Tag Archives: noir

Veronica Mars

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MV5BMTQ4MDc0Mjg4OV5BMl5BanBnXkFtZTgwODk3NjYyMTE@._V1__SX1217_SY911_I don’t even know how to review this movie properly. Which is to say, outside the context of a three season television series that you may not have seen before. Inside that context, it would be a breeze, believe me. But outside, there are two giant stumbling blocks in my way. One is how immediately immersed I was in the world, just as though I’d never left, without any of the pesky (albeit brilliantly accomplished) ten minutes of introduction to all the characters you wouldn’t know about if you’d missed the show in the first place. This lack, in addition to highlighting my lack of objectivity, serves to introduce the second stumbling block, which is that I spent a minor chunk of change on the kickstarter for the movie. Having been funded by fans, there’s a really good chance that it’s not my failure to separate out my sense of homecoming and look at it externally that’s the problem. They know where their money came from and who their primary audience would be, and I think maybe it’s not concerned with newcomers in the first place. So, I’ll give up on that angle and move on.

Do you even know they made a Veronica Mars movie? Fan or not, if you missed the kickstarter, it may have slid under the radar. Anyway, it released last weekend, and you can theater it or stream it. (I think I get a bluray eventually?  But it was streaming in this case, as I live in ye olde future.) If you are not a fan of the show through inaction, you’ll get a lot more out of the show than the movie, at least until later. If you are not a fan of the show through choice, you sadden me. If you are a fan of the show… here’s that really easy review I promised you a while ago.

You know how I said it immediately felt like a homecoming? That was not a clever riff on the fact that one of Veronica’s reasons for returning to Neptune is her ten-year high school reunion. (The main reason being, of course, a murder.) Because, really, it felt like no time had passed at all since the last episode I watched. And okay, not remembering much of what happens in either of the latter two seasons meant I was playing a little bit of catch-up, but not much, and not in a way that took me out of the joy of coming home. By the end of the movie, I was ready for a new season or a new movie either one, and pleased as I could be that the door is wide open for that. So: you should really go see this movie, or stay home and see this movie, or whatever it takes to convince them to do it again soon. If not for yourself, do it for me. Aw, who am I kidding, seriously, do it for me, and I’ll hope in turn that you enjoyed yourself while doing it.

Because I am a good person.

Joyland

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Is this a good idea that I should be pursuing more consistently? Or a terrible idea that should never again see the light of day?It is known that I was already going to read any Stephen King book, and approximately on publication day. But a Stephen King book that is also about carnies? It’s like a match made in my heaven.

Joyland is a mish-mash of a coming-of-age story, a ghost story, and a hard-boiled mystery (hence the Hard Case Crime imprint), and of course I think that works; I’ve always thought King was the best fiction writer around, even though he mostly gets pigeonholed in horror[1] and people fail to think of him in a more general sense. Anyway, to rate it on each of its parts: the mystery was perhaps the weakest aspect, though I’m not a big mystery fan so I’m not sure that’s fair of me to judge. Perhaps the mystery is solvable, but it was not by me, and anyway, perhaps that should not really be a criterion? The ghost story was just the amount of spooky that you can get out of real life, or at least just the amount I’ve ever managed to eke out of real life, which is to say, not nearly enough. But strangely, this is not a criticism. Or at least, I criticize real life for this more than I criticize the book.

As for the coming of age, that is both mine and King’s bread and butter, and while I can’t say this is the best he’s ever handled it, it’s probably the best he’s handled it with college-aged characters. (Which, okay, the only comparison is Hearts in Atlantis, which was really good as well, but I don’t recall it being this poignant, introspective, or personal in scope.)

Also, if you care about such things, you could easily read it over the course of a single rainy afternoon.

[1] Which, to be clear, this book was not.

Turn Coat

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Usually when I go camping, I bring a trashy post-apocalypse book because they are quick easy reads and I won’t be horrified if my copy falls in the mud or something, I guess? This time, I brought the Kindle, though. Which makes no sense given my prior criterion, but I think I figured what with the case it’s in and the non-delicacy of the electronics in general, probably it would be fine. Plus also, in case I had read a lot, there would be more books present without having had to carry them in my already significant pile of stuff.

That said, I did not read a lot, but since what I read was Turn Coat, the next book in the recently horrible-in-paperback Dresden Files, it’s just as well I had it in a format that did not cause me to hurl it in the mud in disgust. (Technically, I have not cracked open my physical copy of the book, and maybe it was only Small Favor that was done poorly, and all subsequent entries in the series, despite their similarity in construction, look like normally proportioned books inside. But I doubt I’ll find out.)

So, right, Harry Dresden. This weekend, he must face a traitor at the heart of the Wizard’s Council, his oldest enemy, the White Court of Vampires (as, okay, happens every book or three), and a Native American nightmare. Also, he has to acquire a little more power, juggle his sporadically successful love life, and continue to have two awesome pets and an awesome apprentice who could at any moment spell his own death. So, you know, it’s pretty much a book in the Dresden Files, and after a dozen or so, I suppose you know if you like them. I know if I do, and the answer is yes.

I wonder if I will make a more solid attempt to to review these when I am reading the current one? I’d like to think so, but I would have the same problem with bloat in the ongoing storyline (not a pejorative; it’s just that after multiple years and multiple books, if an author is trying for continuity, there will be a kind of a lot of it) and spoiler avoidance whether everyone else had read the book yet or not. Possibly, these problems would even be amplified.

Small Favor

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If one almost-enemy asks you to go rescue another almost-enemy, I’m not sure how the personal math on that works out. Do they add up to more than one enemy total and you shouldn’t do it? Is it a multiplier effect, and in fact you will have less enemy than ever? Of course, if you’re Harry Dresden, the kind of people who are asking for a Small Favor of this type are unlikely to be the kind of people you get to ignore, so it’s not like you have much of a choice. But I still wonder.

This particular book had the fairies and the Knights with their special magical swords and the mob again, and the last one had vampires, so I’m assuming the next one will be mostly wizard-related. (I’m not saying there is a definite pattern, I’m just saying there might be.) Beyond that, I don’t want to say a lot about the plot, partly because it’s still a mystery series and anything I tell you is something the author doesn’t get to present just so, and partly because I am spoiler-shy about these particular books right now. That said, the massive spoiler I have for two books from now did allow me to take note of a lot of pretty heavy foreshadowing, which mostly leaves me impressed that Butcher knows what’s coming so far in advance. I mean, it’s one thing to know he has a long term plan for the story and another to realize he knows years in advance what steps he will take along the way. So: cool.

Another thing I like about this book (and I think the series in general) is how Harry is basically playing high stakes poker without ever getting a chance to look at his hole cards. From one moment to the next, as each new horrible and/or death-defying event occurs, his move is to raise, faster than the bad guys can call. Sometimes it feels like, to slightly muddle my metaphor, the only reason the house of cards doesn’t fall is that he’s building it too fast for gravity to catch on that something isn’t quite right. The cool thing about this method of plotting is that it doesn’t give you a lot of time to think, which is fair since Harry never seems to have much either, and also any time the cards do start to fall, you feel it. A lot. And yet, it seems mostly to work. At the end of any given tale, Harry has won a little or held his ground, only rarely slipping back any. And he certainly never loses really big. Well, y’know, yet anyway.

Meanwhile, though, the book? I don’t know what Roc is thinking with their new paperback design, but I want to go on record as finding them to be godawful. It’s the wrong size for shelves and the wrong shape for the words on the page. My eyes hurt before I finished the first chapter. Too tall, too thin, the angles were wrong in the same way that an eldritch Lovecraftian horror is. The upshot of this is that I am a bigger fan than ever of the problem-solving capabilities of my Kindle and also I’m still not sure how I feel about reading paper books now that the new world has opened up to me. But the next book I read, definitely. Definitely. So I’ll let you know.

Also, apropos of nothing else I’ve written here besides the part with the Dresden Files tag, but I’m an ever bigger fan of Karrin Murphy. Best normal person in a supernatural series? Possibly!

White Night

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I’ve reached a crisis point in my reading of the Dresden Files. See, there’s always (by which I mean starting in the third book or so) been a long-term story being told, and I know this. Plus, there’s always been continuity, and I know this too. But until White Night, I’ve been able to pick up each new book and just read it, and remember enough about the previous continuity and the long-term story to do just fine. Now, though…

Don’t get me wrong, I remembered enough to keep up with Harry Dresden’s rampage through the spirit world in response to the recent murders of magic-sensitive women, that took him through several trips down memory lane and culminated in, as usual, mostly everybody but Harry winning big[1], but there was at least one world-shaking revelation that lacked the punch I think it should have had. And I know it’s only going to get worse. So now what?

If there were a lot of books left, obviously I’d just read them. But the truth of the matter is, I’m only a few behind now, and there are (I believe) quite a few to come, as yet unwritten. So if I were to rush it now, I’d just have the same problem in October. So I guess I’ll just stick with what I’m doing? (I do kind of wish I could do online research without fear of massive spoilers, though.)

Oh, anyway, I did want to say that I continue to be intrigued by Harry’s emotional ups and downs. Struggle with sexism? Sort of. Really, he embraces it, but I have the impression that the more he talks about it, the more he is trying to figure out a better way. Anger issues? Big time. Too much paranoia (or justified fear) to work well with others? Oh, my, yes. But he’s still unquestionably a good guy, and that’s what I like best about him. The nuances. He’s an interesting, interesting person.

[1] At least he continues to win small.

Proven Guilty

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The only problem I have with the Dresden Files series, at least for right now, is the pretense that there is a broader world beyond the bounds of Chicago in which things are happening over which our wizarding hero Harry (no, not that one; the cool one, Harry Dresden) has no influence and can only react to when odds and ends of it affect his city and the lives of his nearest and dearest. I mean, that’s factually true, which I suppose makes some kind of case for it not being a pretense at all and me just filling a paragraph with lies for the sake of volume. But the thing is, we all know that sooner or later these world-shaking events will drop onto Harry’s doorstep and he’ll be forced to deal with them[1], and while that will make for an exciting plotline, it’s still somewhat disappointing that the depth of world will be proven a bit of a pretense after all and it really was all about Harry Dresden, start to finish.

On the bright side, Proven Guilty is yet another entry in a long and seemingly unstoppable series of books designed solely to justify making it all about Harry by presenting a cool, funny hero who is always clawing his way out of the hole with equal parts style, honor, and romantic frustration.[2] In this case, much to my delight, he’s doing all of that at a horror convention that is being stalked by exactly the kinds of horror icons the fans are there to see, more or less. Stir in a new practitioner of the dark arts on the loose and Harry’s new duties to take care of that kind of problem, plus all the usual suspects (good and bad), and you have, well, a book of the Dresden Files, which alone is enough to pretty much guarantee a good time.

[1] In fact, this has already happened at least once.
[2] The many, many series of urban fantasy with female protagonists seem to have as a common thread how irresistible said protagonists are and how much sex they either could or do have, depending on whether they’re co-filed into the paranormal romance section of the bookstore. The Dresden Files, in addition to being just about the only one with a male protagonist in the first place, also seems to be about the only one without any supernatural powers of sexiness for the protagonist. This leads me to no particular conclusion, but what with my psychology hobbyism, I can’t help forming questions.

The Dresden Files: Welcome to the Jungle

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If you had never heard of Harry Dresden before and didn’t want to sink much time or effort into deciding how you felt about the idea of reading his series, Welcome to the Jungle would be an excellent jumping-off point. For one thing, it is a prequel to the first book, so it’s not like spoilers are really possible. For another, the short format-limits of a reasonably sized graphic novel make it a pretty small time investment, and the high ratio of art to dialogue (even counting Harry’s omnipresent first-person monologue) makes that investment even smaller. In point of fact, I read the majority of the story around listening to a friend’s disco cover band playing at an area strip club. There were distractions galore, is all I’m saying, and yet it went by with surprising quickness.

For the as-yet uninitiated, Harry Dresden is Chicago’s only freelance wizard. In practice, this means that he sometimes helps people with minor tasks that could usually be done non-magically just as well, but mostly he assists the Chicago PD when weird things happen that nobody can explain. Like a zoo groundskeeper being violently killed, purportedly by a gorilla who obviously couldn’t have done it except that people like that answer better than some kind of magic bugaboo as culprit. Mix in a hellhound, a damsel in distress, and a power-hungry mastermind and you’ve got the makings of a quick and dirty mystery that does a fine job of introducing our Harry to my hypothetical too-busy-to-read populace. Enjoy!

Dead Beat

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In retrospect, this has been happening for a little while; I just didn’t notice until it smacked me in the face. The Dresden Files series has been changing, is what I mean. The prose has improved on a pretty steady incline, sure, but I’m more talking about plot and character. The series is darker, more dramatic, perhaps a bit more romantic, but above all ever broader in scope. In the first book, Harry Dresden’s case files were affecting, at most, small elements of Chicagoan life, whereas by the advent of Dead Beat, he is involved not only with the current and future status of the White Council[1] and the hierarchy of all three kinds of vampires[2], but with the actual fate of the world. (And I think this book wasn’t the first time.)

This time out, the names of the game are blackmail and necromancy. In short… you know, the problem here is that I hardly want to talk about anything that happened in the book, because each moment held so much weight. But in short, a quest to retrieve misleading photographic evidence otherwise destined to destroy his friend Murphy’s career leads Harry into a race with three powerful necromancers to find their bible, The Word of Kemmler.The journey takes him from magical bookshops to burned out high-rise tenements, from the limousine of Chicago’s most powerful mobster to the shadow of its most famous skeleton, from the secret corners of his own mind to the heights of the White Council, with stops along the way for the toughest magical duels yet, for what may turn out to be the biggest mistake of Harry’s life, and, just possibly, for redemption.

[1] Which is to say, the world’s non-evil magical community.
[2] It’s not entirely worth going into for the purposes of this particular summary; the important part is he doesn’t spend the entire book fucking them.

Blood Rites

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At some point between the last Dresden Files book and this one, I got accidentally spoiled for a piece of character development between Harry Dresden and Thomas Raith, a vampire of the White Court he’s been palling around with lately. (That is, of course, a drastic simplification and barely accurate at that, but so be it.) As such, it’s going to make it tricky for me to dig into the rich thematic ground here that I would and often have plumbed with great abandon for similar situations in other works. And while I could probably still kill this paragraph and start over in a theme-based review without letting you get spoiled by the character elements, these things are mostly more about me than the actual stuff I consumed, as you will have no doubt noticed by now.

After reading five previous novels, what I find that has been the most glaringly absent from the series, the single thing I could point at and say, “Where’s that?”, is porn. Thankfully, Blood Rites has solved this problem to my satisfaction. It’s like, you can only read so many books in a series and remain interested before someone puts some porn in there, am I right? And at long last, there Harry is, surrounded by women in lingerie, watching the cameramen and the boom operators as the director tries to get the shot just right. Because, porn![1] So, um, anyway, Harry is hired to clean up a little bit of entropy that has gotten all over the porn studio.[2] And as the formula dictates, he finds all too rapidly that he’s in something way over his head. Because, there’s the porn and the thing with Thomas, sure, but there’s also more fallout from the war between the wizards and the less pleasant vampires of the Red and Black courts, and at last a little bit of overt sexual tension between Harry and his long time CPD contact, Karrin Murphy.[3]

Plus, bonus awesome evil-detecting puppy!

[1] Oh, hey. You didn’t think I meant, y’know, a gradual devolution of the ongoing plotlines until all that’s left is a series of orgies “held together” by a pregnancy scare? Jesus, that would be a terrible book.
[2] Ew.
[3] I grew up on Moonlighting. Sue me.

Fables: Legends in Exile

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Another new graphic novel series? I can assure you, it’s all true. For, y’know, extremely relative values of new that seem in fact to reflect things published years ago. My initiation into the format only occurred within the last couple of years[1], though, so running behind kind of goes with the territory. The Fables series got on my radar via Amazon recommendations, much as with Dorothy and for that matter Ex Machina. Of my recent new series, this is certainly the one I’m the most satisfied with.

The idea of storybook characters all jumbled together in New York, while obviously cool enough to take the risk on (since I did buy it), seemed potentially fraught with peril. Apparently, they all come from different worlds (which I will choose to call dimensions) that were one after another attacked by an Adversary (who is thusfar shrouded in mystery), and by the time they realized that there was true danger afoot, they had no remaining options but to flee from their worlds to this one, which the Adversary has no apparent interest in. Being the stuff of fables, they’re immortal, so while they all came from different storybook dimensions to start with, they’ve had several hundred years on earth as Legends in Exile to properly mingle and form interrelationships. The upshot of all that background being that the interactions were rich and often funny, with distaste, attraction, working relationships, and even unlikely friendships all laid bare. The book was equal parts Storybook Melrose Place and Fable Noir.

Which raises my other extreme like for the book. The mystery was, if moderately simple, plotted quite well and made good use of the setting. Bigby Wolf[2], the sheriff of Fabletown, is confronted with murder most foul when Jack[3] reports that his girlfriend Rose Red is missing and her apartment covered in blood. Once Deputy Mayor Snow White[4], the victim’s sister, insists on including herself in the investigation and the rich and powerful Bluebeard is fingered as a potential suspect, all the trappings of a Humphrey Bogart noir are in place, and the only thing left to do is lean back and enjoy the ride. There are a lot of possibilities for the series, since the available characters cast such a wide net. I figure, if I get more volumes in the noir vein, well and good, and if not, the creators have already proven they have the chops to do good things with the premise, at least.

[1] Well, except for Sandman, which I’m prepared to call a special case.
[2] That name still gives me the giggles, even now.
[3] of “and the Beanstalk” fame
[4] whose surpassing loveliness is storied… er, whose fabled… Dammit. The point is, she’s a looker with legs that just wouldn’t quit and a smoldering fire in her eyes that told me she’d seen enough of the world to know that it wasn’t as pretty as the stories said it would be.