Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows

Things the Sherlock Holmes sequel did right, in no particular order:

Less action-for-the-sake-of-action feeling to it than the original. Sequences that showed the inner workings of Holmes’ mind; not so much how he is eight steps ahead of anyone else, but at least the demonstrable fact that he is. (Though maybe the first one did too? I can’t recall.) Sufficient use of Doyle’s canon that I was able to anticipate certain events and recognize others. Robert Downey Jr. Stephen Fry. Still excellent Holmes/Watson chemistry.

Things the movie did wrong, in no particular order:

Y’know, I got nothing. It was light and fun and better than its progenitor, and what more do you really need? Oh, right, if you care, blah blah Moriarty, anarchists, gypsies, unstable Europe, Reichenbach. That should pretty well ought to cover it, except to promise that you will laugh.

Powers: Forever

If I remember correctly, the previous volume of Powers marked a major shift in the way things work, with said Powers being basically outlawed altogether. (Which only makes a limited kind of sense in a world with supervillains, but roll with it.) Naturally, therefore, Forever picks up… at the beginning of time. What?!

No, actually, it’s pretty cool. If you’ve ever wondered about the origins of superheroism in the world, or also about the secret history of now-police detective Christian Walker, and if you haven’t wondered about that last bit by now we aren’t reading the same books, then this is a can’t miss entry in the series.[1] Except to warn you that it’s a historical interlude with no apparent bearing on the future, there’s almost nothing else I can say. No, not true, I can say that it’s good. And that it has really unexpected monkey vagina. (Is there another kind? …if you’re not a monkey?)

[1] Someday, I will probably still not understand people being able to skip a book in a series.

Resident Evil: Fire and Ice

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So you want to read a bad graphic novel? Allow to recommend Fire and Ice, a book that makes me look longingly back on the manga-style of the last few Resident Evil comics I’ve read. (Which, to be fair, is more a comment on my dislike of manga than on the quality of this book’s art. The troubles, as you will see, lie elsewhere.) So, it starts with some random characters that the authors seem confident I should be attached to despite them being uninteresting, overly soap-operaish in their equally uninteresting interrelationships, and never having been introduced before. The never-mentioned Charlie Team of S.T.A.R.S.[1] is off on missions to Mexico and Alaska to stop Umbrella from blah blah blah zombie-cakes. And yes, that’s the entire source of the title, is that some people went somewhere hot and set a fire while some other people went somewhere cold and I guess there was an avalanche maybe? Also a giant flying zombie penguin, because they live in the Arctic Circle now, apparently. Probably for the candy.[2] And then, after that series was over, I still had half the book left, in which possibly the characters could be developed a bit more and I could decide that, okay, there was a point after all.

Yeah, no. Instead, there were a lot of very short (short enough that if they were sold as individual comics at today’s prices, I predict that a lot of punching occurred later) stories set between and before Resident Evil 1 and 2, mostly traveling backward through time, but not because of a cool literary trick that reveals more detail with each step backward, no, they’re just arranged oddly for no good reason. Some of them were slightly amusing, some of them were shitty retreads of stories told better by the actual game, item-collecting and steps-retracing[3] and all. Some of them were just not any good at all. In the only original story to which I attached any interest, the characters were anonymously killed at the end in a wry twist reveal that this particular outbreak predated all the games, which is why nobody ever heard about it. To be fair, I think that last one would have bothered me less if I had not been looking for a character to care about for the entire damn book.

I mean, aside from the flying zombie penguin.

[1] They were the folks who exposed the Umbrella conspiracy in the first game, and were basically all dead by the end, the few individual survivors working together under their own recognizance with no leadership structure anymore, so on top of the rest, there’s a pretty massive canon violation.
[2] I’ll take really, really obscure internet jokes for $600, Alex.
[3] “Hey, look, I should grab another part of this bomb that I haven’t mentioned needing to find, in case I want to set off a bomb later!” “Ooooo, I should take this key and go back to that locked door on the other side of the mansion from before!”

Ice and Fire

51nrpwy4fyl I’m reading too many of these, and they are too similar, for much in the way of in depth reviews. So I think if you are interested at all, you’ve got the premise settled in your head by now, and I can just go with sense impressions, unless something vital changes. So, here’s what’s going on in Ice and Fire.

1) More secrets from the past, via cryogenic chambers! That is definitely a cool thing, not simply for the information they have been able to glean that will help them on their way, but also because where there is one bank of cryogenically frozen people from the past, there will be more. Y’know?
2) More ambivalence about the purpose of their travels. I guess the real purpose is to eventually teleport into a place where they like what they find and want to stay there forever and grow old and fat together with lots of slightly mutated children, but I think even though that’s what they believe, they none of them would be willing to put down roots when there are more things to see and people to save. Yet at the same time, they spent the whole book seeing a big, obvious problem (otherwise happy, wealthy people living one of the better lives available in our tragic future, except the massive mutant snake-worshiping cult that has sprung up is threatening to turn them all into hate-filled religious slaves) and saying in a number of different ways, “Hey, this is not our problem, we don’t have to solve everything, we’ll just get chilled if we do”. Right up until they end, when they remembered that they’re suppose to leave the campsites cleaner than they found them. I want this ambivalence and, okay, flip-flopping to be a psychologically interesting long term problem, but the truth is that it’s probably just iffy writing. Still, I hold out hope!
3) Romance is in the air! By which I mean the guy who likes guns is awkward around the baron’s secretary and also the blonde girl that’s been associated with Doc Tanner gets tired of him being old and her vagina starts making questionable decisions for her. The second part was the worst thing in the series so far, because even though their relationship troubles have been in evidence around the edges of the previous book or two, she suddenly becomes completely unreliable out of nowhere in this book, and then is clumsily removed from the plot. It all felt very “teenager in an ’80s horror movie”, when the rest of the series has not shown any evidence of slut-shaming or indeed imbalance between the sexes on either the good or evil sides of the equation.
4) Gradual cast turnover continues as well, which I still like, even if I could stand for it to not be, y’now, clumsy like this was.

By and large: there’s still more good than bad here, even if I wasn’t so susceptible to the setting that I’d ignore the bad for as long as possible. The edges are fraying a little bit, but I see all kinds of ways to recover, so for now I’ll hold out hope that my trashy apocalypse-porn series can stay less trashy than one might expect.

Hugo (2011)

Jack of Fables: The Bad Prince

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It had been so long since I last read one of these books, I was convinced I didn’t remember anything about the series. Luckily, I could remember two plotlines and had only read two previous books, so apparently I’m okay after all. But still, there’s a noteworthy gap, and I’ll be more careful in the future.

So, anyway, Jack, right? I’m not sure whether I should care about the ongoing plot of his personal arc, since it is so obviously a low-key romp with little or no seriousness or long-term impact[1], but it was certainly visible that he was mostly hijinx with brief reminders of the plot tacked on this time instead of the plot itself. The hijinx revolved around getting a slightly clearer picture of his place in fabledom as well as of his history, while only incrementally advancing the potential long term plot via the clarification of powers above the fables and via hints about Jack’s son, if such a creature still exists.[2]

But then there was a thing that made no sense at all, and it was the title. Unexpected cloning, sure, potential Fable Creators, okay, more devil-dealing than you can shake a pointed stick at, absolutely. But if there was any kind of prince buried in the book, much less a particularly bad one? I’ll eat my hat. And I can assure you, it’s a fantastic hat that I would regret losing quite apart from the digestive issues.

[1] The truth is, this book makes me question that assumption for the first time. We’ll see I guess!
[2] Spoiler alert: I’m betting yes.

Ultimate Fallout

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Nominally, Ultimate Fallout is about the world’s (and especially the enhanced community’s) reactions to the death of Spider-Man. The nominalization is strong enough that the collection was put under the imprint of that particular storyline, in fact. And I’m okay with that, it was a big enough deal to deserve an entire one-shot run’s worth of reactions, much like the Requiem that followed the Ultimatum event. But it’s also (as partially evidenced by the multiple authors who not-coincidentally are the authors of the three concurrent ongoing series (Spider-Man, Ultimates, and X-Men) that are starting up next) the end of the bridge between the first and second runs of the Ultimate Marvel universe, and as such, there are a lot of things that happen. I mean, really a lot of thing. Pretty much, all the things happen in this book.

Just like Requiem set up the way the world was going to look after Magneto’s Ultimatum, Fallout finally ties together the randomly wandering threads of the last couple of years’ events and sets up a much tighter future. This guy Mike that I know called it a reboot, and while I wasn’t prepared to agree with him before I read the book, now I’d say that everything between the Ultimatum and now was a glacially slow reboot that has finally been realized. Because, like I say, a lot of ground got covered in here. Too much to speak of more than I have in the premise statement I made above, but I can toss out several sense impressions.

May Parker is still and forever the most improved character from the original Marvel continuity. She’s been incredibly fun to read at every turn, and I anticipate missing her nearly as much as I miss her nephew. She’s frequently cooler than Nick Fury, and I don’t care how much Samuel L. Jackson cachet they lent him. That said, I’ve never liked Nick Fury more than I do today, and I like him quite a lot on average. I’m still skeptical of the world’s newest apparent supervillain. I’m really, really excited to read the X-Men stuff, as it will almost certainly have the best forthcoming storyline. And as for Captain America, I provisionally like him better than I ever have too, although even if I’m right about that guess, he still won’t have been worth it.

That’s all for now, though. More next year!

11/22/63

You know how I was recently talking about running out of Stephen King books? Well, now it’s actually happened. I’m sure he’s still writing something, but there are no more plans floating around in the world for when the next one will come out. I have read an entire canon.[1] This particular book is his take on the big time travel questions, like “What would happen if you went back in time and killed Hitler?” or “What if you killed your own grandfather before he met your grandmother?”[2] or, predictably in the specific case of 11/22/63, “What if you saved Kennedy?”

Naturally, of course, the book proceeds to be only partially about that. Mostly, it’s about an (only slightly nostalgia-tinged) trip through the late ’50s and early ’60s filled with the same ratios of horrible and wonderful people that exist everywhen and with the consequences of impossible choices. What King gets right (really, what I think he always gets right and is least appreciated for) is the characters. They are always painfully honest and painfully real. Nobody, not even the wifebeater who apparently[3] shot the President, comes off as irredeemable. And nobody, not even the man who plans to give up five years of his life just on the odds that he can prevent the assassination and that doing so might make the world better, is faultless. Typing it out, that sounds trivial and necessary in any worthwhile story, but I guess I am more talking about the unflinching way he portrays the horribleness that lurks in the best people and the basic decency and love that exists in the very worst people.

What he gets wrong? I mean, obviously I’m going to trust his historical research, because I don’t have that kind of time. The other things are towards the end of the book and are pretty subjective. Also, due to their placement, they are spoilers, but I still want to talk about them, so see you in the first comment!

[1] The most trivial of internet research has revealed the preceding statements to be untrue. But after April? Nothing.
[2] Why would you do that? That’s stupid.
[3] No spoilers!

Immortals

A Very Harold & Kumar 3D Christmas

Shards of Delirium

Fragments of Delight