Naamah’s Blessing

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Hey, I was right. Moirin did go to America! (Also, wow, I was annoyed at that book.) Luckily, I was not annoyed at this book, which is much more of a sequel to the first book of the trilogy than it is to the second. The downside is, after nine books in this series and countless more in its genre, I’m out of things to say. Moirin headed off to America and hung out with Incans and Mayans and Aztecs (probably only two of these, but which two?) and also resolved her destiny with a certain demon-summoner of her former acquaintance, and there were battles and politics and magic, and all of it was mostly predictable, but who cares, they were travelling to new places and meeting new people, and if you’re into that, you already know it after nine books. Nothing stands out as new and amazing, but since the last thing that stood out was an aggravation, I don’t mind so much.

So, would I recommend Naamah’s Blessing? No, for a number of reasons. But I would recommend Kushiel’s Dart unreservedly, and if you eventually got here, I’d nod to you in shared recognition, and we’d say “Cool.”

Haywire

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When the credits rolled on Haywire, I immediately felt kind of dumb for not having already realized it was a Steven Soderbergh movie. It just filled that obvious space in my head, the moment I knew. Not that he writes a lot of action, but when he does, it is exactly this kind of kinetic, stylized to the point of nearly being its own character, loudly impactful action. And certainly the characters are all Soderberghian ciphers, begrudgingly giving up any hint of motivation that you do not fill in for yourself. And the plot is I think Soderberghian too, in that it is easily summarized in one line that doesn’t exactly belie hidden depths, even though they exist. Upon reflection, I’m not sure why I like his movies. On paper, it seems like I would hate every one of them, but somehow they’re always engrossing. I should try to figure that out sometime.

Oh, as for the one line plot, there’s this awesome spy chick who gets burned (a la Burn Notice the TV show, obviously, but with a completely different mentality) and then goes on a hunt through every person involved in her last mission, including her superiors, to find out why and take her revenge. …okay, technically that was more than one line, but I bet if I were the kind of person who was actively interested in terse editing, I could have trimmed it down.

Fables: War and Pieces

717LwHDwIOLA little bit hard to believe: I am still more than three years behind on the Fables series. There are just a lot of these, you know? It’s not that I mind being behind, especially when I compare with having to wait six months for every new Walking Dead. It just caught me by surprise that it’s as far as all that. I suppose it caught me even more by surprise when twinned with the realization that this book marks the climax the stories have been building towards since basically the very beginning.

Yep, true story. The Fables of Fabletown, around a brief spy-heavy interlude that I kind of loved, have launched their long-planned war against the Empire that drove them out of their homelands lo these many centuries past. And as you can probably see from the title, War and Pieces, that is the main focus of the entire book. Which is as it should be. So I guess what really surprises me about being three years behind is that this is the kind of war where it’s hard to envision what comes next. Either Fabletown loses, its back broken and our mundy world now ripe for plunder while the survivors fight a desperate holding action and things get really grim, or else Fabletown wins, and, well… this is what they’ve been working for all along. What comes next? Apparently, three more years’ worth of stories, minimum, either way. When I figure out more, I suppose I’ll let you know.

Assassin’s Creed: Brotherhood

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acrom_360_mI wonder if there’s a new season of The Borgias starting on Sunday or so, or whether it instead got cancelled. I wonder this primarily because of my current familiarity with the characters and some of their life events, courtesy of my completing Assassin’s Creed: Brotherhood over the weekend. Because, see, after the happy ending in Assassin’s Creed II, the first thing that happens is the Borgias destroy Ezio’s home in revenge for that golden apple fiasco under the Vatican. It’s a whole big thing that won’t make enough sense to be spoiler if you haven’t played the first game and, if you have, basically it’s an excuse to get him injured and friendless so that he starts off the game not a god walking among men. Whether this is a good decision is left to the individual player, but I suppose it is at least an understandable one since someone could plausibly pick up this game first.

After that, it’s pretty much the same game, which is an entirely good thing. You climb and run and sneak and murder your way through early 16th C. Rome in an attempt to stop the Borgia and their Templar allies from controlling the fate of the world, with all kinds of side missions and secret explorations and memories of Ezio’s buried past along the way, not to mention the near-future modern day shenanigans in which it’s apparent that someone is helping Desmond Miles from afar, because he may not be able to trust all of the people helping him explore Ezio’s memories. To put it simply, this the best serious sandbox series ever, and the prettiest sandbox series ever regardless of plot seriousness. (The best non-serious sandbox series is Saint’s Row.) If you like to look at the beauties of the past, and you like to climb around on everything, you will love this game. If you like conspiracy theories and dark futures, you will also love this game. If you like both, this is your candy store right here. And there’s already another sequel out!

A word or two about the multiplayer: extremely fun among friends who have played the same approximate amount of time as each other, suffers from the modern theory that playing online a lot isn’t enough of an unbalancing reward, so we will also give you levels and new toys with which to crush newcomers who for some reason can’t play online 12 hours a day for the first month of release. I’m not sure how to solve this problem, and realistically there is no way beyond me accepting that multiplayer online has passed me by for the most part. (But yay for friends.)

Kick-Ass

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I gotta say, that movie Kick-Ass? Was an extremely faithful adaptation of the comic that spawned it. I can’t even think of much new to say. Ultra-violent? Check. Extremely funny? Also check, and probably often at the same time, which I suppose says something about me.[1] While it was not nearly as much of a meditation on the place of costumed heroes in the world, I do not know if that’s because the movie actually did something overt on the topic or because, having already had the thought, it wouldn’t make any sense to think of it again for exactly the same reason. The art was cartoonish, which both softened and emphasized the massive quantities of blood and also gore.

Yeah, sorry, I even tried talking about art, but that never gets me very far, and the truth is, they really are this much the same on story/character. So I can either cut and paste or else leave you here. But to be clear, I would recommend either unreservedly (there’s the violence, but I already mentioned it and now trust you to take it into account your own damn self), and I am looking forward to the sequel! (To the book for sure; I think there’s a movie sequel coming too, though?)

[1] Not anything new, but still.

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (2011)

MV5BMTgwNjEwODcxNF5BMl5BanBnXkFtZTcwNjU3MDY5Ng@@._V1__SX1217_SY911_You know those Swedish books everyone has read and Swedish movies everyone has seen, and now there’s an American version of the same stuff? Yeah, I never did any of that, so I showed up for The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo knowing nothing except what was in the previews, that an investigative journalist and a punk hacker join forces to solve a forty or fifty year old murder. I will add for the purposes of anyone who did come in like me with no idea of what was going on that said team-up, while natural and organic, took a good long while to accomplish, so it was kind of unsettling (from a story balance perspective) to watch Daniel Craig all embroiled in plot progression while this justifiably angry chick was just kind of living her life and developing her character and seemingly completely uninvolved with anything else in the other scenes.

The pay-off, of course, is that Lisbeth Salander is Incredibly Cool. So, totally worth it, just briefly unsettling. Speaking of unsettling things, I should mention every other part of the movie, because I assure you it does not pull any punches. You will see things nobody should really ought to see, and you will meet a spectacularly dysfunctional (yet entirely plausible, just like the eventual team-up was from earlier) family, and you will probably care about what happens to any and all of them. Which is part of why the “no punches pulled” part of the movie is even rougher than you think it is. And you will find that research can in fact have dramatic tension. You may find that Trent Reznor’s soundtrack, while every bit as meaningfully atmospheric as the act of filming a scene outside in Sweden is, sometimes drowns out the dialogue. So that’s unfortunate but it’s really the only thing I didn’t like. Rumor has it that the book is pretty hard to read, so I suppose I’ll just stick to the sequels.

One thing I wonder, though: are we meant to care that she has a dragon tattoo? Other than its existence, I could not find any underlying purpose for it, neither in subtext nor plain text alike. It’s cool if it was just an identifier, but I can’t help wondering. (Another thing I wonder is whether it is possible for a Swedish film to be non-bleak? Is it like a climate thing, or does the happy stuff just never get exported?)

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!

Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol

The bad thing about the new Mission: Impossible flick is that the plot felt occasionally rushed. I’m not talking about one of those things where reviewers say, despite being paid actual money by actual media organizations to have no other job besides sitting in a dark room with popcorn watching magical images appear in front of them and then talking about those images, that they were confused because the plot of the movie was too hard to follow.[1] There was definitely no point where I said, “Wait, what, they left something out!” I’m just saying that, now and again, you could tell that there was room for more backstory and it had been squeezed out. (I am thinking here specifically of Bogdan, who was really given nothing to do except have a goofy smile and be a plot catalyst; but that is not the only example of what I mean.)

The good thing about Ghost Protocol is you don’t have to care about any thin areas in the Pattern, because everything else was in fact really pretty cool. Was the mission actually impossible? Pretty much! Was the gadgetry really cool? Yes, yes it was, and on top of that it was involved in an unacknowledged-by-the-dialogue running joke that I will not spoil because it has plot implications. Did Tom Cruise smirk his way through the whole movie? I mean, obviously he did since that’s what he has done in every movie he’s ever been in[2], but it’s not like his smirk is off-putting, and it conveys a whole range of emotion beyond general punchability. Which when you think about it makes him an incredible actor. And the rest of the cast had generally good chemistry, and character development beyond ‘helps Tom Cruise do the Impossible’. So I’m saying, there’s very little not to like here. But none of these are the reason I’d recommend the movie.

Go see it in IMAX, because just about every action scene is put together in a way to showcase the immensity of that screen, and frankly very few IMAX films that come out have that particular sensibility. It was close to as good as a nature documentary, in those terms. And it had rather more explosions per capita than a nature documentary generally does, so you can see how this would be a win-win. IMAX or not, though, I wish more action movies were put together on this scale. Big is not a necessary thing by any means, and look no further than Die Hard before you consider disagreeing. But it should happen more than it does, is all I’m saying. Most of these kinds of movies are not designed to be small, but they’re filmed that way anyhow.

Okay, digression over. Review, too.

[1] Not that I’m bitter.
[2] Maybe not Eyes Wide Shut. Maybe.

Uncharted 3: Drake’s Deception

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I like that the Uncharted games are end-of-year releases. My parents enjoy the seamless cinematic feel, I like having something to do out at the Ranch at Christmastime that is commercial-free; pretty much everyone wins. (Well, sometimes it’s a little too seamless, and I end up with my dad giving me good but unimplementable advice during a cutscene. Still, as complaints go, this is a pretty minor one.)

Drake’s Deception is, for the most part, exactly the same game as the other two, though I understand there may be co-op campaign play that I did not see any part of, and which I suppose could plausibly change things? Probably it just turns a previously unkillable NPC into a new excuse to restart from last autosave, though. Anyway, my point is, there’s not much to say that I haven’t already said about one of the previous games. If you like a mix of platforming[1], shooting with the occasional pinch of stealth or dash of fisticuffs, and all kinds of Indiana Jones style treasure-hunting and clue-divining that also has a subdued romance plot, over-the-top action sequences, and a pretty hilarious ongoing exploration of the mentor relationship, this is an oddly precise match for what you seek!

I wonder if, novelty of the first game aside, any of them are better than the others? I’m pleased, I think, to note that while they all flow from one to the next with continuity and such, there’s nothing like a trilogy feel here. I guess they could keep making them forever, though I should say that getting much deeper into Nathan Drake’s life without some kind of real change (a marriage, a break-up, a death, something to shake up the status quo) will start to feel cheap pretty soon. Maybe even by during this game, but certainly by the next one. So past writers of half of the current game or at the very least future writers of the next one? This was your warning!

Oh, and I should warn you about the [spoiler elided, or else presented in Sabean script if you prefer], but nobody warned me, so, you pays your money and you takes your chances.

[1] That, okay, is not as good by a long shot as what you get in the Assassin’s Creed series, but what is?

The Walking Dead: We Find Ourselves

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When I saw the cover to the most recent Walking Dead collection, I came to what is perhaps an ironic realization.[1] I think that maybe the title of the series does not actually refer to zombies! (Not that there was any particular thing on the cover, especially a particular thing about the story in question; it just happened.) I really have nowhere else to go with this point, it just struck me and seemed relevant to share.

As for the irony, though: this is the book in which real steps are taken toward moving from survival toward a higher step on Maslow’s ladder[2]. On the one hand, I am excited to see the few surviving characters I still care about finally seeming on the verge of a happy ending. But on the other hand, it really does feel like things are edging toward an ending, and speaking of ironies, now that it’s upon me, I’m not so sure I wanted it after all.

That said, I’m objectively wrong, and all stories should end while they’re still at least somewhat good. That said, this is obviously not the last volume and there are still stories left to resolve. But it really does feel like the home stretch, and as much as I don’t want to give my characters up, I also don’t really want to see them forced into an implausible new flight from an implausible new disaster. I’m pretty sure I want that one more, and I know for a fact that I should.

[1] Also, as with all literary analysis, I may be full of crap.
[2] Yes. I know. Shush.