Read/Viewed: No Country For Old Men

Just got back from No Country For Old Men. Well, just got back, then took a long walk down the road to think about it, then answered all my wife's questions about plot holes and contrivances based on my book learning, then re-read some reviews, then thought about grinding my way towards the good songs in Guitar Hero III, then looked up the latter and learned there are none. Then I decided to post instead.

I'm going to break, as I often do, from our spoiler policy and split this into two parts. The non-spoiler review follows. The spoiler review follows that.

No Spoilers For Old Men

While I don't think I could stomach reading No Country For Old Men, the audiobook version read by Tom Stechschulte is pretty damn gripping. It's edge of the driver's seat listening, and thematically it's a prequel to the bleak world depicted in The Road. I don't know whether the movie succeeds on both of those levels or not, because a late development in the story may have caused someone in the audience to have a heart attack. The theater neglected to turn the lights on and shut off the film, so the audience was left to grapple with whether they were supposed to ignore the EMTs and watch the denouement, or sit in the dark for 10 minutes and wait to find out if someone had died. Afterwards, another moral dilemma: Is it wrong to complain that your movie-going experience was ruined when someone's life is on the line? I can't say for sure, but as long as you aren't the asshole who leaves the theater saying, "No Country For OLD MEN! Hahahaha!", you're probably in the clear. Yay, date night.

Old Men Who Like It In The Spoiler #18
Seriously! Spoilery spoilers below!
Yo! My gangsta flow! Yo! Yo-ho-ho.
Also...spoilers.

Maybe the book is too fresh in my mind, but even without knowing how the movie ended, I'm almost kinda pretty pissed off. The Coen brothers got the suspense parts right, but they botched the message. My wife's a smart woman, and she wouldn't be asking me, "Why did this happen?", "Why would this person do something stupid?", "How could this be possible?", etc., if the film hadn't skipped over or altered plot points from the source material. While I understand nervous laughter, and that the fragility of human existence is part of the point, we shouldn't be laughing when Chigurh is sitting naked on a toilet picking bullets out of his flesh. He's supposed to be a symbol of unknowable, unstoppable violence spreading in modern times, damn it!

Succintly put, I resent them for turning Cormac McCarthy's thesis on escalating, inevitable chaos into Fargo.

Two things really ruined it for me. One, I could be wrong, but I don't remember Chigurh killing Jimmy James in the book. I'm pretty sure he brought JJ the money for no reason other than to prove he was good at his job. Two, the shocking, unexpected death of the protagonist is fully justified by the circumstances, but the movie rushes it, and cuts out the most heartbreaking part. It's just not the same if he's not shot to death in a hotel room he rented for a female hitchhiker, after renting a separate room for himself. Couple that with the edited down final confrontation between Llewelyn's wife and Chigurh, and the movie just isn't unfair enough.

Dreamt: Making Money

Immediately after reading Terry Pratchett's Making Money, I had a dream where I entered an underground street race against Lord Vetinari. I didn't lose too badly, but he was a master of the fabled Agatean Drift, whereas I tended to ram into buildings when taking corners.

Afterwards, I complimented his racing, and swore that my attempts to kill him had all been made in jest. Furthermore, I told him that I was excited about the new direction the Discworld books were taking. Clearly, the books about Moist Von Lipwig would eventually tell the story of how he would become the next Patrician, after Lord Vetinari's death.

Then I woke up. I can't say whether this was a prophetic dream or not. It certainly doesn't seem in Pratchett's character to build a multi-book plot arc where one character actually gets around to replacing another. On the other hand, I can fully believe that the way things are proceeding, it is only a matter of time before underground street racing hits Ankh-Morpork.

(Not) Read (Yet): The Chopin Manuscript

Talk about your impulse purchases.

Starting September 25th, Audible is publishing a "serial thriller" written by 15 different authors, at the rate of two or three chapters per week. The final chapters will become available on November 13th. It's read by Doc Ock, which leads me to believe the entire manuscript has already been completed, edited, and tinkered with. It's such a non-event that details are scarcely searchable on Google, but I can't imagine anyone financing this project if it was predicated on S.J. Rozan downloading the latest chapters the day they came out, writing her part, then FWD'ing it to Lee Child in time for him to get his submission back to Alfred Molina in the recording studio.

Which is too bad, because that was the sort of pressure that made the Green Mile so intriguing. But even assuming that's the case, I still couldn't resist knowing: "What would happen if 15 different people wrote a Jeffrey Deaver novel?"

I hope you're ready to find out, and that you have some vague idea of who Jeffrey Deaver is. (If not, he is, as we say in the game-speek sphere, a mystery writer on rails.) Because I'm going to be posting about it every week. Place your bets for best chapter now.

PAX 2007: Between Medium And Xtra Large

One of my goals at PAX was to pick up more T-shirts. Not counting my hoodie though, which is fairly useless for an East Coaster in Los Angeles, I already have three Penny Arcade shirts. As much as I'd like to hail ball, I'd feel like a tool if I could outfit myself courtesy of Kiko all week. So other than picking up a PAX '07 tee, my intent was to diversify.

In all, I acquired four new T-shirts. Two were purchased with cash. Another was given to me in return for a charitable donation. I won the last in a Chow-Yun Fat trivia contest.

Me: The Corrupter!
Stranglehold Guy: Give that man a T-shirt.
Stranglehold Woman: You're a Medium?
Me: I taste dead people.
Stranglehold Woman: I have Large and Xtra large.
Me: Uh, maybe it will shrink in the wash?
Stranglehold Guy: What do John Woo, Brian DePalma, and J.J. Abrams have in common?
Me: Mission: Impossible!
Stranglehold Guy: Sir, you've already got your over-sized night shirt. No shot glass for you.

The Stranglehold T-shirts were designed solely for the development team on the video game. Also, it was white, so it wasn't like I'd be inclined to wear it anyway. Overall, a minor disappointment compared to the Large T-shirt I bought from The NESkimos.

I knew it would be too big for me. It always is when whoever is at the merch table says, "Maybe it will shrink in the wash." But I felt bad for them. They had to play after Freezepop, and other than rocking the entire soundtrack to Castlevania II, their set was weak. A guy I met last year at the post-PAX nerdcore night walked out. I'm sorry, dude. I was embarrassed, too.

I felt I'd look like a dick if I asked the ECA representative at PAX for a raincheck on a T-shirt I could actually wear. I'll do it through e-mail instead. I'll even return the one they gave me and pay for postage. It's for a good cause.

Which leaves me with one T-shirt that almost fits.


I know this seems unusually "You own a dog and you feed it" for our blog, but I am going somewhere with this. I just never gained respect for the academic approach to thesis statements. When the authors of Freakonomics or Richistan blow their "In conclusion" load in the first 15 pages, why do I need to read the rest of the book? Give me an anecdote instead, and save the sound bites for page 220.

Read: Two Books About Supervillains

If I could have chosen one week out of the year so far to fall victim to illness, I couldn't have picked a worse week than this one. Other than that time I was on the run from a serial killer. But it did give me some time to finish unrenewable library books.

If your weekly Internet browsing includes sites that feature book reviews, you've probably heard about Soon I Will Be Invincible. The author is Austin Grossman, and it's no wonder the book has attracted media attention. He's worked on some high-profile story-oriented video games, and 20 odd years after Watchmen, "literary" takes on superheroes are in. It's hip to try as hard as you can to like them. Of course, a movie is in planning stages.

People give Tim Burton a lot of shit for "not getting" Batman. But I have a feeling 20 years from now comic fans and movie critics are going to agree. With Batman Returns in particular (and a lot of help from Danny Elfman), he did something no one's really done during our current comic-book movie boom. He took someone else's characters, with years of canon, and ran with the concept. That's what great comic books are about, as Alan Moore and Frank Miller proved so long ago. "I have six months to tell my Batman story, and it's the dream of every 12-year-old boy. Fuck it, I want penguins with rocket launchers. And Prince."

Given the chance to create his own alternate DC universe, Austin Grossman does nothing unusual. Soon I Will Be Invincible is at best two novellas (one from the point of a super villain, another from a reluctant hero) slapped together. Which might be acceptable if it wasn't pretending to be a novel. But despite his statements to the contrary, it reads like a video game. Reading the book is like pressing the right mouse button to click through cut-scenes. If you're reading this blog, you've been there before.

Catherine Jinks' approach to supervillains is lower-profile, but more intriguing. If you've ever wondered what Harry Potter would be like from the point of Slytherin, this is the book for you. The narrative drags in the middle and the ending is a bit pat, but the author isn't afraid to address some of the more unpleasant aspects of teenage life. Evil Genius has a real feel-bad emotional aspect that JK Rowling's series lacks. It's over the top, but more believable. The only real flaw in the current hardcover addition is that stupid cardboard last page. You have been warned.

Don't Read This Either! More Potter Ramblings

I am more than halfway through the final book of the Harry Potter saga. I can't deny that listening to it on CD, every day I wish my commute was a little bit longer. But inside my forehead there's a bored whisper. It sounds like Simon Pegg, and it says, "Skip to the end..."

I've always had issues with Rowling's sentences, plotting, and plot-creep cheats. "[blank] swelled up in Harry's chest like a balloon." All those important conversations interrupted by "then they heard voices," and not resumed for weeks. The "You didn't know about these before because [they didn't exist until this book]" excuse. Plus there's that ever-present "It must be Snape!" thing, when it's so obviously not. Rowling has no poker face, as Deathly Hallows often demonstrates.

But I was sucked in anyway, because of the characters and the characterizations of Jim Dale, who reads the audiobooks. Without them, the series would be a chore.

Case in point, The Deathy Hallows. The setup at the end of The Half-Blood Prince was intriguing. Harry planned to skip his last semester at Hogwarts to hunt down Voldemort. I didn't think Rowling would actually go through with it. But she did, and it's shocking how badly the plot stumbles without the school framework. How's a woman supposed to know when to advance the plot if there's no summer vacation, Halloween, Valentine's Day, or trips to Hogsmead?

Worse, taking the heroes out of Hogwarts means no character interaction. So far, Harry, Ron, and Hermione have spent most of their time sitting around, sophomorically speculating in circles, waiting for things to happen to them. When it does, one or two characters from Rowling's sprawling cast might make a cameo appearance. "Look, there in that paragraph! It's Luna Lovegood! And her father's in this book, too! Wow, that was fast. Oh, right, Draco! Forgot about him. I wonder if anything's going on with Neville. Kind of odd we haven't seen him yet, don't you think?"

I might as well be watching one of the movies, hoping for a brief scene where Alan Rickman is given a chance to speak.

Don't Read This! Random Late Night Ramblings On Harry Potter

Give me a break:

• Voldemort's newfound efficiency makes no sense. The narrative continues to prove that Deatheaters in a mob are even less competent than before they had ever appeared. The idea that You Know Who could suddenly take over the government and the media in a society powered by magic is preposterous. There is no precedent in the previous books for the good guys to be this incompetent, or for the bad guys to actually succeed at anything.

• Harry Potter is a coming of age series that refuses to come of age. After skipping over a description of Harry's first kiss in the Order of the Phoenix, now we've got Ron and Hermione tentatively patting each other on the arm or holding hands when they should be sneaking off and, at the very least, snogging. Excluding all the horrible possibilities that teenage boys with magic wands conjures to the mind, this book still reads as if written by a mom who refuses to acknowledge that young men have biological, reproductive imperatives that would if nothing else encourage them to spend less time sharing a bedroom. For a series that is always questioning the morals of adults, it's annoying that characters who have suffered torture, death, and societal ridicule still act like awkward 13-year-olds when it comes to relationships. I get that they're all essentially home-schooled, but both Harry and Hermione grew up with cable TV. People are dying, the tide has turned, why is everyone still such a prat?
  

• I'm only six discs in, which means there's still ten chapters before the plot starts, but it's maddening how previously well-realized students now appear as stereotypical cut-outs. Sure, it's meant to be that Ron and Hermione get together, but wasn't Crumb the first guy to realize that smart was hot? Shouldn't we feel bad about that? As for Ginny, the argument that she's the Mary Sue of Harry Potter is looking less and less like fangirl outrage. Once a shy girl of no consequence who liked an older boy, then the hard-ass non-Asian true love of the Chosen One, now she's gone all sacrificial Mary Jane on him. It's "Now Cho Chang's a bitch" all over again. Um, consistency, please?
  

This wouldn't be the first time that I've hated a Harry Potter book off the bat. I never expected to like the series in the first place. But I'm starting to get worried. There's going to be some unexpected payoff in the end, right?

Bullet Point Book Reviews

Astute readers may notice that despite my protests to the contrary, participation has decreased significantly over the past six months. Productivity is at an all-time low. While this directly corresponds to real life class changes, including prestige classes and grind burnout, it can't be denied that our blog is perilously close to entering that predictable "Sorry we haven't posted anything in two months" stage.

I blame myself. My dictatorial instincts have recently been focused elsewhere, and I've been suffering a crisis of conscience over whether or not content should be free. In general, I agree that free content is nice, as long as the providers aren't self-righteous about it. But ideally, I think their podcasts, blogs, v-logs, and YouTube stunts should be ancillary to work they are actually paid for. Gloating over the death of a magazine that would pay you for the same content you give away for free is the sort of thing that, hypothetically, might classify your podcast as no longer tolerable. And it upsets me greatly that the guys from LOSTcasts put so much thought into their work while TV reporters at the New York and LA Times are paid not to.

But I digress, and use "I" more than I'd like. In the interest of keeping our blog alive for at least a full year, allow me to suggest some changes to for our review formula. Specifically, how we go about book reviews.

A book-a-week reader as a student, I couldn't imagine a life where time spent reading books would become a luxury. But here I am. As a fully-employed reader, writer, and gamer, I currently view books according to three criteria:

• Time: Is it worth the time spent to read/listen to a book?
• Money: Is it worth the cost of the reviewed format of the title (hardback/audiobook/trade/etc.)?
• Wait: Is it worth the wait to get it at the library or for a different format?

Note that these are the same criteria I use to judge anything supposedly entertaining or enlightening, from Battlestar to Buddhism.

As a hibernating aspiring novelist myself, I hesitate to suggest that a book is not worth the time spent reading it (you can learn something from any book, especially the bad ones). But there's no reason we should treat books with kid gloves when we're so harsh with more collaborative media like television, movies, games, and porn. Yes, it's sad for Christopher Pike if he spends years (benefit of the doubt) on his latest adult novel, only for some interlard to dismiss it as a waste of your time. But it's significantly more cruel to bash BSG or Sakura Tales, something we do often. It's probably not Apollo's fault that Starbuck isn't dead, and Mika Tan puts a lot more on the line than Christopher Pike. His heart may be on the page, but you won't recognize his face at the mall.

I'm not advocating that we descend to 5-sentence book reviews, but I think if we keep time, money, and wait in mind, it might be less daunting to get book reviews up on a regular basis. We need something to write about until television comes back. And our 8 readers might appreciate suggestions on what else they could be reading when I get passive-aggressive and refuse to post.

Richard Kelly's Bad Day In L.A.

...what the fuck?

I want to see Southland Tales: The Movie. I really do. But I'm worried after reading its first companion book, Southland Tales: Two Roads Diverge.

Things happen in it. None of these things make much sense, because the story cuts off before we arrive anywhere. And you won't care because there is no emotional involvement available to the reader, and certainly none between the characters. There is dialogue, of the strange twisty sort that would seem over the top even in a film by The M. Night Shyamalan What Bombs At Midnight. The art is...acceptable, but I kept expecting a Templesmith-styled vampire to burst into the room. No such luck there.

Damn. Even trying to give this book a serious review, all I can do is give a laundry list of unconnected facts. In summation: the book means nothing. It's not even a proper beginning to the story, because we already damn well know that the movie will be the heart and soul of the Southland Tales Experience. That makes the book I just read the first third of an optional prequel to something that doesn't exist yet, at the low price of thirteen dollars.

I still plan to see the film. For one thing, Sony has forced the director to cut the movie down a bit, in return for money to buy better special effects. You only need to compare the original Donnie Darko to the Director's Cut to see that a little ham-fisted editorial interference actually made for an improved product.

Things Read/Things Viewed

I've come across a few things that seem worth talking about, but not enough to devote an entire post to. Which is another way of saying that good or bad, none of these things inspired much passion.

Also, please note that right below, Tomfoolery has joined Narraptor and myself as a contributor. In his inaugural post, he talks about one of those subjects that is close to our heart: Buddhism.

Read:
Nightwatch
This is actually a trilogy of short stories, so by the time you've reached page 100-ish, you'll have gone through all of the events of Nightwatch the movie. The plot is similar, except that it removes most of the best and worst parts of the film, leaving a tale that's better grounded, but without any noteworthy scenes. Oh, and each tale ends with the same twist: It Was All My Cunning Plan. Magical Russia is nice, but I can see why most people prefer to do their adventuring in Magical London. (This statement discounts Londoners themselves, who often react to Magical London with abject fear and a strong desire to return to their terrible job and lame friends.)

Un Lun Dun
This one actually would have been it's own post, except that Narraptor pretty much said it all for me.

A nice touch is the glossary in the back, which includes none of the Magical London terms used in the book. However, it does explain all the British slang for American kids.


Viewed:
Ghost Rider:
Do you want to see an old issue of Ghost Rider come to life? Because that will pretty much determine what you think of this film. For one thing, the dialogue ought to have been put in word balloons, especially whenever the movie's central themes are used. Also, most of the fight scenes follow a traditional old-school comic formula.

1- Villain enters and gets a few good hits on Ghost Rider. Oh, no, what can he do?
2- Ghost Rider figures out the villain's weakness and takes him down in a matter of moments.

(That weakness is unusually some variation of, "Wait! What if I use my demon-killing chain to kill this demon?" Don't expect any epic fights.)

If you care, they changed the Ghost Rider's origin story. I guess they felt that the audience wouldn't be invested in a guy who willingly summons Mephistopheles, The Secular Satan, and signs his contract of doom. "Yes. He fooled you... that's what he does. I thought you spent months studying about this guy."

Sublime
A video release recent enough to include a trailer for The Reaping, Sublime is advertised as a pure horror movie. This is as much of a lie as the image on the cover. It's about a guy who goes into a hospital for a routine surgery and everything goes weird on him. If you don't already know where this movie is going, you haven't seen enough of these films. But there's another element involved... there are long, lingering shots. Questionable shots that linger on their own artiness. Superficial discussions about what it means to be a superficial person. A sea of electronic music letting you know how you should feel. And then, it all comes together. Some poor fool combined a horror movie with Grand Canyon.

Read: Un Lun Dun

China Mieville, author of Perdido Street Station and creator of the new weird world of Bas Lag, enters the Young Adult market with Un Lun Dun. The titular city is the fantasy flipside of London, a conceit that seems to be popular with British authors these days, and with readers around the world. The consensus seems to be that London isn't really all that interesting without magical modes of transportation involved, ideally in the form of trains or buses.

To its credit, Un Lun Dun is also inhabited by the Unbrellissimo, a character who travels by floating unbrellas, swinging from one handle to the next to get to where he wants to go. And though the book starts off in typical form, with the chosen one, Zanna, and her sidekick Deeba whisked away to Un Lun Dun, where they meet various cleverly named creatures and run away from the forces of evil, events take an unusual turn 100 pages in. The bad guys trick the Propheseers into believing everything is taken care of and arrange to send Zanna and Deeba back to London, leaving Zanna with no memory of the experience.

Deeba's curiosity and Google-fu allow her to discover the deciet. She takes it upon herself to return to Un Lun Dun, eventually becoming the Unchosen One, much to the resentment of the Book that contained all the prophesies. ("Maybe in a few years we'll open me up and read what was supposed to happen and we can all have a good laugh.")

Stripped of his usual vocabulary, the vitality of Un Lun Dun doesn't compare to Mieville's Bas Lag, but it's also less intimidating. Though the setting seems haphazardly defined, given the 400-page length of the novel, the story has more depth than the stereotypical Young Adult fantasy. Like many books marketed as YA, it's more of a children's novel than one specifically aimed at teens. The protagonist's age and race are undefined, she's rarely wrong, and the possibility of failure is never present. It even has illustrations that, at least in the US version, give away what's going to happen before the reader gets to that paragraph.

In a true YA series, say, Harry Potter, the main characters continually learn the harsh lesson that they don't know everything. They screw things up. In Un Lun Dun, the city existed for centuries before Deeba came along, but no one ever considered: "The Unbrellissimo controls all broken unbrellas. What happens if you repair one?"

But Un Lun Dun is an excellent children's book. The cliffhanger ending is a disappointment, but it offers hope that this might be the second coming of Oz. With any luck, a year from now you'll be reading Hong Gone.

Read: Throne of Jade

Nothing says mass-market fantasy like a title that means absolutely nothing without "Book Blank of the Blank Chronicles" to give it context. In this case, Throne of Jade is book two in Naomi Novik's Temeraire series. It's kind of fun after 270 pages. That leaves 194 pages of fun.

As I mentioned some months ago, the Temeraire series is Patrick O'Brien with dragons. What I meant was that it is Patrick O'Brian with dragons. But since one of my New Year's resolutions for the blog is to be less obtuse, I'll elaborate. It's Master and Commander with dragons.

Set during the Napoleonic Wars, Novik imagines a world that has always been populated by dragons, with different breeds native to different regions. Dragons choose companions shortly after hatching (they turn feral if they are born alone). In Temeraire's case, he is seized from a French transport by the British navy as an egg and hatches in their company. He chooses the ship's Captain, Laurence, who must then resign his post to join the British aerial corps.

What separates this series from conventional 15-year-old wish fulfillment fantasy is that the dragons are large enough to be crewed. They are strung with webbed harnesses and carry officers, gunners, and bombers. And though there are chapters devoted to battles and tactics, those are not what Novik excels at. The most interesting conflicts are mannered ones of politics and rank, as they should be in this sort of historical fiction.

Throne of Jade begins shortly after Her Majesty's Dragon left off, with the revelation that Temeraire was originally sent by the Chinese government as a gift for Napoleon. After much to-do and an unnecessary battle sequence, Temeraire and Laurence are ordered to take a ship to China. The English wish to use the dragon as a bartering chip in their war against the French.

While the events that occur during the voyage do eventually have a point--Temeraire, already chafing under the rules of the aerial corps, learns about slavery, which he will later contrast with how respectfully dragons are treated in China--everything that happens before the ship reaches Macao bogs the book down. The sea monster doesn't even appear until page 243. Things pick up afterwards, but the climax turns out to be what the savvy members of the corps suspected all along. The Emperor's brother wanted to use Temeraire in a bid to challenge the throne.

As with the first novel, there are some neat instances of plot creep (my still temporary terminology for when the main character of series becomes more unique and powerful in each installment). For one, Laurence becomes an adopted son of of the Chinese Emperor in order to keep Temeraire. Also, while the Emperor's brother dies as a result of his final attempt on Laurence's life, his dragon does not.

That leaves several plot hooks that might make the next book more interesting. Napoleon still hasn't come after Laurence; Temeraire wants to reform the way England treats dragons, at the very least by giving them a salary for their service; Laurence's father and country will no doubt react badly to his adoption, even if it is in name only; and there's a pissed off albino dragon out there who might want revenge. And judging from the preview chapter, Temeraire and crew are going to take their return trip by land.

In the end, I have the same opinion of this book that I did with the last one. Start with the next book. It could be pretty cool.

Viewed/Read: Children of Men

I finally took advantage of living in Los Angeles and went to see a film in limited release. Of course, all that really means is that for the first time in a year, a movie came out that was intriguing enough to be worth the extra effort and parking fees. Raleigh's highways may be confusing, and Tyson's Corner more crowded than a Wal-Mart on the wrong side of Pennsylvania, but both pale in comparison to the terrors of The Grove.

It was worth it. Children of Men is fantastic.

Assuming you've browsed other reviews, you're familiar with the "most realized dystopian future since Blade Runner" meme. I can't argue with that, though I would add a caveat. Blade Runner is a projection of what the world might have looked like if everything continued to go wrong after 1982. Children of Men depicts a horrible future that is already happening.

The novel The Children of Men uses the premise of an infertility pandemic to explore issues of civil liberties versus security; the consequences of selfishness at personal, familial, and societal levels; and what drives people to power and how power affects those who acquire it. Those aspects are all featured in the film's plot, but it struck me as having a more singular theme: what little value we have for human life. With one or two exceptions, every time a character died in Children of Men, I was shocked. When characters who had only been on screen for 15 seconds were killed, I was horrified. In contrast to the other "serious," "political," and "adult" movies previewed before the film, when something exploded in Children of Men, it wasn't flashy and pretty. It was senseless.

I'm not a war movie person. Even when the message of a war movie is that war is bad, I know a lot of people will watch it and think, "Dude, that part where the guy's flamethrower tank blew up? That was awesome!" What amazed me about Children of Men is that its portrayal of violence was so unglamourous. Even justified deaths lacked satisfaction. You'd have to be a sociopath to enjoy the waste of life in this movie, and this is coming from a guy who thinks a world without children would have its advantages.

The idea that if people became incapable of reproduction we'd still be killing each other is haunting. To imagine that if someone was suddenly able to procreate in such a setting we still wouldn't put down our guns is even worse. But the greatest impact this movie had on me was that this random, pointless waste of life is happening every day, and we just don't see it.

Children of Men isn't science fiction. It's what we ignore about today.

A Vow Fufilled

Due to the following, I am morally obligated to approve of the Scott Pilgrim series, by Brian Lee O'Malley. (Warning: link provides no evidence that I'm right.)

1- The main story begins with an anime-styled love triangle between Scott Pilgrim, his current girlfriend, and the girl of his dreams.

2- His roommate locks Pilgrim out of his apartment. The roommate demands that Pilgrim make his decision, and break up with "His fake girlfriend" before he'll be allowed back inside.

3- Pilgrim does so, and never looks back.

It's about damn time that happened. Also, a "How appropriate, you fight like a cow," will win me over exactly three out of four times.

A similar vow once caused me to read the entire The Night's Dawn books by Peter F. Hamilton. If I had known the name of the trilogy beforehand, I probably would have never picked up the first one. But once I found out that the books were about mankind's war against humans who had turned into beings of pure energy, I had to read it.

Oh, I hates beings of pure energy. Especially when people turn into them at the end of a book. This explains my anger when at the Deus Ex Machintastic ending, a main character turns into a being of even purer energy, and makes everything right with a wave of his kilowatt hand.

Really, I should've seen that coming.

Exposition

There are worse reasons than Christmas for a lack of compelling content. The fake holiday I hated the most was E3. For those who were blissfully unaware, the Electronics Entertainment Expo was a week long festival attended by anyone who had ever thought about making a video game. Each entrant would bring videotapes of what they thought their videogame would be like, assuming they had unlimited cash and technology from the future. If the entrant had any money left over from outsourcing their video footage, they would hire a scantily clad woman to stand beside a cardboard fort. During E3, every website that had ever been connected to videogames would alter its format to only talk about E3's hypothetical game experience. This lack of real content would continue for another week afterwards, or two if the reader was really lucky.

I put this in the past tense because E3 has finally died, for unspecified reasons. Expect two to three years of glorious silence before a new media-glomming exposition takes its place.

Christmas might have more of an impact on the web, but at least the reader is expecting this... and if they're lucky, their content providers have too. In case you're desperate, I've taken the liberty of adding Marketplace to the Tolerable Podcasts section. It puts Narraptor to sleep, but I love it for reasons obscured by my mysterious past.

Otherwise, there are always books if you're desperate for content. I suggest grabbing a random mystery with a decent title, and we can all enjoy being underwhelmed together. My latest choice was The Water Clock. As with most mysteries that lack a gimmicked main character, the inside of the book jacket desperately spoils plot points in a desperate attempt to hook you. This one was notable for revealing that the main character's investigations will solve a mystery from his own tragic past. The actual contents of the book give no clue that this is the case, until the last four pages. Also, the title itself is a spoiler, and yet has virtually nothing to do with the book.

Now that I think about it, that's a rather impressive trick.

Out Of The Cylon Planet

On the second attempt, I finished reading Out Of The Silent Planet, the unnecessary first book of C. S. Lewis' unnamed science fiction trilogy. The hero is kidnapped, and taken to a mysterious planet by an evil scientist and his preppie. He escapes, and discovers that every other sentient life form in the solar system lives a good and righteous life except for man. Then, he gets sent back to Earth and complains that the story you have just read left out all the best parts.

This might very well be the weakest book in the trilogy, for all I know. However, the weakest book in the Chronicles of Narnia features a giantess using a steel girder as a club. In contrast, Out Of The Silent Planet climaxes with an astronaut complaining how hot it gets in space.

If I'm going to talk about the science fiction religious allegories of yesteryear, I should also talk about Battlestar Galactica. I have a working theory that any time a mystery is presented to the viewers, it's the show's way of saying that they don't know either. What is the connection between the barely explained human religion and the utterly unexplained Cylon religion? You can be assured that your guess is exactly as good as the writing staff's. After two and a half seasons, all I know about Cylon Jesus is that he doesn't like people very much.

And that's why you should never admit the full extent to which you're making up the story as you go along. In a book, when the scene switches to the main villain's perspective and he thinks about his master plan in the vaguest of terms, I'm only annoyed at the bad writing. It never occurs to me that perhaps Jeffery Deaver doesn't know what's going on, either.

Running Late, Again

I’ve been reading Out of the Silent Planet at work. So far, I can barely remember a damn thing about it, and most of those are the notes the book’s previous owner left for me.

“Ransome examines space."
“This seems like a flimsy excuse for Ransome to stay.”
“Background Information.”

Still not as amusing as the copy of The Runes Of The Earth I read, which begins with book-report style margin notes, and eventually degrades into swearing whenever Linden Avery does something stupid. Which, being a Thomas Covenant novel, is fairly often. (If the protagonist endangers the arc of time, take a drink.)

Meanwhile, I’ve started playing video games again, after a one year hiatus. Which means that I’m now buying video games again. While the sales clerks are more desperate than ever to super-size my purchase, they don’t seem to understand that I need to be bribed. Purchasing the right to purchase an item when it comes into the store doesn’t do much for me. However, I was the bewildered owner of a “Viewtiful Joe” bobblehead for a time.

As I recall, the bobblehead was in my possession for longer than the game was.

Last week, Bryan Curtis of Slate asked if you should read The Ruins. He had an interesting perspective on what the book was about, but he never specifically answered the question.

The answer is no.

I will elaborate, but in the absence of Mr. Bile, this seems like the perfect opportunity for me to set the rules regarding spoilers. That’s what he gets for having technical difficulties.

I am less interested in writing reviews than (admittedly geeky) critical analysis. There is little satisfaction to be found in having a one-sided discussion on the season finale of Battlestar Galactica. (“The thing that I won’t tell you about until you’ve seen what happens could hardly be viewed as controversial given the way the writers have played with something you might not know about yet all season.”) I just can’t wait for the survivalists without cable and DVD players who end up here while searching for Y2K message boards to catch up on BSG.

So when discussing serialized entertainment, you have fair warning that I will generally be writing under the assumption that you’ve already seen or read what I'm writing about, don’t care to, or will skip that day’s update until you have. My best wishes go to browsers who end up here after this post is archived. Lucy Lawless is a Cylon.

On a less passive-aggressive note, while you will not see the words “spoiler warning” in any posts, the occasional “spoiler free” will end up in the heading of a straight-forward recommendation. I mean, I certainly don't want to ruin a Filipino horror movie for anyone. And in accordance with my agreement with Mr. Bile, I will not discuss Lost until the new season starts in October. He still has two weeks to catch up. After that, it’s on. For all y'all.

As for The Ruins, it’s just another overly-hyped, supposedly literary summer novel, like The Historian or Jonathan Strange or that book where Jesus wore flannel, but readable. A bunch of college kids go into a jungle they’re warned not to go into, they step into some vines, and then Mayans surround them with bows and will kill them if they leave. If they don’t leave, they’ll be eaten by evil vines.

How evil is this plant? It could have killed them all instantly, but it lets them suffer for 200 pages before the last one dies. Stephen King wrote that some people might mistake it for a bloated short story. I’d argue that people who should know better might mistake it for a novel. The book has some creepy death pieces, but it’s still about a bunch of dumb kids and a plant that chuckles.

The answers to the Battlestar Galactica quiz are “over the counter birth control” and “137 minutes earlier.”