which I understood to mean, "thrown together by unskilled people who don't know what they're doing" instead of "designed by forethinking people with the best economic and sociological minds in the world who built it and then went back to their day jobs."]

The village divined is a stone quarry village that’s only nominally part of the same kingdom so the herald and the academy staff look down on the villagers.

There is some time spent about how the girls get along together. There is some time spent talking about village life— and explaining the details to lowlander girl who moved there earlier— this includes a bizarre form of magic that doesn’t seem especially important. All of this was interesting, but it was not very cohesive. It all works together, but it seems rather accidental instead of being especially chosen as a means to convey the underlying story.

We do not really get to know the characters we meet. They are superimposed caricatures, then suddenly there is a paradigm shift from the main character’s point-of-view and everyone is someone completely different. It was less interesting than if there had been a steady build-up to that. I didn’t like one of the crux points in the story where the main character brings home drastic changes, the story presents them all as universally positive, but I am not convinced that much change without examination is not going to have long-term repercussions. For example, the main character wants to start a school and have everyone learn to read and figure, but the main method of communication in the quarry is this magic that is heart-felt and unlearned. I didn’t see that as fitting well together because it’s possible that all the formal learning will undermine the magical knowledge. The main character is 15 years old, it really seems like her whole village shouldn’t just let her take over. Other people have experience and knowledge and it really seems unlikely that they’d have an open leadership role just going begging for her to fill like that.

It was a good story. It was well told. But I think there were some rough edges as to internal motivations that we just didn’t see.

recommended.

Book of a Thousand Days

Shannon Hale: Book of a Thousand Days

I ended up reading a book, nearly random selection, from the children’s new book section of the library.  It was Shannon Hale’s Book of a Thousand Days. I thoroughly enjoyed it. There is a lot of personal and external conflict and these things were kept well in balance. Normally a book will use internal conflict to showcase a character’s development or to drive the external conflict, and there was some of that. But what I really enjoyed was how the seeming “progress” the character makes toward her personal development ends up being an external conflict. This is a very character-driven book, despite the big war plot.

It’s meant to be a story for children, and I have to say that I’m starting to envy children for getting the better quality books. All the fantasy and magic based books for adults have been subsumed by the “OMG *squee!* vampires!” books or the ones where the vampires are evil and everything is grim and scary. Plus someone actually edited this book. There weren’t any typos or mis-used words. Someone went through this and scrubbed it clean. I can’t remember the last time I read an adult book with that level of quality effort.

The story is about a nomad girl who moves to the big city and takes a job as a maid and her first job involves going to be imprisoned with her lady in a tower. Eventually they break out. The story ends happily. But I was really surprised by how well I liked the nomad girl, how she uses her magic, her unfailing belief that there is a way, and her devotion to her faith. The author did a really stunning job of creating a world and a worldview that were both alien and realistic. I was amazed.

Highly Recommended.

Acheron

Acheron by Sherrilyn Kenyon is the nth book in her Dark Hunter series. Ash has always been the leader of the Dark Hunters, who are vampire-like, but kill other vampires who are evil because they’re Apollo’s offspring instead of Artemis’s. Or something. It’s always been kind of vague and ridiculous to me and I ignored that part to concentrate on the individual Dark Hunter’s past/background.

This series, despite the vampire angle, is mostly romance-based. The point of the stories is to match the Dark Hunter up with his One True Mate who then has to kill him to redeem his soul. In later books, we see that the Dark Hunters’ souls are not freely given by Artemis, Asheron pays for them with his body and flesh and blood.

Acheron’s story is a tome. The hardcover version outweighs the most recent Erikson hardcover.  But it has thick paper and pleasantly sized type. 65% or so of the book is very ancient times, like 11,000 years ago. We see Ash as a child. We see him eternally living in the absolute worst torturous environment possible, with hope lasting just long enough to make the fall past rock-bottom even harsher. A lot of it was nauseating to read. If this was fanfiction, it would have carried a plastering of warning labels rivalling Indy cars. I loathe that published fiction has zero respect for readers and does not even bother to mention this level of violence and graphic torture. Normally I would not read anything with this much blood and gore and unfounded hatred because it makes me less of a person to immerse myself in other people’s pain like a sadistic voyeur.

What absolutely ruined the book for me was the modern story.

We see Ash going to an archaeology lecture and heckling the speaker. We see the speaker asking a colleague for help, the colleague is a Dark Hunter from a previous book (of course beholden to Ash) who says he can’t help her, but knows someone who can. The woman speaker throws a hammer at Ash and stomps off. (He deserved it, admittedly, but only if you hadn’t just read the previous half of the book.)

Ash decides she’s the woman for him and instantly falls in love with her, so despite ELEVEN THOUSAND YEARS OF EXPERIENCE, he trusts her and opens his heart to her. She falls for him because he’s freaking gorgeous (and this is actually described much better than the Kitty Does DC author’s “Brazilian”) and he can teach her to speak Atlantean (the language of Atlantis.)

It’s bizarre and completely unrealistic. There’s no reason these people should fall in love. And if there is, then Ash should have been able to fall in love before, because this woman is nothing special. Ash is thrilled that she seems to accept him, but lots of women accept men with shadowed pasts and don’t hold it against them. Ash is thrilled that she seems to have honor and loyalty and he’s never see that in another woman. I don’t know where he’s been looking, but I know a LOT of smart women who don’t lie and don’t cheat and who generously aid their friends even when it’s hard. The book is set in New Orleans, which is part of the South, where they claim to have Southern Hospitality and women are all kind and Christian, but most of them in my experience are vicious snakes in the grass out for any and all advantages they don’t deserve, as long as they can pull a kind face on it and say “Bless your heart!” afterward. So maybe Ash really does think all women around him are worthless whores, but I did not see ANYTHING special about this woman. There was no real rationale given either.

I had to read hundreds of pages of filth and torture scenes where a young boy is chained up and raped repeatedly and starved and beaten and raped and castrated and thrown out of his family home just for having been abused— and I get, Ash meets his perfect woman who is the only woman he’s ever met who doesn’t think badly of him for having been tortured. ? What? Really? That’s it?

No quibble with the very thin love story, not really. All the Dark Hunter books have been like that, where the big strong man just knows when he’s met the right woman.  Then they go through some conflict and plot and drama and in the end there’s a happy ending. I was really expecting that. This was absolutely not a happy book even though there is lip service to that. We spent pages and pages watching Acheron be raped and bled almost to death and gutted and having his eyes gouged out… but the only sex scene in the modern half of the book was less than 2 pages, most of which described the woman as wearing sexy lingerie instead of a pleasant instance between them.

I am angry that there was 10 times as much effort to convey the pain and fear and gut-wrenching aspects of Ash’s early life and no effort what-so-ever to convey why he would fall in love with this particular woman. She didn’t seem special. That would have been fine if it had stood alone. With all the gore though, I feel like I am OWED hundreds of pages of “this is what it’s like to be in love with the right woman and be immortal.”

I would like the other 400 pages of happy ending. Or for someone to have warned me to start 2/3 of the way in the book. Even just typing this out, my stomach is trying to escape through the back of my neck and my skin is crawling fit to move to Canada without me.

There is no question that this was supposed to be a “romance” story, that’s who the whole series has been marketed toward. But at the same time, there is no question where this book belongs. It was full-on horror in my opinion.

-1089123 in meeting my expectations.

Heartily non-recommended due to causing of repeated vomiting.

If you’re one of those sadistic people who likes scary stories and violence and characters hurting beyond the point of human frailty, well, this book is definitely for you. It was well researched and catchy enough that I read it all. But it still gives me nightmares.

0/10 because it made me want to throw up just thinking about it to write about it here. ANGRY ANGRY ANGRY at the author for the zero warning.

Iron Man

Iron Man
an action movie
IMDb | Netflix | Amazon
Overall Rating: 7/10
Meets Expectations: +1 (which is amazing considering the hype)
Apparent Rating: 8/10

If there can be said to be long-time readers of a months’ old blog, let me say that long-time readers should know that I have an immense love for superhero movies. Iron Man is no exception. I really enjoyed it. I think the live action version is superior to the cartoon version I saw recently too.

So much of this movie is funny, like when the S.H.I.E.L.D. guy says the whole name every time and every time, the person says, “Ya needa new name!” and he says he gets that a lot. It’s one of those things that’s funny because of the repetition.

The Pepper Potts woman was less of a caricature than I expected, but still managed to hit all those character identifying notes that I’d expect from the woman who is the personal assistant to her playboy boss. It was a little less successful in terms of me believing she was really witty and really in love with him because the line about trash was a bit off-rhythm and  she was way more squicked about saving his life than grateful it had worked. Considering that the role was entirely a caricature in the original stories and in all previous versions, the actress did a tolerable job. But I didn’t feel her devotion or understand her rationale for it and that would have helped sell the movie to me.

Tony Stark was good. I think there could have been a bit more exposition, but we’re meant to think he’s shallow. That shallowness would have worked better if it hadn’t been played in a flashback after he’d gotten taken hostage, because I sort of felt like he deserved to have some fun after the hellish experience…. intellectually I realize the kidnapping was supposed to look like Karma, but because it was out of sequence…. I didn’t like how casually he dealt with the hostage situation. He’s got all that money and doesn’t think to go back for the pieces of his creation? The helper translator guy story bothered me and it seems like anyone who has gotten that far in life would not have just accepted it at face value. But what I did really like about Tony Stark is even in the midst of his shallow playboy lifestyle, it’s completely clear how brilliant he really is. He didn’t just inherit the company, he inherited the brains to make something of it.

Overall, I can’t say if the actor, Robert Downey Jr, was good in this role; I’ve read reviews saying he was, but I thought some of it looked like acting—especially the parts where he’s supposed to be brilliant. I remember him from the nightly news where they kept showing the perp walk when he’d been arrested on drugs use and drunk driving and some other things that show really bad judgment.  So when Tony Stark is driving like a maniac in a quarter-million dollar car through magically empty Los Angeles streets, I kept expecting DUI behavior. I think he was probably adequate and it really is unlikely that Hollywood has anyone who can seem brilliant, since being actually smart is such a taboo societally that even brilliant people can have no practice looking smart. It was still vastly superior to the “I’m like totally stoned right now!” performance from Tobey Maguire in Spider-Man. Comparatively, since they’re supposed to both be roles of brilliant men, RDjr turned in a much superior performance.

One thing I enjoyed, from a humorous angle, was that Tony Stark and Obadaiah Stane and several other people had beards. Normally one can discern the villain immediately because he is a blond man with a beard.

Some of the most amusing parts were the construction robots with the fire extinguishers.

I would really like to see sequels to Iron Man.  If they’re all of this quality, I could see a sequel beating out X-Men for my favorite superhero movie.

Sanctuary: the place for speculative fiction in a modern world.

Why are all science fiction shows chock full of the scary business? I had been seeing ads for the new show Sanctuary for months before it appeared, so my anticipation was high. I couldn’t watch even 30 minutes of the pilot. Too much darkness with things jumping out. Hollywood seems to think of science fiction as a haunted house and I read science fiction and fantasy to explore interesting ideas like interactions between vastly different cultures. So I think of sff more like anthropology or politics or history. You don’t hear anthropologists and historians going around passing judgement before they have researched or talked to people. Assuming things that are different are going to be scary is a very non-sff concept, one I think is bad for society as a whole. Many people who read science fiction want to become scientists (despite the way scientists frown upon fictional science and its readers, there are a lot of people who treat their reading preferences as a dirty little secret) because they want to know more. If the books were all about how scientists’ need to know destroys the Earth and kills everyone, wouldn’t that discourage some of the brightest people? Many people who read some of the great modern fantasy absorb tolerance— I don’t know anyone who has read and liked Lackey’s Valdemar series who really thinks being homosexual is a killing offense, there are some who are still skeeved if they think about it too much, but we all got to know Vanyel and it’s hard to think he deserved to be tortured because he wasn’t attracted to women.

Personally I’ve read books that started from an Islamic basis, the story wasn’t about that, but there was an underlying premise. I got to know a little bit about what the differences are compared to my own upbringing. I find it impossible to assume every Muslim is inherently a terrorist. Because the fundamental core beliefs are not about that.  But if the story had been about being a woman in Saudi Arabia, I would have been too angry to keep reading and then I would have no connection to the characters.

Science fiction and fantasy differ in what powers everything, but they are both fundamentally about exploration of the human condition, regardless of shape or color or background or belief.

Hollywood’s tendency to make all science fiction and fantasy scary enough to be horror really undermines the globalization of society. Hollywood is trying to make us afraid of each other by making everything that is different jump out of the darkness with guns blazing.

It makes the title of the new show Sanctuary rather ironic.

Black Velvet Gown

Black Velvet Gown
an historical melodrama movie
IMDb | Netflix | Amazon
Overall Rating: 5
Meets Expectations: -1
Apparent Rating: 4

This was another movie where the title has very little to do with what happens and the description of the movie even less so. The summary of the movie says it’s about a widow who takes a housekeeping job and the master falls for her and then leaves her the house but society around her is very intolerant of jumped up servants aping gentry.

If you’re interested in this movie stop here. There will be spoilers. If you’re reading from the RSS feed, you won’t see the fold I inserted here.

Once

Once
a foreign drama movie
IMDb | Netflix
Overall Rating: 6/10
Meets Expectations: -3
Apparent Rating: 3/10

I know there is often a disconnect between the summary describing a movie and what the movie is really about. Some of that has to be not spoiling the viewing experience. Some of it might be the translation from Irish English to American English. But this is not a movie about two people falling in love with each other.

The songs in this have a lot of catchy bits to them but they are annoyingly repetitive. As I get older, I find even popular music from my teenage years to be inane and repetitious, but most of these songs had one verse and a 3-verse-long chorus. There’s one song that says “When your mind’s made up/there’s no use fightin’.” fine. It’s part of the chorus, and most songs repeat the chorus several times, but there were more than a dozen instances of that couplet. Even that does not convey the irritation. The guy sings it in falsetto. In a minor key. As a duet with the girl even though the drama bits of the musical indicate it wasn’t about her. And she chooses the minor-fourth harmony. It was the accoustic power ballad dirge love song set on “Repeat1″. 15 minutes of 85 minutes. Seriously. It was the song that never ends. It says on the movie jacket that the actors wrote the songs and won an Oscar for it. Must has been a low-competition year.

Bad subtitles that didn’t include the important bits.

The movie skims over the parts that made their relationship (as non-lovers and non-friends) by showing a silent clip sequence.

But the whole movie is supposed to be upbeat, showing how a man who works in a vacuum cleaner repair shop can find a girlfriend and record a demo disc— supposedly so he can “make it big”. But he was just helping his dad out in the shop, it wasn’t like he didn’t have a career before then. The girl was at least a decade younger than him, a foreigner, married, with a child— so she wasn’t for him. And by the time the one song of doom ended, I’d rather punch the guy than listen to him play.

Ireland looks beautiful when you see it on travel programs, but it looks like a hellhole in this movie. Apparently they  saved big bucks on filming rights by shooting at 4am in back alleys. Everything is grim and dark and underlit and overlaid with this miasma of filthy despair. It was odd because I couldn’t imagine anyone living there making any strides toward success, but that was the premise of the movie. I think someone put a camera filter on because a story that’s about people working hard to make themselves happy can’t be of artistic value, only suffering and pain can have artistic value, so they had to artificially make Ireland look like Tartarus.

The story might have been interesting if I could have identified with the characters.

The female lead was… what do you call it when someone moves to a country but has no intention of staying and becoming a citizen? that’s not immigration. Anyway, one of those. She doesn’t have a regular job, she accosts people on the sidewalk to sell them junk like homeless person magazines and dead flowers.  She meets this guy who is busking on the street. (I hate that too. The world is loud enough without people deliberately adding noise to it in public.) They make friends with each other and eventually she brings him home, she’s so young she lives with her mother, but she has a toddler. So we’re supposed to feel sorry for her because she’s in a strange country with a child and no husband and trying to keep a roof over everyone’s head when she can’t find a real job. But I don’t believe that. I think if you take a chance with your life, you don’t bring your vulnerabilities and try to use them as a shield. I think you don’t emigrate to a country where you barely speak the language without a job lined up. So I’m a hard-hearted person, but I had zero sympathy for her.

To sum up, I hated the guy. I hated the girl. I hated the music. I hated the setting. I might have liked the story if they had used other characters and it had been set somewhere the sun still shines and the music was less annoying. But then again, I didn’t especially like Music and Lyrics, which is exactly what I just described wanting this movie to have been.

Dreamkeeper

Dreamkeeper
a docudrama movie
IMDb | Netflix | Amazon
Overall Rating: 5/10
Meets Expectations:+1
Apparent Rating: 6/10

There are some movies that meander and seem rather opaque that still end up entertaining, Dreamkeeper was one of them. It was a close call though. I thought a lot of the forced parallels between the legends and the journey were blindingly obvious most of the time and astonishingly inapplicable the rest. I kept getting lost as to what was a flashback, what was story, and what was now.

The “now” part of the story was uninteresting and just next to worthless. I think it existed solely to be a framework for telling these other parables, but generally if I can see why something was done that way it seems like a staging failure. In my own writing, I call that, “Excuse me, your plot is showing.”

Some of the stories were really good. They were well told and interesting. Some of the stories relied upon outside knowledge I didn’t have and those were less successful. The stories were from a variety of tribes, even though the main characters were at one point “Sioux” and at another point “Lakota”– perhaps that’s a variant of Sioux, like when the Pawnee woman added, “Wolf Clan”. None of the Indian parables told failed as badly as the main storyline. The flashbacks, which were supposed to help the viewer sort out the rationale for the main storyline, did not start until late in the movie and by then I’d already written the characters off.

In summary, “Too bad they had all that wasted time with Grandpa and Shane.” It’s a 3 hour movie and at least half of it was very boring. I did not like the resolution in the end either. We’re supposed to see this as a happy ending, but really, the movie would have been a lot better if it had been a dozen little movielets that were just telling the stories.

Overall if you like “Native American” mythology, then you will probably enjoy this movie at least moderately. It was not terrible, but certainly a movie to have your knitting nearby to keep your hands busy.

Dragon Tiger Gate

It was filed under superhero movies. I claim that the renting of Dragon Tiger Gate was completely not my fault. I love superhero movies. My DH loves kung fu movies. Clearly this would be an amazing together-activity, right?  Not so much. We did watch it together and we did bond over it. But that moment of shared experience was thinking “What were they thinking?”

The movie jumps around a lot in the timeline. It’s based on Manga, so you just know there are whole issues that are flashback. But there is no cohesion to the flashbacks, so they go from current to recent-past to long past to possible future to current in some random order at intermittent times.

The plot is that two brothers are separated in early childhood. There was a conflict between the spoken English and the subtitle English, but it seems to have been that Dragon and Tiger are half-brothers and their father Two Wrong FuHu  (or something like that) cheated on Dragon’s mother, so they were thrown out of their home and replaced by the new and improved family while Dragon’s mother went to live in the ghetto slums. Tiger tries to keep his brotherly bond, but Dragon is having nothing of it. Then Dragon’s mother dies and Dragon is adopted by a complete stranger instead of returning to his father.

But the premise of the plot is that Dragon owes fealty to his father and must return to “The Gate”. Dragon feels he cannot because he has dishonored his kung fu.

But even now after watching the whole thing, I have no clue who the bad guys were. At first it seemed like this gang. Then it was a traitor within the gang who was Dragon’s bit of fluff. Then it was this escapee from the Power Rangers.

Oh, and a huge part of the plot is that no one seems to believe Dragon and Tiger are related because they don’t look alike. Maybe if I were Chinese I would be able to tell, but to me it looked like that ancient Parent Trap movie with Halley Mills and Halley Mills.

All the fight scenes are completely ludicrous. They look a bit like the car-fight scenes in Speed Racer where jump-jacks can shoot the car straight up and into a barrel roll. By the time we get to that part though, we’re on our fourth evil mastermind and this one looks like a cartoon reject, so I just assumed this was supposed to be hilarious and a parody. (I wonder if I might have liked Coughing Tiger, Hidden Moron if someone had told me it was all tongue-in-cheek?)

The story is all over the place with technology. Cell phones, but no one has a powered vehicle.

Some parts of the story were interesting. Love interest. Foreign Family Values. Etc. But it really was written by the three faces of Eve or something. Just completely incoherent.