Election Day in Westeros

Happy Election Day!

In honor of the US elections, and our firm belief that--as is the case in many other countries--voting day should be a national holiday, we're taking the day off. 

If you are American, please go out and vote. Then sit down and watch the maddeningly vapid commentary for hours on end, perhaps with a smirk because the statisticians are about to make punditry obsolete. At least, that's what I plan on doing.

Will work for food

If you are not American, you can watch the drama on one of our cable/satellite TV stations. You will undoubtedly find yourself amused (or bemused) by the array of half-baked theories, sports metaphors, flashy graphics, cross-talk and general superficiality that passes for "news analysis" on CNN, MSNBC and FOX. Then turn to one of your own channels to find out what's really going on, because the best news shows in the US, sadly, aren't exported.

GOOD, BAD or UGLY: Disney Star Wars

Disney recently announced it has bought Lucasfilm for a whopping $4 billion. That means it gets the rights to the Star Wars franchise (aside, apparently, from Episode IV, whose rights belong to Fox), as well as Indiana Jones, Industrial Light & Magic, Lucasgames, etc. Disney also mentioned plans to make Star Wars Episodes VII, VIII and IX--which would not be written or directed by George Lucas, the man responsible both for the iconic original trilogy and the wretched, childhood-tainting prequels. We ask each of our bloggers to tell us: is this idea good, bad or ugly?

Vance:

UGLY: There's an upside and a downside here. The up is that Lucas won't be able to Jar-Jar any more STAR WARS movies, and maybe with his finger off the switch, Disney will finally release the films in their original form, without all the Greedo shooting first business. The downside, contrary to popular sentiment, is not that Disney will screw it up. Lucas proved totally capable of doing that himself. The downside is that Walt Disney studios has been releasing fewer and fewer films each year (only 7 last year, 6 this year), so now what we're looking at is a two-year cycle of 12 films where 2 Marvels, 2 Pixars, 1 Disney Animation, 1-2 Tim Burtons, and now a STAR WARS are already taking up over half of the slate and about a billion dollars in budgeted production costs. What this move means overall is that fewer films will be made, there will be fewer surprises, and fewer chances for anyone to ever again blow up the cinematic landscape like Lucas did with the original STAR WARS.

The G:

GOOD: Though the prequels did improve, film to film, overall they were a disaster. The tinkering Lucas has done to the original trilogy, if anything, has been worse. All of this goes back to a fundamental misunderstanding on his part about what people liked in the original trilogy to begin with--they were grand fantasies that tapped into narrative themes and symbolisms that animate nearly all mythic traditions, from Gilgamesh to Lord of the Rings. And they were set in space! Sure it was a fake version of space where there are audible sounds and many laws of physics are not applicable, but whatever. These were good stories set in an interesting “world” populated by memorable, believable characters. I was half-convinced that Chewbacca was real. Enter the prequels, which peed on that. Then enter the revisions to the original trilogy, in which we get corny, quickly-dated CGI, Greedo shooting first...and...no “Yub Nub” at the end of Jedi! GEORGE LUCAS I WILL NEVER FORGIVE YOU FOR THIS. Disney might be able to do some good here: they’ve done a decent job with Marvel (so far), and given that the STAR WARS franchise is riding a decade-and-a-half long waterslide to the gutter, it won’t take much at this point to right the ship. Mixed-metaphors aside, all it will take is putting the right people on the project. What’s Lawrence Kasdan up to these days?

Molly: 

GOOD: I can't wait for Leia to be considered a Disney Princess. (Hipster Leia, why didn't I think of that for Halloween?!) Frankly, it's about time that someone took Star Wars away from George Lucas. Disney understands they hit the jackpot with Joss Whedon taking on Marvel. Even though Dark Shadows was pretty awful, Disney’s still right to trust Tim Burton and his track record. So this is all about who will lead up the project, both directing (my votes go to J.J. Abrams, John Favreau, or Christopher Nolan) -- but more importantly, the writing. The characters and the stories have always been rich (Lucas does some things right, like ripping off every biblical and mythical archetype in the books to great effect), but thank Kenobi that Lucas won’t be in charge of the dialogue anymore. The painful and awkward dialogue has been proliferating throughout the galaxy since Episode 1 and persists in Clone Wars. Let's get David Mamet, Aaron Sorkin, Quentin Tarantino, and Seth freaking MacFarlane in the same room with a bunch of light sabers and see what happens. As long as Disney keeps the swipe transitions I’ll be happy!

Screencap from Episode IX?

Philippe:

GOOD, BAD, maybe UGLY: So, we can all agree that the prequel were terrible. But, if we’re being absolutely honest, the originals weren’t that great either.

Mike: 

GOOD: George Lucas has already ruined the beloved franchise that I grew up with. He added unnecessary sequences to the original trilogy and created a new trilogy that is laughable. How can Disney do any worse? My take is that Disney will take the brilliant world that Lucas created and treat it with care. Under the watchful eye of Disney I could see more of a Star Wars presence in its theme parks and could see it expanding the successful Cartoon Network’s Clone Wars. Anyone who has been watching the Clone Wars knows that the Star Wars franchise has a lot of quality stories to be told. I feel that removing Lucas from the picture may really open the creative envelope on a world ripe with opportunity. I for one am on board.

Jemmy: 

GOOD: George Lucas was brilliant in coming up with STAR WARS, and created a memorable world and fantastic characters. That said, the last four movies (including Revenge of the Jedi) left much to be desired. Lucas, that is, really screwed up his own series. It has long been time for Lucas to give up control. We should be jumping for joy that the series is out of Lucas’s hands! In selling to Disney, he gives a strong brand to a company that has the resources and the experience to make the most of it. Disney can breathe new life into the STAR WARS brand. Of course, this depends on Disney’s selection of screenplays. Should they adapt the next movies from Timothy Zahn’s Heir to the Empire Trilogy (also known as the Thrawn Trilogy), we should expect to see renewed interest in and love for the STAR WARS franchise. With the right director and screenplay, I would be more interested in the Heir to the Empire Trilogy than I was in the original series!
 

Brad:

BAD: I seem to be the lone wolf here, but I’m literally a STAR WARS baby. I was born two weeks before it came out (May 11[me]-May 25, 1977[Star Wars]) and I’ve been a lifelong lover of all things Star Wars. I’ll admit that Jar-Jar was worse than Ewoks and Jake Lloyd was a terrible choice for young Anakin, but I still get goosebumps when that door opens and Darth Maul fires up his double-edged lightsaber. Come on, admit that was cool. You know it was. The reason I chose “Bad” was because Disney hasn’t made a good movie since The Lion King. That’s 1994, people. Although I have high hopes for Wreck-It Ralph, After nearly 20 years of disappointment, even a movie about video games has trouble getting me excited, and I’m the game reviewer! If they promise to turn it all over to Pixar, I might be okay with it. Get the Wall-E guys on the case. That was one of the more creative yet family friendly movies of the last few decades. 94% of Star Wars movies are CGI, anyway. Clone Wars looks pretty good and it’s a “cartoon.” Imagine what they could do with a Star Wars Episode 7 budget! I say we all just get down on our knees and pray to God Almighty that they don’t stick Harrison Ford in the role of Han Solo for #7! After Indy 4 you know he’ll do it if asked. Looking old and foolish doesn’t bother him a bit if the contract is big enough. I guess I probably wouldn’t care either if I got $65 million and a profit sharing deal. Get ready, folks. It’s something you never thought you’d see. Harrison Ford as a 70-year-old Han Solo. Those Pixar geeks are going to earn their money on this one!

Literary Games: Alan Wake

As Close to Reading as Video Games Can Get

Even as I type that, I had to question the validity of the statement, if only because of Lost Odyssey. Half that game was literally reading scrolls, pages and pages of scrolls. With Alan Wake, it's more that playing the game is the closer experience to reading a Stephen King thriller than a video game is ever going to get. Although it takes place in Washington state instead of Maine, there are many similarities and having read so many King books I kept mixing up the locations. There are many varied types of scenes and you're never quite sure whether you're playing a dream sequence, a horror game, or a little bit of both. 

Games as Narrative Art Form

It's games like this that help me when I make the claim that video games are a new narrative form. Now, there may be some crap out there as there is in any style of artwork (Go listen to Billboard's Top 10 and come back and argue with me), but well produced games with an extremely deep and intriguing plot line make me feel that we've gone beyond the standard "video game" that our parents warned us would rot our brains. We have arrived at the point where games can tell a more engrossing story than any two-hour movie. When done correctly, games like Skyrim, Half Life, Mass Effect, Red Dead Redemption, and Alan Wake can create connections with the characters that no movie can match, even in a three-and-a-half-hour director's cut. How could they when you spend over 150 hours making decisions that effect your characters in some of the aforementioned pieces of video game perfection? The only thing that comes close is books. Anyone who invested the time to read the unabridged version of The Stand knows what I'm talking about. If anything, we develop closer relationships and care more about the characters we create than we do with most other forms of entertainment. Not only that, but Alan Wake continually finds pieces of a manuscript throughout the game that reference recent action in the game. That way, you not only end up playing the game, but literally reading it, as well. Some people may hate being forced to read while playing games, but I'm not one of them. In this case, it just added to the depth of your confusion as to what was really going on. It also helped to humanize the characters and give more detail about action scenes that may have been too hectic to completely digest on the first playthrough.

I know people who refused to finish the evil quests on Oblivion because they had created a good character and didn't want to damage their reputation. People skipped half a game in order to protect the character they'd created. If that isn't dedication to a fictional creation, then I don't know the definition. Something that can have that much of an effect on the player has to hold some validity as a respectable form of art. These games aren't cheap. By skipping half the quests, they're essentially saying, "It's worth thirty dollars to me in order to keep my personal creation the way I want him or her."

When was the last time you spent thirty dollars on a good movie (plus popcorn and Dr. Pepper) and left halfway through? 

Light vs. Dark

One thing that Alan Wake does masterfully, as well as any game not called Dead Space, is use light and darkness to not only set the mood, but to effect the characters, as well. For one thing, when you're in a lighted space, you literally feel relieved. The endorphins rush in and you relax, knowing you're safe for the time being. Darkness, on the other hand, is a baaad sign. Any time the scene begins and there isn't a sun in sight, get your flashlight and gun out quickly because something is coming to kill you. Don't ask why! I was a bit confused through some of this game, too. Just do it!

Alan Wake succeeds at having memorable characters, a story that grabs you yet keeps you guessing right up to the end, and some of the best use of light in a game I've ever seen, While it doesn't take even one quarter as long as Skyrim, you still get invested in the characters. The writers were creative and I commend them for trying something beyond the average shooter. This is a unique game unlike anything else I've played. If you like your games heavy on story with exciting action instead of just another special forces first person shooter, then please don't overlook this one-of-a-kind gaming experience. 

The Math

Objective Quality: 9/10.

Bonuses: +1 for a totally unique and gutsy story. It took five years to make this game and the polish was worth every minute of it!

Penalties: -1 for a bit of repetitiveness in the enemies you have to face.  

Nerd Coefficient: 9/10. very high quality/standout in its category

Microreview [book]: At the Mouth of the River of Bees by Kij Johnson

The Meat

Acclaimed science fiction and fantasy author Kij Johnson's recent short story collection, At the Mouth of the River of Bees, is an emotional whirlwind. The short story collection includes a number of her Hugo, Nebula, and other award-winning stories written over the past two decades. It covers the gamut of real and imagined animal life, from humans and monkeys to foxes, horses, bees, cats, wolves, tentacled aliens, and winged unicorn-like ponies. Ranging from love stories to jarring tentacle porn and strange retellings of history, the stories in At the Mouth of the River of Bees reach from East Asia to Montana, from the ancient past to the distant future, and from the world of the dead to alien planets. Kij Johnson has given us an impressive collection of some of her best stories, and in doing so breathes a great deal of life into short story science fiction and fantasy.

At the Mouth of the River of Bees is at its most interesting when blurring the boundary between human and animal worlds. While anthropomorphizing some animals (in "Fox Magic," for instance), other stories highlight the opposite trend of humans emulating animals. "The Bitey Cat," for instance, shows how a young girl, Sarah, deals with the divorce of her parents through her relationship with her wild, bitey cat. Instead of taking her parents as role models, Sarah deals with the divorce by becoming as wild as her cat, turning into a bitey human. And the weird but oddly compelling tale "Wolf Trapping" centers around a woman who is so intent to become a member of a pack of wolves that she does something unthinkable.      

"Ponies," perhaps the most grisly and jarring of the stories, takes up the theme of cruelty, both the cruelty of childhood and that borne from the desire to fit in. A young girl's desire to fit in and befriend the in-crowd leads to a gruesome and cruel story of friendship betrayed. So influenced are Barbara and her winged unicorn-like pony in joining the in-group (OneOfUs) that they betray their own friendship and involve themselves in a ghastly crime. Children, Johnson rightly implies, can be cruel and uncaring. 

It is in the stories of love and loss that Johnson writes her finest work. "At the Mouth of the River of Bees," after which the collection is named, is far and away the most brilliant and magical story in the collection. A bee sting starts a chain of events that lead Linna to take her ailing dog on a road trip through the Northwest. On the way, they encounter a literal river of bees, and Linna decides to take her dog on a long trip up to the mouth, ultimately, to meet the queen of the bees. This magical tale deals with broader issues of aging, dying, loneliness, devotion, and loss, and represents the best of Kij Johnson's talents. Hugo award-winning story "The Man Who Bridged the Mist," too, tells a story of a man who builds a bridge over a dangerous river of mist. (This story, incidentally, features the best world building in the whole collection). However, the bridge he builds (his life's work), he soon finds out, threatens to destroy the woman he loves. And "Chenting, in the Land of the Dead" offers an interesting look at love, loss, and death. Death, Johnson rightly points out, is sometimes only in the eye of the beholder. Where death is warm and beautiful for the suffering scholar, it is cold and lonely for his lovely concubine, Ah Lien. Their paths of love meet in life, but diverge in death.

The last to emerge from this collection is the the bitter sweet theme of hope. "The Cat Who Walked a Thousand Miles," for instance, tells the story of a cat lost on the famous Tokaido road in Edo-period Japan. The cat, named Small Cat, travels far from its home, walking a thousand miles in search of adventure only to find itself. And Johnson's opening story, "26 Monkeys, and the Abyss," tells the tale of a woman who buys a disappearing monkey act. This playful story revolves around a central mystery that the woman tries to unravel: where do the monkeys go after they disappear? Johnson ends on a hopeful note, hinting that even after parting, nothing is ever lost.

As with all short story collections, there is a good deal of hit and miss. Some stories that delve into the experimental or the playful fail to do the collection justice. The Nebula Award-winning story "Spar," Johnson's foray into tentacle porn, is one such story. A woman and a tentacled alien, both trapped in space in a lifeboat, spend the whole story fucking each other. They fuck because it is their only means of communication, a flawed means indeed. And they fuck because they have nothing else to do and it helps them escape the reality of their meaningless existence. While jarring, this reviewer wonders why it was worthy of winning the prestigious Nebula award. Moreover, while "Story Kit" and "Schrodinger's Cathouse" are both conceptually interesting, they lack the power or depth of Johnson's better tales.  

Nonetheless, the good stories far outweigh the bad. At the Mouth of the River of Bees is an excellent short story collection, one that is well worth your time and attention. 

The Math

Objective Quality: 8/10.

Bonuses: +1 for a blurring the boundaries between human and animal, and for engaging in fantastic world building.

Penalties: -1 for Johnson's tendency to exoticize Japan, especially in "Fox Magic." 

Nerd Coefficient: 8/10  "Well worth your time and attention"

[See an explanation of our non-inflated scores here]

Microreview [Novel]: Mr. Blank

The Meat

In this review of Mr. Blank, the term “fun romp” will not be used. In fact, I’m going to stay away from the word “fun” entirely.

As a teen I couldn’t get enough of conspiracy theories. Of course, it was a simpler time. Oliver Stone and X Files, the Loompanics catalog and Feral House’s very existence, the Clinton Administration and the internets: the nineties were a good time for cabals, secret histories, and cattle mutilation. I’m not sure that I bought a single conspiracy – other than maybe the Kennedy assassination, the Action Comics #1 of modern conspiracy theories – but I immensely enjoyed reading these cheap trade paperbacks that promised to uncover age old secrets about Jesus’ kids and decode the dollar bill.

Justin Robinson’s Mr. Blank is a comedic roman noir about conspiracies, part Chandler, part Vonnegut, part von Däniken. Actually, it’s a novel about conspirators. More to the point, it’s about the low-level Joes that conspirators hire to do the shit work of their nefarious plots – the working schlubs who are charged with during the grunt work necessary for world domination or waking the Old Gods. Someone has to do take the Holy Grail to FedEx or give Lee Harvery Oswald’s clone a ride to the dentist.

The novel’s hero is just such a nameless dude. He’s a Mason, a Templar, and a Satanist, as well as a neophyte of, henchman for, and errand boy to a number of other secret societies you’ve never heard of. He’s the man you call when you need a mysterious object dropped off in Encino – or when an equally mysterious object needs picking up in Culver City. It’s good work if you can find it. And if you can decipher certain Craigslist ads correctly.

Fortunately, Mr. Blank’s plot is not really that important. (Fortunate for me because I am really bad at summarizing.) There’s a couple of stolen mythical artifacts, warring cults, assassination plots, a plus-sized model, and more spooks/cultists/anorexics than…something. But these themes, tropes, and gimmicks are all an excuse for the jokes.

The book is generally funny. Robinson, as if he were Dashiel Hammet’s annoying kid brother, sardonically mimics the best of hardboiled crime writing: “At first glance, she looked fifteen. Second glance aged her five years, third a couple more. She always had a look on her face like she disapproved of everything she could see, and was imagining a few more things to be pissed off with.” Nice.

Robinson’s at his best when he’s poking fun out his hometown, Los Angeles:

• “There are people in LA who spend their entire lives avoiding the 405.” “Burbank existed entirely for the purpose of destroying any lingering belief that the world was a beautiful place.”
• “‘You have to just make a decision. Do you want to be famous and dead, or unknown and alive?’ I expected her to have to think about it. After all, she was in LA.”
• “It looked like old LA to me, a place where a bot player had probably dies in the ‘40s and was a stop on one of the lower-rent tours.”

Jokes. This book is full of them. And if Mystery Science Theater 3000 taught us anything, it’s that the more jokes one makes, the greater the likelihood for failure. There are indeed plenty of bad jokes in Mr. Blank. Some of them are even embarrassing. Fortunately, there are some damn funny ones as well.

The plot of Mr. Blank is fairly incidental. In fact, it’s entirely incidental, little more than an excuse to introduce another conspiracy, another silly character, or simply to make a trip to the Griffith Observatory or the San Fernando Valley. Does it matter that the internet has become sentient and has been given a body by its worshippers? Only to the extent that it makes for a funny and fairly creepy scene. Though the plot’s relative irrelevance was not overall too much of a drawback, it began to wear toward the end of the book. I didn’t expect or want to care about anyone in the book, but somewhere around page 270 I truly stopped caring. The book’s denouement would have delightfully underwhelming and anticlimactic assuming that I had been required to pay attention to the pages that preceded it.

Had this been one of those “serious” novels that the New York Times or an attractive Latina comparative lit doctoral candidate insist I read, I would have been pissed. But this isn’t a book about upper middle class folks with problems and relationships. It’s a silly book about the silly conspiracies that silly people believe. And as such, it was almost entirely successful, despite all the bad jokes.

All in all, Mr. Blank was a fun read. Dammit.

The Math

Objective score: 7/10

Bonus points: +1 for reminding me of Loompanics; +1 for good jokes

Penalties: -1 for bad jokes

Nerd coefficient: 8/10

[See here to check our work. It's legit.]

Thursday Morning Superhero

I hope you all had a chance to visit your local Comic Book Store and participate in Halloween ComicFest.  My children entered the costume contest at our local store and we picked up a handful of great comics that we enjoyed reading together.  Our highlights were Axe Cop, Cow Boy, and Johnny Boo.  Well, on to the weekly releases and as always, hit me up on twitter at @newhousebailey with any feedback.

Pick of the Week:

Bedlam #1 – Nick Spencer, the master behind Morning Glories and Infinite Vacation, takes a dark turn with Bedlam. Madder Red is a deeply disturbed serial killer who has baffled the police for years. This book opens with one of the most shocking and disturbing scenes I have read in some time. The art is equally disturbing and the character design is phenomenal. Bedlam grips you from the start and leaves you hanging on every word. Nick Spencer has another hit on his hands. Well done sir.

Runner-up:

Masters of the Universe: The Origin of Skeletor #1 – As someone who grew up a huge He-Man fan, I never knew what made Skeletor the villain that he was. In this book we learn the tragic figure that is Keldor and his quest for the throne of Eternia. It might be my nostalgic self taking over, but I enjoyed this book and the insight it provided to a franchise that meant so much to me as a child.








The Not as Good:

Happy #2 – It seems that Grant Morrison is either pure gold or something I don’t quite get. With Happy, I must say that I don’t quite get it. Nick escapes from the hospital from the help of his imaginary friend and begins to confront the mob. It is intriguing and I am left curious, but still don’t really get the overall picture. I will pass on the next two issues.

The Rest:

Hit Girl #4 – The ultra-violent series from Mark Millar continues as Hit Girl flirts with being caught after she swore to give up her role as superhero. While she is dealing with convincing her stepfather that she has hung up her cape, Ralphie Genovese makes a move to stick it to Detective Williams without realizing that he is holding Hit Girl at gunpoint!

Winter Soldier #12 –Bucky strives to get Black Widow back and must go through with an old Cold War mission to save her. With encounters with Wolverine and Daredevil, it is no wonder that this series is a success. Brubaker treats Bucky with the same care he gave Captain America for so long and it shows.

Lot 13 #1 – In a creepy tale of a family on the move, Steve Niles delivers an intriguing book filled with mystery and suspense. Not a whole lot of back story is provided, but enough is told that has me looking forward to the next creepy issue.

What I should have read:

American Vampire #32 – Scott Snyder continues his run on American Vampire along with Raphael Albuquerque in what continues to be a great book. The vampires are hiding amongst the Hollywood elite that is worth your time.

Fatale #9 – Brubaker continues his noir epic with another solid issue that I should have picked up. I have really enjoyed this series, but decided to move to trades a while back. Based on the success of issue #9 I might should have stuck with the singles.