Clandestine Critic

Richard Herring Leicester Square Theatre Podcast: Stephen Fry

noreply@blogger.com (David Norman) — Mon, 10 Jun 2013 22:00:00 +0000

The Richard Herring Leicester Square Theatre podcasts are fascinating and fun, not because of the silly recurring questions (‘Have you ever tried to suck your own cock?’ and ‘What would you rather have: a ham hand or an armpit that produced sun cream?’) or Herring’s shabby interview technique, but due to the atmosphere that leads to the interviewee opening up and discussing things in a honest and interesting manner, with occasional jokes thrown in. They are revealing and intimate and funny and unusual, particularly for fans of British comedy.

The first series had plenty of these from a wonderful selection: Stewart Lee, David Baddiel, Charlie Brooker, Adam Buxton and David Mitchell, to name a few. Herring would get them talking about their lives in a way that wouldn’t occur in a normal interview process, which meant that great anecdotes would arise from unguarded guests who seemed to enjoy the night as much as the audience. Intriguing nuggets of information would appear out of nowhere, as the guests felt relaxed and felt part of a conversation about their work and their history.

I don’t know how Herring got Stephen Fry to be his guest, but I’m grateful he did because the podcast from last Monday night was the best yet (and not just because I got to attend in person). The show had sold out on the day it was announced – I got lucky when I saw Herring’s tweet announcing Fry’s attendance – and it was a packed house on a warm summer evening that filled the downstairs auditorium. The host was nervous in the pre-podcast stand-up section – Fry had yet to arrive and he was worried he might not turn up and have on his hands an angry audience demanding their money back (as he joked, it’s not as if Fry had never failed to show at a theatre performance …), which I think reflected in his performance, which was slight on material and more about talking to audience members, although he thinks differently as he has released that as a separate podcast (something he doesn’t usually do as a way to entice people to pay for a ticket to the night). However, when Fry sneaked in the side just before 8pm, Herring relaxed and stopped the chatter for an interval before the main event.

And what an event it was: 90 minutes of wit, honesty, anecdotes, revelation and eloquence. I think Herring was a little in awe of Fry but he didn’t try to cover it with his usual braggadocio; instead, he realised that he was second fiddle and let Fry take the lead, occasionally putting in a joke but standing back to allow Fry room to talk. Talk he did: he chatted about various film roles (he did Spice World because he, like all the other actors, would be loved by their sons/daughters/nephews/nieces/godchildren if they gave them signed photos of the Spice Girls), with nice anecdotes about working on A Civil Action with John Travolta and working with Walter Matthau on I.Q. He did a great Rik Mayall impression when he talked about suggesting the University Challenge idea to Mayall and Ben Elton after the first series of The Young Ones. He also did a good Dustin Hoffman when relating an anecdote about Hoffman asking Fry for his autograph for his daughter. He said that Hugh Laurie was still his best friend after all these years (for the past 25 years, they have always had Christmas together, either at his or Laurie’s house), which was rather touching. He and Herring discussed in detail the character of Fabian in Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night, and talked eloquently about his life in response to Herring’s (deserving) praise of the first volume of his memoirs, Moab Is My Washpot, and told the story (with accents) of being hypnotised by a Hungarian man in order to be able to sing for a sketch on ITV’s Saturday Live; he also thoroughly answered Herring’s recurring questions about self-fellatio and the ham hand/sun cream armpit dilemma. Fry was his usual mix of intelligence and warmth and insight and humour, and it was a joy to be in the audience, but there was more to come.

The huge revelation (which would become headline news on Wednesday when a transcript of the podcast was released to the press – it was very strange to ‘know’ the news nearly 48 hours before it was announced) came about from the simple question, ‘What’s it like to be Stephen Fry?’ (one of the questions of the 12-year-old son of the producer of the podcasts). Fry talked about how lucky he is, with the success and the privileges that have ensued (‘Oh, another invite to the royal box at Wimbledon – shall I go?’), but then started to talk about how his bipolar disorder affects him, and that he had tried to commit suicide in 2012 (the first time he has mentioned it), with a combination of pills and vodka, which caused him to pass out and then convulse with such violence that he bruised four ribs. Fortunately, he was discovered by the producer of the programme he was working on and he was brought back to the UK and recovered. He talked about how there was no reasoning behind it (if there were, he could be reasoned out of it), and how he couldn’t talk about it to anyone, let alone a best friend (‘Imagine your best friend in the world. Now imagine you have a genital wart. Would you tell your best friend?’). It was quite something to be in the presence of this man who has been an inspiration to me for many years and I was shocked at the revelation and then overjoyed when he said at the end that he was much better now and on better medication, and the whole audience applauded in unison in happiness that he had survived this ordeal. It was a fitting ending to the show, even if we could have stayed there and listened to him talk for much longer, which was really something special (even Herring was moved, as he wrote it about in his daily blog). You should really listen to the podcast to enjoy it for yourself – you won’t regret it.

Comic Book Review – Star Trek: Countdown To Darkness

noreply@blogger.com (David Norman) — Wed, 29 May 2013 16:08:00 +0000

Story by Roberto Orci & Mike Johnson
Script by Mike Johnson
Pencils by David Messina
Inks by Marina Castelvetro
Colours by Claudia Scarletgothica
Letters by Chris Mowry
Edited by Scott Dunbier
Published by Titan Books

As the title of the book suggests, this is a prequel leading directly into Star Trek Into Darkness, meaning that themes and ideas are introduced that play out in the movie. To emphasise this, the story starts with Spock having a recurring anxiety dream about the destruction of Vulcan and the death of his mother, something that is affecting his relationship with Uhura; meanwhile, Kirk is pondering about the nature of command to his log. The Enterprise is visiting the planet Phaedus for a five-year check of its civilisation, which is several thousand years before its inhabitants will be ready for first contact. Therefore, when a high-frequency energy field originating from the planet surface disrupts communications and transporters, Kirk decides to take a shuttle down the planet to investigate, with Spock accompanying him to ensure no further violations of the prime directive (as well as Sulu and a redshirt). However, when they fly down to the planet, they are shot down and come face to face with aliens armed with Starfleet weapons … and Robert April, former captain of the Enterprise, believed to be dead (and who looks a lot like Rutger Hauer).

It transpires that Phaedus is undergoing a civil war – the dominant race are brutally killing the other race and April is trying to help the oppressed: when he first witnessed it 20 years ago as captain of the Enterprise, he couldn’t stand by and let it happen, so he violated the prime directive by abandoning his post and taking weapons down to the planet to help. Another link to the film: his first officer is Alex Marcus, who lets him leave and then telling Starfleet that April was dead; he plays a big role in the film. After Spock rescues Sulu and the redshirt from captivity from the dominant aliens, they return with April to the Enterprise, where he reveals that the war is a proxy war: the Klingons are supplying the other side with weapons so that the Klingons can take over the planet (April has been using a female smuggler called Mudd to arm the oppressed aliens). Kirk decides to bring April back to Starfleet, but April manages to take over the Enterprise (with the only bit of weak plotting in the book: he used a sleeper program he had designed and installed on the previous Enterprise, which has somehow survived the building of a new ship, and which allows him to lock out control of the ship from everywhere else but the bridge) and contacts the Klingons to offer them the Enterprise in exchange for governorship of Phaedus so that he can stop the slaughter. It’s up to the crew of the Enterprise to stop him … although, because this is a prequel, you can work out the ending.

This is a well-crafted story – it does the job of a seamless prequel to the film, as would be expected from a story from one of the co-writers of the movies, and it nicely drops hints about things in the film, such as Mudd’s shuttle that is used in the film to fly to Kronos. The art matches the style of the film perfectly: the shiny quality to the ship’s interiors, lens flares aplenty, tilted angles for panels; Messina has a good blend of character likeness and a clear, sharp cartoony style with great storytelling skills. I read this book after I had seen the film (a film with which I had a few problems), but that didn’t colour my appreciation of this book, which stands up on its own merits and will be enjoyed by anyone who likes the new Star Trek.

Notes On A Film: Star Trek Into Darkness

noreply@blogger.com (David Norman) — Mon, 27 May 2013 12:41:00 +0000

I really enjoyed the Star Trek reboot from JJ Abrams. This is despite the fact that they blew up Vulcan just to emphatically state that this was a completely new Star Trek (not cool, Abrams) and that the villain of the piece wasn’t particularly good. It didn’t have a lot of what made Star Trek so popular in the first place, but it was a film that meant we would get new Star Trek films, so it achieved its aim. And Karl Urban was fantastic as Doctor McCoy.

This meant that I was looking forward to the sequel, even with its silly name, especially with the marvellous Benedict Cumberbatch as the villain. Now that I’ve seen the film, I’m left feeling disappointed and the only way to talk about these disappointments is to discuss the film in spoilerific detail. So please look away if you have yet to see the film and want to view without any prior knowledge, which is the best way to enjoy a movie these days (I only watch teaser trailers, if possible).

WARNING: SPOILERS AHEAD

LAST WARNING: VERY LONG DISCUSSION OF A FILM AHEAD

It is a truth universally acknowledged that Star Trek II: The Wrath Of Khan is the best of the Original Series Star Trek films. (The rule of even-numbered Star Trek films was broken with Nemesis. Also, I think that Star Trek: First Contact was the best of the Star Trek films, but that’s another discussion.) It used the history of the series, it used the characters well, it had a great villain, and it had Spock die – it deserves the respect. Therefore, I was always bemused and perplexed when, immediately following the success of the reboot, there was discussion that the sequel would the new Trek’s version of Khan. It seemed the most counterintuitive suggestion I had ever heard – the entire point of the reboot was to establish a completely new Star Trek that would have the characters and the set-up but could do absolutely anything it wanted, so why would it discard any credibility it had by attempting to replicate in its first sequel the best-remembered original Star Trek film? Why would anyone even think about it? It’s absurd. Isn’t it?

I’m a fan of comic books, so I’m used to imagination-lacking decisions to reboot series or universes and rehashing classic old stories in the new version. However, comic books are small potatoes; a film franchise is a multi-million dollar enterprise (if you’ll pardon the pun), so I thought there was no way anything as silly as that could happen with so many people responsible for it. It turns out, I was wrong.

Instead of coming up with a strong story of their own, the creators of Star Trek Into Darkness worked from the standpoint of ‘Wouldn’t it be cool if … we did our version of Khan?’ and little else. The ‘Wouldn’t it be cool if …’ approach was applied everywhere: the opening scene is an exhilarating pre-credits sequence where the crew of the Enterprise break the Prime Directive to intervene in the destruction of a planet, where they hide the Enterprise underwater and stop the planet-destroying volcano with a cold fusion bomb. It looks great (‘Wouldn’t it be cool if … the Enterprise rises out of the water?’) and it’s very exciting, but a spaceship designed for the vacuum of space can’t handle the pressure of water on top of it, and I’m pretty sure that the impulse engines weren’t designed to handle seawater, making me doubt that the ship could actually move. But it looks great, so let’s ignore the lack of logic.

The story, pretty much like the first one, is all about Kirk – after breaking the Prime Directive (Kirk lied on his report but Spock, who nearly died planting the bomb in the volcano, was truthful in his report), Admiral Pike takes away Kirk’s command (for this and other rule-bending) and then it’s all about Kirk maturing into his deserving the command of a spaceship and its crew instead of the lottery win of captainship in the first film. Meanwhile, Cumberbatch has persuaded Noel Clarke to blow up a Starfleet archive in London (future London looks very impressive in this film, consisting of variations on the Shard and the Gherkin), which causes all the top admirals and their first officers (Pike has given Kirk a second chance as first officer on the Enterprise under him) to convene at Starfleet Command to discuss the event, because apparently they don’t have video conferencing in the future, which gives Cumberbatch the opportunity to attack them in one location, killing Pike in the process. (Killing good but periphery characters early in the reboot sequel is becoming a tradition – Irene Adler is needlessly bumped off in the first section of the Robert Downey Jr Sherlock Holmes sequel.) They discover that Cumberbatch has escaped to the Klingon homeworld of Kronos, and Kirk is given permission by Admiral Marcus (Peter Weller) to hunt him down and kill him, with the use of 72 long-range photon torpedoes, just in case one isn’t enough because, erm, reasons?

Kirk wants to kill Cumberbatch but eventually decides to capture him and bring him back to justice. They decide to use a shuttle they acquired from the ‘the Mudd incident’ (nice casual reference to past Trek lore) to get him, but they get attacked by Klingons (an aside: I thought the new Klingon design was very cool) – they land so that Uhura can talk them out of it (one of the few incidences of a woman does something strong and brave in the film, unfortunately), only for it to go wrong and for Cumberbatch to save them by killing Klingons with a big gun.

It was at this point that I started to worry about Cumberbatch’s identity, as he singlehandedly takes on Klingons in unarmed combat – I had avoided any discussion or news items about the film beforehand – and, after peacefully surrendering to Kirk, he does admit that he is Khan, the same genetically engineered Khan from the original Star Trek, who had been awakened from his suspended animation by Admiral Peter Weller to design new weapons and ships for Weller’s impending war with the Klingons under threat of killing the rest of his crew. This reveal made me a little nervous (see earlier paragraphs) but I held up hope that they would do something different, something new. I was wrong.

Admiral Peter Weller arrives in his Khan-designed super spaceship to kill everyone to cover his tracks, only for Scotty to shut down its guns and save the Enterprise after luckily sneaking aboard the spaceship after Khan had told Kirk the coordinates for the secret hangar, and Kirk had told Scotty (even though Kirk is in Klingon space and Scotty is back on Earth, they manage to have a normal conversation on Scotty’s communicator – really?). Abrams obviously likes his ridiculous coincidences (see the first film’s ridiculous dumping of Kirk on the same planet that happens to have the future Spock, as well as Scotty). Kirk and Khan team up to take on Admiral Peter Weller (we should have guessed he was evil because he had already played a villain in Star Trek: he was a villain in Enterprise), which sees Weller’s skull crushed by super-strong Cumberbatch, who then gets the super spaceship and attacks Enterprise.

It’s at this point that this film does its remix version of Star Trek II: The Wrath Of Khan. Instead of Kirk tricking Khan, it’s Spock who tricks him, and it’s Kirk who goes into the radioactive chamber to fix the warp drive to save the Enterprise. It gets worse – Spock comes to talk with him through the window, their hands placed over each other through the window, Kirk does a Kirk version of ‘I am and always will be your friend’ speech before he dies – even though you know that they are not going to kill Kirk in the second film. Then comes the worst bit: instead of Kirk shouting ‘KHAAAAN!’, Spock shouts it when Kirk dies. This is a thing that happened. I couldn’t believe they did it. I felt so sorry for Zachary Quinto – I think he’s great as new Spock, so he didn’t deserve this. Kirk shouting ‘KHAAAAN!’ is a ludicrous moment in the film, especially as delivered by William Shatner in his unique style; it’s a meme, for Rodenberry’s sake. Everyone knows it for its inherent silliness. It should not have been repeated. At all. Someone should have said something at the script stage – ‘Erm, JJ, are we sure about this? Isn’t it a bit silly? Won’t it ruin the scene?’ – instead of making poor Quinto go through the humiliation. It is the apotheosis of the creative bankruptcy of this film, and it depressed me.

The film doesn’t even end here: despite 72 torpedoes going off in the ship, Khan survives and crash-lands the ship on Starfleet and is then chased by Spock and they fight, eventually knocking him unconscious with the aid of Uhura (who they can transport onto a moving platform despite the fact that they state that the reason they can’t transport them up to the ship is because Spock and Khan are constantly moving – WTF?). Then, instead of putting him in prison for his crimes, Khan is put back into suspended animation with his crew – you can see a hint of smile on his face when the camera pans into it. Excuse me? How does that work? How is that a punishment? Meanwhile, Kirk has been saved via Khan’s blood (this is the reason why Spock had to capture Khan) because McCoy had injected some of Khan’s blood in a conveniently dead Tribble on his work desk (a nice shout-out but it such a ridiculous attempt to cover up a ‘this is important for later!’ moment – why did McCoy have a dead Tribble on his desk? Why did he decide to inject Khan’s blood into it?) and discovered its amazing restorative properties, which is used to resurrect Kirk; however, instead of announcing that they’ve discovered a cure for death, it’s completely ignored after they’ve saved a headstrong, reckless, rule-breaking egomaniac. Sigh.

I should counter my negative with mention of some good stuff: Urban is still the best thing in it, throwing out Bones’ aphorisms with delight. Simon Pegg is fun as Scotty, although he does lose the Scottish accent in prolonged dialogues, especially where he has to be angry. Cumberbatch is very good as Khan, exuding power and stillness (although he should have better dialogue for his delicious delivery). The design of the Klingons is pretty neat, both under the masks and the outfits themselves. Zoe Saldana as Uhura gets some a couple of good moments, standing up to the Klingons being one, but it’s still pretty much a sausage-fest, with not enough for the girls (and, in the case of Alice Eve’s character, any pretence of having an interesting female character is destroyed when the film shows her in her bra and pants – it’s a scene where she is changing into a spacesuit with Kirk in the room, and she’s told him to turn around, but he turns round to look because he’s pervert; however, instead of viewing Eve from Kirk’s point of view, the camera is looking up at Eve from the point of view of someone at her knees, looking up at an angle, solely for the purpose of displaying her near nakedness in the most gratuitous way, something for which at least Damon Lindelof apologised, realising how wrong it was). The production design is visually spectacular – this film is beautiful to look at and it’s great to have actual sets instead of everything in CGI (disclaimer: I saw it in 2D, so I don’t know what it looked like in 3D or if my comments hold up for that version). The film is very funny on occasion. Sulu got a nice moment to display his toughness.

However, despite the fact that the film is fast paced and exciting and well-made entertainment, I left the cinema disappointed and saddened by the creative bankruptcy at the heart of the story and the loss of the opportunity to do something new and interesting instead of fan service.

Rating: DVD

[Explanation of my updated film rating system]

From A Library: Neonomicon

noreply@blogger.com (David Norman) — Tue, 23 Apr 2013 20:49:00 +0000

The Courtyard #1 & 2 and Neonomicon #1–4
Written by Alan Moore
Art by Jacen Burrows

I’m sure this is heresy but I’ll say it anyway: this comic book, which was written by arguably one of the greatest writers of comics books and whose work I enjoy very much (so much so that I went to Kettering to see him talk about them), was not a good comic book in the sense of being an entertaining piece of sequential storytelling with the aim of providing escapism in fiction. It was thoroughly unpleasant and I find it hard to believe that it came from the man who bought us Watchmen and V For Vendetta and Miracleman and Top Ten and Supreme. I haven’t been enjoying Moore’s comics of late: I admired the Century trilogy of The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, but I didn’t find the experience of reading them particularly enjoyable or satisfactory. That’s not what I want from my entertainment – the primary function should be the ‘entertain’ part. Writing this, it feels like I’m having to explain a relationship that isn’t working any more – “It’s not you, it’s me; we’ve drifted apart. It used to be fun in the old days. It’s just not the same any more.”

The trouble with this book was that I actively disliked it, something I never thought would happen with an Alan Moore comic. It’s a really strange feeling, and it saddens me. The book is deliberately horrific, and I’m not really into horror for my entertainment tastes, but this is not an Alan Moore book I’ll be reading again (and not in the same way as not reading Violator or Violator Vs Badrock again). This depresses me in a way I can’t really explain. Moore may have written worse books (see the aforementioned Image mini-series, although I’d advise against it) but he never seemed to set out to write a book that was unpleasant and nasty and basically unreadable, as he admitted about this comic at the convention appearance at N.I.C.E.

The Courtyard is about a bigoted, racist, homophobic, anti-Semitic cop who is undercover investigating murders that have led him to a strange club and a strange drug that causes even stranger things to happen to him when he is exposed to it. Neonomicon follows on from this, as two federal agents visit the detective who is now in a secure psychiatric institute after he killed some people. The agents are investigating murders with the same modus operandi, going back to the same club visited by the detective in The Courtyard. They discover a lead that sends them undercover to Salem, based on a connection to HP Lovecraft, where things go catastrophically wrong almost immediately and then they don’t get any better.

As a story, the plot is put together well enough and it is filled with background detail that roots it in reality. Burrows does his usual detailed job on art duties, drawing talking head scenes and horror scenes and the surreal scenes (particularly the double-page spread in The Courtyard when the detective’s mind is opened by the strange drug) with equal skill and dexterity. However, this is a story where a former sex-addict female agent is repeatedly raped by a Lovecraftian fish monster and then she ends up happy after escaping when she realises she is pregnant with a creature that, when given birth, will bring about the end of the world. It’s not enough to have the great meta moment at the end of the first issue of Neonomicon, where the character the agents are chasing disappears in a mural on a wall – great skill in comic book storytelling don’t make up for a story I found unpleasant to read. Perhaps it is just me, but it’s put me off buying the very few Alan Moore comics that are being produced now.

Comic Book Review – Modesty Blaise: The Girl In The Iron Mask

noreply@blogger.com (David Norman) — Fri, 19 Apr 2013 20:52:00 +0000

Written by Peter O’Donnell
Art by Enric Badia Romero
Published by Titan Books

I grew up in London, so would occasionally see the Modesty Blaise strip in the Evening Standard newspapers discarded on the trains in the underground. I was always amazed that the strip survived so long, with only three panels of fairly small black and white art, the tiny snippet of story being played out on a daily basis. I wasn’t aware of the history of the strip – it started in 1963 in the Evening Standard, finishing in 2001 – nor of the eleven novels or the film from 1966; the only cultural touchstone was the reference in Pulp Fiction, so it was a delight to be able to read this collection and see for myself why the character was so popular and why the strip lasted so long.

The strip was created by O’Donnell, with art initially by Jim Holdaway (until his death in 1970); Romero took over art duties until 1978, with three other artists replacing him until 1986, when Romero returned to draw the strip until it finished (Romero, a Spanish artist, spoke no English and the scripts had to be translated). This collection – the twenty-third so far published by Titan; there were 95 stories in total – contains three stories first published in 1990–1991: Fiona, Walkabout, and The Girl In The Iron Mask. The strips are the same throughout: three panels of story with no ‘Previously on …’ catch-up notes, with all the ingredients for the story told through the dialogue, artwork and some minimal expository text (limited by the space available in the panels), with a small credit box in the first panel and a number identifying the strip in the corner somewhere. The amazing thing is the economy and precision with which the narratives are presented; O’Donnell and Romero have an excellent storytelling partnership, able to convey so much in such a small space, generating excitement and adventure on a regular basis, with clarity and style and precision.

Modesty Blaise is a great female character: she is an extremely capable woman, smart, calm under pressure, able to take care of herself in a fight, yet thoughtful of others, particularly those who worked for her in The Network. After the second world war, she was a young girl who escaped a displaced person camp in Greece before surviving a tough life in the Middle Eastern and North African regions, growing up to become head of a criminal gang in Tangier, which she expanded into an international operation known as The Network. Her right-hand man, in a purely platonic sense – she is always the one in charge – is Willie Garvin, who started with her in the days of The Network and followed her when she retired from the criminal life to England after she had acquired enough wealth. She eventually got bored of the uneventful life and started helping the British Secret Service as well as other people she meets on her travels, protecting them from unsavoury types and taking a hands-on approach to problem-solving, with the aid of Garvin.

The first story, Fiona, sees Modesty visiting one of her former Network operatives in Bangladesh and getting involved with the local drug runners, who happen to be run by an old enemy of Modesty, who has a particular dislike of drugs (I should also point out that the Fiona of the title is a chimpanzee from the circus where Garvin has been having a working vacation, who takes a liking for Garvin and follows him on the adventure). The second story, Walkabout, sees Modesty going for a walkabout in Australia with an ex-Network Aborigine to escape back to nature, which ends up with her getting involved with the Australian mafia when they try to kill the head of Internal Security (whose secretary is intimate with Garvin) by brainwashing an Aborigine (who happens to save Modesty afterwards; these stories occasionally need some coincidences to propel the narrative). The final story, The Girl In The Iron Mask, sees Modesty captured under the orders of multi-millionaire former-criminal twins, who want to play twisted torture games with her, placing her in an actual iron mask and watching her as she struggles in her confinement. This tale is the weakest of the three collected here, which is a shame that it provides the title for the collection, but I suppose it is catchier than the other two.

These stories are very good, even the slightly lesser eponymous tale; O’Donnell is a very good writer who creates engaging capers placed in real-world scenarios that allow for some of the more unusual elements, such as Modesty charming a king cobra by swaying gently, or Fiona the chimpanzee saving Modesty by attacking a man with a gun. I really like combination of the well-researched criminal elements (drug running, organised crime) and the exotic locales (the small village in Bangladesh, the outback), which provide a great backdrop for the adventures of Modesty and Willie. The art from Romero is lovely, telling the story yet filling the small panels with exquisite detail; his woman are beautiful (Modesty is particularly sexy) yet he can also draw the details that set the scene and make the panel, even something as simple as drawing animals that actually look like animals. I find the level of craft on display in these strips very impressive – O’Donnell and Romero produced high-quality sequential pictorial stories day in, day out, week in, week out, and it doesn’t waver. I’m glad that Titan has produced these permanent collections of Modesty Blaise, because these stories deserve it.

Comic Book Review: Hit-Girl

noreply@blogger.com (David Norman) — Fri, 29 Mar 2013 20:43:00 +0000

Kick-Ass 2 Prelude: Hit-Girl #1–5
Written by Mark Millar
Pencils by John Romita Jr
Inks by Tom Palmer
Colours by Dean White
Letters by Chris Eliopoulos
Edits by Jennifer Lee
Published by Titan Books

Warning: before buying this comic book, you should be made aware that it is not ‘real-life’ superheroes. Ignore what Millar says in interviews – this is a traditional (if modern-day), completely over-the-top superhero adventure filled with only-in-comic-books action. This is a book where a 12-year-old girl breaks into a prison, knocks out the guards, kills a mafia boss and then executes the prisoners on death row with a machine gun, quipping ‘Just thought I’d save the taxpayer a little cash while I’m here’. This is not serious. This is a hilariously insane, excessive, demented, crazily violent action thriller mixed with bits from a John Hughes film, which is perhaps the most ideal Mark Millar comic book ever.

This is the sequel to the comic book as well as acting as the start of Kick-Ass 2: after the events of the first book, the mob is killing imitators of Kick-Ass in order to find him and Hit-Girl. Meanwhile, Mindy McCready, aka Hit-Girl, is trying to live a ‘normal’ life as a pre-teen girl with her mum and step-dad (who is also a police officer), but she is finding it difficult to blend in with the girls at high school; as she puts it, ‘Why can’t I handle these bitches?’ Her solution: in exchange for training Kick-Ass to be an actual superhero, Kick-Ass has to show her how to be a normal girl. This means two things: firstly, Hit-Girl teaches Kick-Ass the basics of superheroing (learning how jump through windows to make a dramatic entrance, developing ‘iconic’ lines when making an entrance, and slaughtering mobsters when Kick-Ass can’t beat them up); secondly, Kick-Ass teaches Hit-Girl how she should act (telling her to watch shows about celebrities and chick flicks, especially ‘all vampire stuff’, which ‘is solid gold’, and developing knowledge of The Hunger Games and Bieber). All the while, Hit-Girl is drugging her parents at night and disposing of mobsters, just like any normal pre-teen …

Meanwhile, the Red Mist is developing into a supervillain: he is out for revenge against Kick-Ass (although he can’t remember the real identity of Kick-Ass) and to regain control of the mob business of his father; however, when his first supercrime goes wrong, he heads out and does a ‘Bruce Wayne’, paying ninjas to train him up to be the ultimate bad ass. Unfortunately, he eventually discovers that it’s actually a lot of hard work and can’t be bothered, especially because he knows that the instructors are ripping him off, so he decides to go back to the US and just hire bodyguards instead.

In order for these comic book antics to be vaguely believable, it needs the art to be grounded yet still able to handle the comic book side. Romita Jr is such an artist – he can draw the grungy mobsters, the high-school scenes, the smallness of the family interactions, but also handle the demented violence. He has always been a terrific storyteller, which helps you believe what is going on, even while your brain is wondering if you should be laughing as a 12-year-old girl slaughters criminals. His style in this comic book is softened in comparison with his normal work because of Palmer’s inks: the art here is more rounded than the more angular, blocky style when Romita Jr inks himself; Palmer brings a looser, warmer feel to the line work (although he can’t do anything about the over-large heads that Romita Jr draws on his young characters, perhaps the only flaw in a book about Hit-Girl).

This is a deliriously bonkers comic book with scenes of Tarantinoesque violence: Hit-Girl sticks a cleaver in a mobster’s genitals, rams a rolling pin down another mobster’s throat, smashes in the head of a mobster with a sledgehammer, before going on a killing spree involving decapitations and chopping off limbs. However, the whole point is that it is done in jet-black humour: this is a 12-year old girl as the Punisher, with added pop culture references (and the worrying element that she hallucinates her dead father). It’s supposed to be funny. What it’s not supposed to be is in any way realistic. The mentions of Marvel and DC superheroes, Christian Bale films, Mean Girls/Queen Bee, The Big Bang Theory, Comic Book Resources (Kick-Ass writes pieces about comics for them, such as an article about Vertigo paper stock): these all suggest that this story is occurring in our world (and these references immediately date the book to a very specific point in time), but it’s all an illusion. This is a comic book, pure and simple, and all the better for it. Just keep saying to yourself: ‘This isn’t real life’. And enjoy the ride.

Comic Book Review: Dead Space and Dead Space Salvation

noreply@blogger.com (David Norman) — Wed, 20 Mar 2013 22:25:00 +0000

Dead Space #1–6
Written by Antony Johnston
Art by Ben Templesmith

Dead Space Salvage
Written by Antony Johnston
Art by Christopher Shy
Published by Titan Books

As I mentioned in my review of Dead Space Liberation, there were two other Dead Space trade paperbacks released to coincide with the publication of Dead Space Liberation. Dead Space is a six-issue prequel to the original video game from 2008, whereas Dead Space Salvage is an original graphic novel set between first game and the sequel from 2010. Both are written by Johnston, who also wrote the dialogue for the original game, and who has also written many comics in his own right, so he’s the perfect choice to explore the beginnings of the story.

This Dead Space prequel is basically the background to the first game. It starts in media res: P-SEC Sgt Bram Neumann on Aegis VII, recording a message telling people to nuke the planet, then ‘5 weeks earlier’. A mining colony is preparing for planetcrack when they discover a Marker, a large structure with odd markings on it. The Marker is a sacred object to the Church of Unitology (which is NOT the Church of Scientology, despite the error in the character profile for Carthusia, where he is described as ‘a respected pillar of the Church of Scientology’), whose members believe it to be a proof of their faith, so it stirs up religious fervour among Unitologists on the colony. However, people start acting strange: miners are not sleeping, people acting out of character, their tempers turning violent and people having hallucinations of dead people. High-ranking Church members in the government order the Marker to be retrieved to await arrival of the spaceship Ishimura.

Things get worse: Neumann’s P-SEC partner, a devout Unitologist, is one of 50 Unitologists who kill themselves in the belief that the Marker means that they will return. A strange fungus is found growing on the grilles of the air vents. Bad dreams increase, people scrawl messages about the Marker on their walls, increased assaults and murders. Neumann tries to get the colony manager to stop things but he’s not getting in the way of a multibillion-dollar operation, and jurisdiction has been handed over to the captain of the Ishimura, who has enacted a no-fly order after the removal of the Marker. The fungus continues to grow and the planetcrack proceeds – and immediately all the power in the colony goes out and everything descends into madness … Neumann’s girlfriend has worked it out: the carvings on the Marker are instruction for DNA, recombinant DNA that mutates genes (note to the writer: genes can ONLY be mutated ‘at the cellular level’ because it doesn’t exist anywhere else) spread through a specific target vector – necrotic flesh. It infects dead bodies and reanimates it, which can’t be killed and only wants to create more reanimated dead flesh.

This is a slow-build sci-fi horror comic book – it takes until issue five for these Necromorphs and the violence to appear. Johnston takes his time to build up the sense of the people and the atmosphere in the extra room that six issues provides. Johnston uses all the material he created for the game he to tell the story that leads into it, such as the character profiles of the seven major characters before the story, providing background for their actions (such as why Neumann hates the Church of Unitology). This provides some poignancy to the deaths that arrive – you know this will happen because this is a horror book, so I’m not spoiling anything: a situation is set up and the characters are killed one by one, made even more aware of this fact by that this is a prequel. However, the journey is the interesting part and Johnston does make this interesting.

Templesmith’s art is a bit looser and scratchier than his normal style but it suits the book well – he achieves a grungy, lived-in sci-fi atmosphere (think Alien and Alien 3) that roots the horror in the mundanity of a mining operation that happens to be on another planet. His storytelling is much stronger than Shy’s (see below) so you can follow the characters and the narrative more easily. He also understands the placement of word balloons (I think he does the lettering, although the book doesn’t specify), so the dialogue flows around the art more naturally. The collection also contains a short story, Dead Space Extraction, which is about what happens on the Ishimura after the events on Aegis VII, as well as a gallery of Dead Space concept art and Templesmith art (sketches, alternate pages and covers), making for a good overall package.

In Dead Space Salvage, things are a bit different. The first half is slow and takes a while for the story to get going. We are introduced to a group of illegal miners who are extracting precious metals from asteroids, when the Ishimura unexpectedly arrives, crashing into the mining ship with all the extracted metals (although you can’t tell this based on the art, which is hard to follow and understand what is actually happening – you have to piece it together from the subsequent dialogue). So they stop the Ishimura from drifting and decide to go aboard to investigate and see if they can make money out of it, only to find fragments of what they think is a Marker. One of the crew runs out with evidence to cut a deal with a nearby government ship searching for the Ishimura, which alerts the agents aboard of the location of the ship; meanwhile, there is trouble aboard the Ishimura for the miners …

Shy’s art is evocative and moody, in his grungy, dirty, washed-out, off-kilter art style, but his storytelling is erratic: panel transitions are problematic, and some panels you can’t work out what is occurring. There are odd choices – a panel that’s a close-up on a hand for no reason, a full-page spread of a woman’s face that isn’t reacting to anything. The dialogue text can be troublesome – sometimes a blue font on blue backgrounds, and no real indicators when dialogue is from someone on radio, making for confusing conversations. It’s also quite large text, not contained by word balloons, so it sprawls over the panels; sometimes, the text sprawls so much it is cut off the bottom of the page, as if the panel trim didn’t take it into account. The fuzziness of the faces makes it hard to keep up with who’s who, not helped by the lack of definition in the majority of the characters, meaning that the book looks like a collection of concept art instead of a real comic book.

There is also a problem with typographical errors: ‘planercracker’ instead of ‘planetcracker’, ‘someone find the bring’ instead of ‘the brig’, ‘and mow we’re in the ship’ instead of ‘now’, ‘alreadly’ instead of ‘already’, and inconsistent capitalisation (upper case after a comma, ‘marker’ and ‘Marker’, ‘Jesus christ’, ‘I guess i got’). This is slightly unprofessional and takes me out of the story, and not what I expect from a re-released comic book. So, I can recommend Dead Space the comic book but not Dead Space Salvage.

Comic Book Review: Dead Space Liberation

noreply@blogger.com (David Norman) — Mon, 11 Mar 2013 22:27:00 +0000

Written by Ian Edginton
Art by Christopher Shy
Published by Titan Books

Dead Space is a popular video game, a third-player shooter where the main character fights ‘Necromorphs’ (human corpses reanimated by an alien virus) aboard a spaceship. The first one was released in 2008 (of note, Warren Ellis was involved in writing some stuff for the original game about two years before the game was released, although not much survived the process) and the second sequel, Dead Space 3, came out last month, which is why this graphic novel has been released in a story that follows on from the events in the first sequel and acts as a prequel to Dead Space 3.

This story follows Sgt John Carver on the planet Uxor, a soldier with nine commendations but who was busted down to a grunt due to his issues with authority. He is stationed with his wife and son at the site of an alien marker that is attacked by religious fanatics, with an EMP causing ships to fall out of the sky and cause a Necromorph outbreak. Carver’s family suffers and he ends up with the woman his wife was secretly working with to understand the carvings on the alien marker and uncover the secrets behind it, while trying to survive attacks from the religious fanatics and the Necromorphs.

The front cover has the artist’s name on the left side, suggesting the importance of the art to this project – it looks hauntingly creepy and beautiful. Shy has worked on film conceptual design (Pathfinder, Conan) in addition to his graphic novel work and it shows – the splash pages and individual panels are atmospheric, exquisitely crafted, with an art style that reminds me of Dave McKean and Jon J Muth and Kent Williams; his faces look like photos incorporated into the artwork, and it is unencumbered by word balloons because the dialogue is dropped on top of the art. I’ve never played Dead Space but the art really gives the ambience of the game – the Necromorphs are suitably unreal and horrific, set against the gritty side of space travel and the close-up action of the gun fights. The only problem is in the storytelling – the panel transitions, especially in some of the action scenes, can be confusing and it’s not clear what is happening.

There are a few other niggles that suggest that an editor needed to look over the book. There is no explanation of what the Necromorphs are or how they are created or what the alien marker is all about – instead, I found out about these aspects from the prequel mini-series (which has also been re-released to coincide with this publication, and which I will be talking about next). This book is aimed at people who know the game and don’t need the explanation, but there is something to be said about setting up each story with everything you need to know within the book itself. Then there are the typos (‘alot’ as one word, ‘loose the weapon’ instead of ‘lose the weapon’, ‘its huge’ instead of ‘it’s huge’, ‘in-putting’ instead of inputting’, ‘a low -level’ instead of ‘a low-level’) and inconsistencies in the dialogue (‘Earthgov’ and ‘Earth-gov’, ‘shock beacon’ and ‘shockbeacon’, ‘shock gate’ and ‘shock-gate’) that demonstrate a lack of attention to detail that took me out of the story.

However, the positives just about outweigh the negatives – the character of Carver is intriguing and not the cliché he could easily be (despite the overused ‘character development’ trope of his wife and child dying), the story provides a sense of the nature and atmosphere of the video game, and the art looks like beautiful storyboards for an eerie space horror film, in a good way.

Author Appearance: Warren Ellis at Foyles

noreply@blogger.com (David Norman) — Thu, 28 Feb 2013 22:24:00 +0000

I have been very fortunate to see several of my favourite comic book creators giving talks or in conversation – Alan Moore and Alan Davis in the same day, and Grant Morrison at a similar event at Foyles – and this was another enjoyable personal appearance from a favourite creator. Warren was in The Gallery at Foyles on Charing Cross Road in conversation with journalist/author Sam Leith, specifically to talk about his new novel, Gun Machine, but conversation obviously took in comic books, as would be expected, and Warren – smartly dressed in jacket and waistcoat and with a freshly shaved head – was in a warm and funny mood with a desire to share. These are my hastily scribbled recollections of the night.

We were told to turn our phones to silent at the start – we could keep them on and tweet about the even, as would be expected of @warrenellis, but Warren said that we would only be tweeted by his friends with horrible questions to ask him. Before talking about Gun Machine, Warren was asked about his first book, Crooked Little Vein. Crooked Little Vein was written to shut up his new literary agent (he was with an agency in LA, but the New York office took over and he was inherited by a new agent who constantly pestered him until he wrote 10,000 words of something he considered unsellable; however, two weeks later she phoned him to say, ‘I’ve sold it’, which is why she is still his agent). Crooked Little Vein, Warren said, was written to prove to himself that he could write a novel – if he hadn’t been pushed into it by his agent, he probably wouldn’t have tried prose for a few years, which was something he was thinking about. Now, with Gun Machine, he wanted to see if he could write a good novel (‘But please buy copies’, he joked). He had the spine for the novel and proceeded to write it from page one, word one through to the end, with only one jump when the Warren of that day didn’t consider himself up to the job of writing that passage, so he jumped to the next section and returned to it another day; he said that you are only as you can be on that day, which could be due to something like having only five hours sleep because the cat jumped on his head, but you just have to keep writing – write, write, write and get the bad stuff out of you.

Another thing about Crooked Little Vein: the cooking recipe at the back of the book was the editor’s idea, taken from Warren’s website, and something he’d only put up as a joke. He gets mocked by his daughter when he cooks at home – she pretends to swing a plague bell, shouting ‘Unclean!’. He said she texted a friend ‘Dad cooked and unusually I didn’t die’. ‘Horrible child’, he called her, but you can tell it’s a joke – why else would he have got her a horse?

Gun Machine came out of discussions with Legendary, the studio adapting his Gravel comic book; they wanted to keep the story based in the UK because they thought the USA didn’t have the necessary history, whereas they thought the UK had the weird history that the book needed, calling it ‘mystic’, to which Warren thought, ‘Yeah, we walk around with twigs in our hair and live in Stonehenge’. It got him thinking that the US did have a lot of history, particularly New York. He hasn’t been to New York in over a decade, since he nearly took a flight from Los Angeles to New York on 11 September 2011, but changed at the last minute to reroute the day before via Chicago. He admits that it can keep him up some nights. Anyway, the idea started there, with Mulholland Books saying they wanted a book but it had to be a mystery/suspense book because that’s what they publish, so the two things came together. He used his own memories of New York, used a friend who lives there for research and Google Street Maps to virtually tour the places he used to walk around – it showed him a tree where he knew one didn’t exist 12 years ago, so he put it in the book as a location where a victim was found pinned to it.

He said he used the James Herbert trick – he didn’t describe his male protagonists, and figures showed that something like 95% of his books were bought by men, because they could all project themselves onto the hero without being taken out of the story by physical descriptions (something used in manga, which Warren said is called masking). Tallow is not described in Gun Machine, which is why Reg E Cathey, an African American actor, could do the audiobook and it doesn’t conflict with the book.

Leith asked him about cities, which play an important part in the novel, mentioning Jack Hawksmoor as a previous example. Warren said that cities are an inherent part of his being – half his family is from the East End and he’s lived in or near London all his life – and he can feel the many different levels of history around him when he walks around a big city, feeling the layers beneath him when he walks around London.

He knew Gun Machine would be a novel instead of a comic because it was going to be a very internal story, which wouldn’t work as a comic book (imagining telling his artist, ‘Pages 19 to 45, Tallow looking sad’, in nine panels per page). An aside: he mentioned an anecdote about working on The Authority with Bryan Hitch – they used to discuss scenes before Warren scripted, which Warren thought Hitch would remember, so when it came to the double-page spread of the alien armada in battle with the US Air Force above Los Angeles, Warren wrote ‘The fleets engage’. He got a phone call from Hitch, ‘spitting blood and nails’, because it took him a week and a half to draw it. An interesting aside: when describing Alan Moore’s ultra-controlling scripts and his possible attitudes to the artists who will read them, because Alan wants to control EVERYTHING, Warren used the phrase ‘human meat puppet’ – he said he wouldn’t go that far, but you got the idea.

Warren talked about comic books and how he got into them: he started at the age of three with the weekly comic that had strips based on television shows of the time, such as Doctor Who, Thunderbirds and Star Trek, then he had 2000 AD at the age of nine and he was never the same. As he said, when you open the first page of 2000 AD and see a dinosaur with a mouth full of chewed-up cowboy, Superman comics paled in comparison. But that’s Brit comics for you – he mentioned reading a Dan Dare strip at a young age (which he thought was stuffy at the time) where there was a splash page of a spaceship over Jupiter with a hole in the side and people falling out and their stomachs expanding and exploding due to the vacuum – ‘I never want to read anything else ever again!’ He talked about how comics for him were about generating new ideas, telling new stories, reflecting the times as you go along. He doesn’t want to do the new versions of the company-owned mythologies the way Grant Morrison does. It’s a personal thing, and he doesn’t have the same affection to superheroes because he didn’t read them growing up.

He talked about the difference between prose and comics – in comics, you have to be a journalist, keeping to a word count (citing the maxim of ~28 words per normal-sized panels) and chiselling sentences to full effect and with minimum words, always bearing in mind the artist (he cited that for Colleen Doran, he only has to write the acting of the characters because he doesn’t have to worry about the background and mise-en-scène, whereas other artists require more detail and cinematography). Also, the 20-page limit is a very restricting amount of space to tell the story effectively and requires a lot of craft and effort. However, a novel has no word limit – he could keep on going and take his time.

For someone who has written so much, he said he still dislikes what he has written, even what he wrote the day before. (My theory: he’s mentioned before that the pace of monthly comics meant that he was essentially writing first drafts – therefore, he didn’t get the luxury of disliking what he turned into his editor, and so he kept writing and we got to enjoy his output.)

He said that people keep asking him when he’s going to bring back Spider Jerusalem, which he can’t understand because he finds the character so annoying. He was asked about writing comics set in the US – crass commercialism, on his part, because ‘they don’t want stories set in Southend’. Although it was mostly a chat between Warren and Leith, there were some questions at the end, such as what is his next book about; however, Warren said he couldn’t say anything because he’d been muzzled by his publishers.

A few name drops: Michael Moorcock told him that Elric and Jerry Cornelius were his way into the worlds he wrote, which isn’t the way Warren thinks; he doesn’t return to old characters because he always thinks that new stories demand new characters. William Gibson said, about Gun Machine, ‘this is a compliment, but I found it peculiar’.

An hour in Warren’s company wasn’t long enough – I could have listened to him discuss his work and his approach to writing for hours (we did get to hear him after the talk because he was still miked up, which I found rather amusing), because he’s a smart chap with a very thoughtful, analytical mind when it comes to his craft. He’s also very funny, with an infectious laugh and a desire to entertain and amuse, borne of a natural storyteller (although don’t expect him to direct – he specifically said that he’s only a writer when asked if he wanted to take after Garth Ennis). If you get the chance, I would recommend seeing in Warren in person.

Comic Book Review: Stitched Volume One

noreply@blogger.com (David Norman) — Mon, 25 Feb 2013 22:49:00 +0000

Stitched #1–7
Original story by Garth Ennis
Script and art by Mike Wolfer
Colour by Digikore Studios
Published by Avatar Press

Stitched is a 17-minute short film from 2011, written and directed by Garth Ennis (the trailer can be viewed at the official website). I have to admit I was surprised when I heard that Ennis had moved from brilliant comic book writer into the world of films; I haven’t seen the film, but I’ve been led to believe that it covers the contents of the first issue of this collection of the ongoing series. Three soldiers are the only survivors of a Blackhawk helicopter crash in eastern Afghanistan, one man with a leg injury and two woman; they can’t stay where they crashed because they are in the middle of Taliban-controlled country. However, it is not the locals they have to worry about – there is something else in the mountains that is much worse than armed fighters … Something that the SAS commandos who save the American soldiers call the Stitched.

The Stitched as a concept are a soldier's nightmare: unkillable, unstoppable, controlled by outside force, feel no pain, do not tire, do not need food or drink, they can lie in wait in perfect silence for ever. The Stitched are dressed in white, with all their orifices sewn up (hence the Stitched), who are controlled by men dressed all in black with a can containing pebbles, making a TNNK sound that becomes the harbinger of doom in the book. There is an element of the zombie idea to them but it’s a very different concept, linked to black magic and the deliberate intent to create them as weapons. I think that the idea is scarier than the actuality of the Stitched, which tends towards the gore in the to depict the brutal reality of unstoppable of killing machines, but it is an interesting concept that works well in contrast to the modern fighting soldier.

These seven issues seem to be the extent of the Ennis story (issue 8 sees Wolfer take over story duties, with a new artist and a different storyline), but it’s hard to work out where the line falls between who is doing what in this collection. Is it Wolfer adapting the short film and the idea for a full film that Ennis had? I’m not an expert but I’ve read a lot of Ennis books in my time, since the days of Hellblazer through Hitman and Preacher and beyond), and this doesn’t have the same rhythms and pace of an Ennis book. It is a very Ennis story and concept, and the approach to the modern soldier is right up his alley (which can be seen in such books as 303, Punisher MAX, Hitman and the like); the British soldiers in particular are classic Ennis characters, with their attitudes and dialogue. However, it doesn’t feel exactly the same as Ennis, suggesting that Wolfer is working from Ennis’ notes. This is not a bad thing, but it is something that should be highlighted if you are interested in picking up this book.

The story is a good one – the two teams of soldiers join up to help each other make it out of the mountains alive, with many Stitched in the way and the people behind the Stitched out there as well, leading to gun fights and brutal battles, as well as characterisation that means you get to know the soldiers as they go through this ordeal. Wolfer stages this very well – he is an excellent storyteller (he has been since the days of Warren Ellis’ Strange Kiss) when it comes to the combat, depicting the gruesome details with flair and clarity. The only strange aspect is the faces, which looks like he’s trying to draw likenesses of the actors in the short film for the characters in the book, something that doesn’t seem to be his strength. However, this doesn’t detract from solid art throughout the book, which creates a chilling atmosphere when needed and puts you in the heart of the action, whether you want to or not. I don’t know if this is a film adaptation or not, but it’s a good comic book with a very strong idea behind it.

Live Comedy – David Baddiel: Work In Progress

noreply@blogger.com (David Norman) — Thu, 21 Feb 2013 21:57:00 +0000

When I was a younger man, I was a big fan of The Mary Whitehouse Experience (on television; much to my chagrin, I never knew that comedy existed on the radio in my youth, so I never heard the radio version that ran before it in 1989–1990 and which has never been released commercially), a comedy revue starring and written by David Baddiel, Robert Newman, Steve Punt and Hugh Dennis. I was at university at the time, and seeing four university-educated men of roughly the same age (all four went to Cambridge university and all but Newman were in Footlights; Punt and Dennis had met at Cambridge but were two years ahead of Newman and Baddiel, who started their partnership after university) doing jokes about things I could relate to was great and it was a touchstone in my comedy history (the phrases ‘That’s you, that is’ and ‘Milky milky’ still resonate).

I have seen Newman do live stand-up (his later, more socially conscious material) and watched Punt & Dennis do The Now Show live, but I had never seen Baddiel do live material before, due to the fact that he stopped doing stand-up after a horrible corporate gig he did in 2003 for bankers (something he references in this show). Therefore, I jumped at the chance to see him do new material in front of a relatively small audience in the intimate downstairs venue at the Soho Theatre. It is a work in progress, as he explained at the beginning, on the theme of fame and his relationship with it and how it feels to have been famous at one time (the phrase ‘Comedy is the new rock and roll’ was originally about Baddiel and Newman being the first comedy act to do the Wembley Arena; there was also the Euro ’96 song ‘Three Lions’, with Frank Skinner and Ian Brody from The Lightning Seeds) but to be less famous now.

He started out with anecdote that highlighted the drop in fame levels, the first being an incident of being recognised on Ryanair and another where someone recognised his face on the tube and then told their friend, ‘That’s him from Skinner and Garibaldi’. He went on talk about how he was a famous Jew in Britain (or ‘North Londoner’, one of the many euphemisms for Jew in the British press; he was once voted sixth sexiest Jew but felt disheartened when he discovered that the fifth was Alan Sugar) and how he had stopped doing stand-up after the corporate gig and done more writing (he has written several novels, he used to have a column in the times, he wrote the screenplay for The Infidel), but he was still famous to a degree and the effect of it on him.

There were anecdotes that involved famous people (something he knew sounded bad but it was a result of being famous and so was part of his thesis on fame) that highlighted bizarre aspects of fame. He talked about meeting Peter Gabriel, of whom he is a big fan, but feeling bad about saying the wrong thing; another Gabriel-related anecdote was about The Times wrote a diary piece accusing him of being loud and annoying at a Gabriel concert, which wasn’t true, so he tried to get them to retract it but they wouldn’t, saying they had witnesses and that they’d left the worst bits out, about how he’d told people to fuck off because he’d bought his ticket and could do what he wanted, even when security was called; they didn’t do it even when the person he went with (and who bought his ticket) wrote in to refute it – that person was Richard Curtis; in the end, he emailed Peter Gabriel to stay it wasn’t true, to which Gabriel replied that he knew it wasn’t him because Gabriel knew Baddiel was there on the Wednesday and the incident had happened on Thursday according to his roadie; the roadie then emailed to say that it had been Ian Brody (of ‘Three Lions’), who happens to look a bit like Baddiel, which was enough for The Times to print an apology (although not in a very sincere way).

Baddiel mentioned stories about not being recognised as himself – there was the time Ronan Keating thought he was Ben Elton and then looked angry when Baddiel told him he wasn’t Elton; this led into a story about Andrew Lloyd Webber, who according to urban legend had got the wrong person to write the book for his musical about football, confusing Baddiel (who was famous for loving football through the television show Fantasy Football League) for Ben Elton, and then meeting him in person and then getting into a bizarre situation with Webber’s third wife.

There were lots of stories with famous people in it, but it wasn’t just a collection of amusing celebrity anecdotes; Baddiel had a point to make about how fame is a mask that other people put on famous people that stays that way – people don’t change their minds about famous people once they’ve got the first image in place (my girlfriend has always seen Baddiel as a shouty lad type) and forget that they are real people behind them (as he illustrated with a story about seeing Henry Kelly in a pub after he had done a joke on television about him).

The show isn’t completely coherent, but then this is a work in progress. Baddiel has a good idea about examining fame and he still knows where the joke is in his stories, even he is the butt of those jokes (as demonstrated by the video he showed of Stewart Lee’s song from Lee’s television show that used Baddiel as a punchline). However, the ‘essay’ on fame (his term) doesn’t have a clear beginning, middle and end for the central conceit; it’s still a collection of good bits around a subject, with additional aspects to do with his family (he talked about and showed pictures and video of his kids). With the effort he’s putting in to make this show cohesive, it will be something funny and with some depth.

The negative doesn’t detract from the fact that I had a really enjoyable time – the 60 minutes wasn’t enough, I laughed a lot and could have listened to his stories and jokes for much longer. The audience was friendly (literally – Peter Bradshaw, the Guardian film critic, was in the audience, who co-wrote and starred with Baddiel in Baddiel’s Syndrome, a sitcom on Sky 1 from 2001), apart from one person at the back who tried to add his own joke about a Twitterer who had been trolling Baddiel; the Twitter stuff was interesting, taking into the modern approach to fame as something that’s much closer to ‘ordinary’ people these days and the mistaken bonhomie that followers think they have with the famous people they follow. There were long-time fans of Baddiel in the audience – he mentioned his catchphrase of ‘That’s you, that is’ in order to tell a story about a groupie who wanted him to say it during sex, and the mention got a big cheer from the louder comedy nerds – and they all enjoyed the show as well. It will be interesting to see if this develops into a full show and how it changes from this early draft, and this was a very interesting glimpse behind the curtain of a comedy show in the making.

Comic Book Review: Ferals TPB #1

noreply@blogger.com (David Norman) — Tue, 19 Feb 2013 22:26:00 +0000

Ferals #1–6
Written by David Lapham
Art by Gabriel Andrade
Colour by Digikore Studios
Published by Avatar Press

The small town of Cypress, Lake County, Minnesota. A man is found torn to shreds on the mountain, and his friend is the only person who cares; his friend is also the police in town, Officer Dale Chesnutt, a drunk and a womaniser, who wants to find whoever killed his buddy. That night, Dale gets angry-drunk, hooks up with a strange woman in the bar and gets intimate with her in the bathrooms, before ending up later at the home of his buddy’s ex-wife, where they console each other intimately. However, the morning is the worst comedown ever – the ex-wife is slaughtered by a werewolf, who claws Dale before it is scared off and Dale is now the prime suspect in the murder of both women.

This story starts out as a murder mystery with the horror element added, but there is more to this tale than just a simple genre mash-up. Lapham said in an interview that ‘the idea was to do werewolves differently’, with the starting point of ‘what if werewolves were a people more than just monsters?’ He has certainly achieved what he set out to do – this is a very different take on the werewolf concept. This isn’t the usual bite infections and silver bullets – this is something older and more unusual, involving a small, close-knit community in a smaller town in Minnesota with a dislike of outsiders and a tough manner in dealing with them. It’s a novel approach, one I haven’t seen before, and it opens up a different avenue to explore – this collection is a complete story, but it hints at a bigger world beyond these six issues (it is an ongoing series), something that is also suggested by the involvement of two men in black characters who know more about what is going on.

The book is not for kids – there is violence (werewolves tearing off limbs and mutilating bodies), nudity, sex and swearing – and there is an element of a 1980s film to it, but it’s a little more highbrow than that. The art helps – it doesn’t veer towards the titillating, although it does occasionally veer towards sexy. I’ve never seen any work by Andrade before, but he’s a solid artist and a good find for Avatar – he’s a strong storyteller, with a clear style and no flash or unnecessary flourishes. The ability to draw talking heads and then shift to extreme and bloody violence is tricky, but he does it with aplomb.

Lapham has created an interesting slant on an old concept and an interesting lead character – Dale is rather unlikable, but with the events of the book transforming him into something more than just a drunk, womanising cop from a small town; I’m glad that he’s still going to be the focus in the next storyline because there’s more to explore. I’m always on the lookout for intriguing combinations of old genres, and I had high hopes for a book mixing werewolves and police, which were definitely met. Ferals is a great little book, and I look forward to future instalments.

From A Library: World War Z

noreply@blogger.com (David Norman) — Sun, 17 Feb 2013 19:09:00 +0000

An Oral History Of The Zombie War by Max Brooks

The great thing about this book is that is the scale – this is a book about what happens to the whole world during a zombie epidemic, instead of the small stories that tend to focus on a group of people in a small area. China, Israel, India, Russia, South Africa, Europe, South Korea, Japan, Cuba, the oceans, even the space station – there is a real attempt to imagine the disaster on a worldwide scale, the implications to different societies based on politics, religion or historical attitudes, and eventual return to something resembling normality (that’s not a spoiler warning – there can only be an oral history if people survive).

The story is presented as the unexpurgated interviews by a UN reporter called Max Brooks, which he recorded when producing his Postwar Commission Report – the final document had the non-essential facts removed (‘the human factor’), so this book was written to give the full story, as it were. In making the report, he has visited many survivors and got them to tell him their stories – what they saw, what they did, what the world was like when the world was overcome by a zombie outbreak. It gives a vivid description of the different experiences and the different responses, or lack of responses by certain governments and the way people reacted.

I liked the different viewpoints – the book is fairly America-centric, focusing on how the US responded, how they reacted, how amazing the president was, but the experiences of other countries shows a wider perspective. The way that Europe was grateful for its castles, which acted as defensible strongholds; the way that Russia became a religious empire in response to the outbreak; the way Israel quarantined itself as its response; the way that Cuba survived and then thrived after the way – it’s a fascinating ‘What If …?’ scenario and an impressive piece of thinking and researching of different geopolitical systems. I particularly liked the inclusion of the space station and its role in the post-war recovery. It certainly helps to overcome the heroics of the American bias, even if the author doesn’t quite have the level of detail correct in everything – he has a British survivor helpfully use the word ‘wanker’ to identify him as British, but then has him use the phrase ‘tax dollars’, something a British person would never say.

Despite this linguistic oversight, I thoroughly enjoyed this book – it’s smart, exciting, interesting and thought-provoking. It certainly got me thinking about what would be needed in the event of an apocalypse: get to a castle because it’s a powerful stronghold; thinking about water purification and developing medicine; old weapons that are sharp are definitely good; head north because the zombies will freeze (I know zombies aren’t real – I just thought that was a good piece of thinking). It also doesn’t explain the zombie outbreak: there is a ‘patient zero’ in China, then there are illegal organs sold to South America from China, then ‘The Panic’. I really like this as a book, and I can’t see how it will work as a film (the trailer for the film looks like it is nothing like the book – the zombies are fast in the film, whereas the ‘Zacks’ in this book are the traditional slow variety), but at least the book will always exist in its correct form.

Book Review – Girl Genius: Agatha H And The Airship City

noreply@blogger.com (David Norman) — Wed, 13 Feb 2013 20:00:00 +0000

By Phil and Kaja Foglio
Published by Titan Books

Girl Genius is a comic book series turned online webcomic written by the Foglios and drawn by Phil, and this book is a novelisation of the first storyline. It has a steampunk setting with an alternative world history but the authors additionally describe it as ‘gaslamp fantasy’ to differentiate it because of the other elements in the story – Frankensteinian resurrectionism, soldier monsters, a talking cat – which differentiate it from the relatively straightforward steampunk trappings.

Warfare has nearly destroyed the world after the Industrial Revolution, but Europa is now controlled by tyrannical Sparks – mad scientists who rule through their clockwork armies and bizarre inventions. One man has taken charge: Baron Klaus Wulfenbach, one of his generation’s greatest Spark and friend to the Heterodyne Brothers, the famous Spark adventurers who disappeared and their stories turned to folklore; the Baron has created a ‘peace’ of sorts, the Pax Transylvania, with his Jägermonsters and clanks (steampunk-styled robots) removing aggressors and enforcing the rule of ‘no more fighting’.

Agatha Clay is a student at the Transylvania Prognostic University, working as a lab assistant for Dr Beetle, the Tyrant of Beetleburg. She is a frustrated builder of machines, which are prone to disaster and causes her to have headaches when she tries, and things don’t look good for her future. However, things change when Baron Wulfenbach comes to Beetleburg and Dr Beetle is revealed to have been hiding something he shouldn’t have, and Agatha finds herself on Castle Wulfenbach, the massive airship city that is the floating capital of the Wulfenbach empire, and she starts to discover not only a much larger world than she’s known but things about herself that alter the world around her.

This book is the origin story for our lead character and, as such, has a lot of ground to cover and facts to download. This perhaps explains the sluggishness of the prologue chapter and the first half of the first chapter – it’s slow and feels disconnected from the rest of the book, and I had to re-read them after finishing the novel because they seemed so disparate. However, after the story has got underway, it finds its feet and doesn’t let up.

We are introduced to an interesting and enjoyable world – the Foglios have created a diverse and fascinating little universe, which mixes steampunk with supernatural elements and a good dose of humour: Agatha’s foster parents are called Adam and Lilith, the Jägermonsters speak with a comedy accent (‘Oh vell, he’s a schmot guy’, ‘Iz you okeh?’, ‘Dis is a varning!’), there’s a running joke about Agatha always ending up in her undergarments in front of other people, the son of Klaus Wulfenbach is called Gilgamesh, who has a butler called Wooster and a little clank called Zoing, there is a condition called Post-Revivification Trauma in people who are returned from the dead into constructs, there is a man who fights against the Baron who actually introduces himself as ‘I am Othar Tryggvasen – Gentleman Adventurer!’ (with emphasis on the exclamation point), and the chapters start with fun asides such as the traditional folk saying, ‘When the lightning hits the keep the wise man does not sleep’.

Agatha herself is a very intriguing character, and it’s good to read a strong female character who is all about her brain. It’s a delight to see her come into her inheritance and her developing relationship with Gilgamesh. The Foglios are really good with their characters – they should be used to them after making the webcomic for so long – and they are an interesting cast of people, from the youngsters Agatha is kept imprisoned with to the assortment of monsters and constructs who come in and out of the story.

The story is essentially the first chapter in the ongoing Agatha saga, but it does have its own beginning, middle and end, so you get narrative satisfaction from reading the novelisation, as well as a desire to read the further adventures of the Girl Genius. It also provides a deeper characterisation of the world and everyone involved than can be afforded by the webcomic. This is a funny, charming, exciting, ideas-filled ‘gaslamp fantasy’ that is an enjoyable read, once you’ve got past that prologue and the first chapter.

From A Library: Asterios Polyp

noreply@blogger.com (David Norman) — Mon, 11 Feb 2013 22:11:00 +0000

By David Mazzucchelli

I recently joined City Library in London and it has been a treasure trove of new books that I wouldn’t normally get my hands on, and this has been one of them. This huge hardcover (344 pages – it was a heavy book to bring back from the centre of town) from 2009 is the first in what will be quite a selection of the impressive catalogue.

This multi-award-winning book from Mazzucchelli (there’s a lovely quote on the back: ‘David Mazzucchelli has been making comics his whole life. This is his first graphic novel’) is a very impressive debut from a creator I know only from Daredevil: Reborn and Batman: Year One. It is also what I think of when I hear the phrase ‘graphic novel’ – not just a term adopted by booksellers and the comic book industry to legitimise the medium, but a literary novel with a non-genre story about the human condition that happens to be represented in pictorial form. Everything about this book is an exact marriage of words and pictures to convey the story.

Asterios Polyp is introduced to us at the age of 50 as his home burns down. He is a tenured professor of architecture, esteemed but whose designs have never been built. He was born an identical twin; his brother, Ignazio, died at birth and is the narrator of the story. Asterios is confident, superior, a philanderer and someone who doesn’t listen to anyone but himself. Having lost his home, he decides to take a train to nowhere and ends up working as a mechanic, even though he knows nothing about cars, in a small town called Apogee (‘the highest point in the development of something’, as the dictionary defines it). The story then flashes back to how he met his wife Hana, a sculpture teacher, and their life together and how Asterios ruined the marriage, with the modern story and the past intertwining, plus asides that take in Plato’s Symposium and architect theory.

This feels like a novel in the way that it is small but addresses big things, it is full of characters that are beautifully sketched out (in both senses of the word – Mazzucchelli depicts each character in an individual and distinct style, such as the side profile bust-like look for Asterios, and he expresses their character through dialogue and artistic shape in a masterful way). He experiments with ways of telling his story and his philosophical asides, with big bold images or small details, key panels with no borders or sprawling across the page, changing the form of people from normal to sketchy to geometrical shapes to charcoal-like – it allows him to filter moments so much more expressively than prose can do on its own, giving a new dimension to storytelling that is the essence of sequential art.

The story itself is not the type of thing I’d normally go for but I like to expand my horizons and it had received glowing reviews, and my decision was rewarded with an excellent graphic novel. It has some unusual aspects, such as people having the sort of intellectual conversations that you only read in books or hear in plays (at least in my life, and I went to university), and there are some annoying characters, like Willy Ilium the choreographer who wants to collaborate with Hanna (he’s supposed to be annoying but that doesn’t help), and Asterios is not a particularly likeable person. However, after finishing the story, you feel like you’ve experienced something, which must be exactly what an author is trying to do with his or her work, and Mazzucchelli should be commended for a job well done.

DVD: Catching up with films (which everyone else has already seen)

noreply@blogger.com (David Norman) — Sat, 09 Feb 2013 22:13:00 +0000

Due to various circumstances, I stopped my monthly subscription to a certain cinema chain that allowed me unlimited watching of films on actual proper film screens, with noisy people using their smartphones and coming in late and everything. This meant that I didn’t see many of the films that were in my area of interests (boo-hoo for developed-world problems). However, when my local Blockbuster (history note for children: Blockbuster was a chain of real-world shops where dinosaurs could rent physical copies of recently produced film in a legal transaction involving money, instead of pirating them) sent me a letter announcing it was closing down but including 10 free rentals if I went to another nearby Blockbuster, I couldn’t refuse the generous offer. Which led to me watching eight films over the Christmas period that were released in the past six months. In alphabetical order, here are some thoughts:

Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter
On paper, this is a wonderfully silly idea, which is perhaps why it was a book before it was a Timur Bekmambetov film. Taking one of the most famous American presidents and inserting him into an alternative history genre actioner (where the real reason for the Civil War is because vampires want slaves for food) is inherently funny, at least to non-Americans, so it was a shame that the film seemed lacking in humour. The other disappointing factor was the over-reliance on blatant CGI in ridiculously over-the-top action set pieces, such as a young Lincoln fighting a vampire while they chase each other over the tops of stampeding horses. It leaves you feeling sorry for Mary Elizabeth Winstead, Dominic Cooper and Rufus Sewell.
Rating: DA

The Amazing Spider-Man
AKA The Unnecessary Reboot So That Sony Keeps The Franchise, this is a strange concoction. The DVD has deleted scenes that show an almost different movie, with key scenes completely different to those in the film, hinting at something more sinister behind the deaths of Peter Parker’s parents (alluded to in the credit sequence); this along with the muddy plotting of the film suggest a final product unsure of itself. Marc Webb, who directed the utterly charming (500) Days Of Summer, does well with the non-costume stuff, particularly the relationship between Andrew Garfield and Emma Stone (as Gwen Stacy), who are both very good in their scenes together. However, when we finally get into the costume, the set pieces are solid instead of inspiring and the Lizard looks unimpressive, and it turns from a grounded superhero film into the full bonkers stuff of the comic books. I’m glad I didn’t see it in the cinema.
Rating: DVD

The Bourne Legacy
Another unnecessary film, this time trying to continue the Bourne franchise without Bourne himself, having to create another one from scratch (albeit in the shadow of events occurring in the third Bourne film). This is a perfectly serviceable action film, with Jeremy Renner as a fine if uninteresting lead character, but it tries to include too much of what was in previous Bourne films: Tony Gilroy, who directs and co-writes this film, was a co-writer throughout the previous films and seems to duplicate the hallmarks. There’s running over the roofs and through narrow alleys of an exotic city location, there’s brutal close-action fight scenes, there’s an intense motorised chase scene (except this time with motorcycles instead of cars). The film even ends the same as the first film, with our two leads in a sunny location off the grid (although that doesn’t bode well for Rachel Weisz, who plays a scientist involved in the programme who is rescued by Renner – she’ll get killed in the sequel, as happened to Franka Potente, which is the only thing I hate about The Bourne Supremacy), which seems a bit blatant in its echoing. The thing I’m still trying to figure is why Ed Norton was in it, along with Albert Finney, David Straithairn and Joan Allen …
Rating: DVD

Brave
When I saw initial details about Brave, I thought that it looked like quite a traditional Disney Princess Movie but done via Pixar, which meant it would look great and be a well-constructed story but nothing unusual. Then the reviews came out, suggesting that it was all right but nothing special. However, there are two things that should be pointed out that alter this perception. First, the film takes a complete swerve about halfway through (which perhaps makes it even more Disney-like) and alters the course of the film, meaning it is definitely not a usual princess film. Secondly, as I recall listening to the feedback Mark Kermode got on his review of the film, the film was reviewed as ‘all right’ by mostly male reviewers, who missed the point entirely: this is a film where the stars are a daughter and mother, and the basis of the film is their relationship, albeit told in a highly original and dramatic fashion. If you’re not moved by the ending, then there is something wrong with you. Brave is not up there with the great Pixar films, but it is a very good film and deserving of your attention.
Rating: DAVE

Men In Black 3
Men In Black II was not very good, which is perhaps why there was such a delay between it and this sequel, which got middling to negative reviews. Apart from my major objection to it – that it completely alters the nature of the relationship between J and K from one where K finds J by accident and J proves he has the stuff to be an MiB agent to something totally different – this film isn’t as bad as you might have heard. Josh Brolin does a great young Tommy Lee Jones (Jones is barely in this film), Will Smith is allowed to do Will Smith again in the sequences set in the past (it’s a film that has time travel in it, which seems out of kilter with the MiB universe, something that is acknowledged within the film), and it’s generally quite fun and light (for example, the fun scene where Bill Hader as Andy Warhol is revealed to be an MiB agent who wants out of his undercover role). It has an underdeveloped role for Alice Eve in love-interest mode, Jermaine Clement is not used to his best in the role of the villain, it has a plot point that is similar to the Doctor Who element where the world is saved by placing something on the Apollo 11 rocket, and it has a rushed feel to it (the film started without a proper script in place), but it manages to hang together enough to sail through on the charm of the familiarity of the lead characters.
Rating: DVD

The Pirates! In An Adventure With Scientists!
Based loosely on Gideon Defoe’s The Pirates! In An Adventure With Scientists (the first in his series of books about the characters), this is the first adaptation by Aardman Studios (Chicken Run, The Curse Of The Were-Rabbit, Flushed Away and Arthur Christmas are all original stories) and it’s a lot of fun. With a good voice cast (Hugh Grant stars as the Pirate Captain – all his crew have descriptions instead of names: Martin Freeman is the Pirate with a Scarf; Brendan Gleeson is the Pirate with Gout; Russell Tovey is Albino Pirate; Ashley Jensen is the Surprisingly Curvaceous Pirate – along with David Tennant as Charles Darwin and Imelda Staunton as Queen Victoria) and a strong story – the Pirate Captain wants to enter the Pirate of the Year contest but he’s not very good but sees a chance at fame when they capture The Beagle, where Darwin recognises their parrot Polly is a dodo, and enters Scientist of the Year, despite it being in London and proximity to the pirate-hating Queen Victoria. This allows for fun and lots of lovely gags – my favourite being Mr Bobo, Darwin’s trained chimpanzee, who communicates with speech cards, so when he falls down a big hole he releases a large batch of cards with ‘A’ on them – and all the usual Aardman attention to detail. It’s not as good as The Curse Of The Were-Rabbit, but very few things are.
Rating: DAVE

Snow White and The Huntsman
Female characters have got short shrift when it comes to stories over the centuries, particularly in action films and fairy tales, so I’ve no complaint with the recent trend in female action stars and rejigging old stories to put them in a more pro-active role. In this instance, instead of falling asleep and being rescued, Snow White (in the form of Kristen Stewart) is smart and resourceful and ends up leading a rebellion against the evil queen (Charlize Theron) who killed Snow’s father, took the throne and turned the country into a wasteland. It’s handsomely put together (it’s particularly beautiful when they visit the land of the fairies), but it’s not a completely satisfactory film: Stewart isn’t as inspiring as her speech is supposed to be before the charge against the queen (and her strategy is to just charge at a massive castle full of trained soldiers shooting them with arrows and hurling explosive material down on them), you get distracted by trying to identify the famous people playing dwarves (Bob Hoskins, Ian McShane, Ray Winstone, Nick Frost, Eddie Marsan, Toby Jones), and Chris Hemsworth does a dodgy Scottish accent in his role as the huntsman. However, points for a female-led fairy-tale action film that successfully mixes in elements of the story you know to make something new and interesting.
Rating: DVD

Total Recall
A beat-for-beat remake of the original Arnie-starring film (which I kept seeing being described as a ‘classic’ when people were talking about this film – the Paul Verhoeven Total Recall was many things but it was never and will never be a classic), except there is no Mars and we’re in an apocalyptic world where on Britain and Australia are habitable and they are connected by a tunnel through the Earth’s core. Colin Farrell is a better actor than Arnie and there is more doubt that he is an action hero, there is more for the female leads (Kate Beckinsale as the bad woman and Jessica Biel as the good woman) to do, and the production design is fantastic to look at, but it never surprises and never inspires. It also has lots of little homages to the director Len Wiseman’s favourite films (I detected hints of Die Hard and Blade Runner, among others), indicating a lack of imagination on his part.
Rating: DA

[Explanation of my updated film rating system]

Game: Lego The Lord Of The Rings

noreply@blogger.com (David Norman) — Wed, 06 Feb 2013 20:00:00 +0000

Although I’ve only written about the first Lego Harry Potter game, I have thoroughly enjoyed nearly all the Lego games. All three Lego Star Wars are great, both Lego Indiana Jones are very enjoyable, the second Lego Harry Potter game is expansive (if not as ‘fun’ as the first, what with all the deaths and grimness), the first Lego Batman game is a delight, and even Lego Pirates of the Caribbean is an enjoyable diversion. TT Games has hit on the perfect formula for combining gaming and Lego and popular film franchises, and I can’t wait for the Lego Marvel Super Heroes (even if I have to buy a new system to play it).

The only one I haven’t enjoyed completely was Lego Batman 2: DC Super Heroes. This was because, despite all the awesome in it (All the DC heroes! Playing Superman! Hearing the Superman theme tune when he flies over Gotham! The scale of it!), I was frustrated by the experience of playing the game outside of the game, i.e. going around Gotham and getting the gold bricks and red bricks and buying characters. The city itself, when in the midst of the skyscrapers, is rather samey and not very well delineated, especially as you are searching it at night; the map is not very helpful and it doesn’t feel well integrated into the game or action; flying as Superman in Gotham is headache-inducing, with different mechanics to flying within the game sections, which makes getting around the city a pain (literally). But worst of all is loss of the organic split-screen when two players co-op around the city – while the game sections still maintain the great diagonal split-screen effect when two players roam around the same location, the Gotham section just splits the screen in fixed positions down the middle, with each character getting their own camera, completely defeating the point of the co-op nature of the Lego games that had been such a great part of their success (at least in this household). It meant that, for the first time, we haven’t been bothered to finish the game to 100% – we finished Lego Pirates of the Caribbean and that wasn’t nearly as much fun.

So it was with some trepidation that we purchased Lego The Lord of the Rings as our traditional Christmas game. YouTube clips showed that it had the same annoying fixed split-screen for the open exploring section, meaning that the majority of the game would suffer the same co-op problem as Lego Batman 2. Even though the Lego games have all been enjoyable to a degree, could TT Games make this work?

The short answer is ‘Yes’, but I’ll ramble on for a longer answer because this is a blog after all. The difference between Lego The Lord Of The Rings and Lego Batman 2: DC Super Heroes is that LLOTR is more organic; despite being restricted to the events transcribed in the three films, it has a more natural feel to the game outside the story sections. This feels strange when it is based on a novel whereas the Batman game is an original creation, but the process by which you can visit different parts of Middle-earth to look for Mithril bricks and unlocked characters and go on quests makes a lot more sense and works more intuitively. This means that the majority of the game (i.e. outside the story sections) is more enjoyable and not a grind.

The story sections are based on the films but with typical Lego innovations; unlike the other film-related games, which used silent cut scenes to explain things (with a healthy dose of humour), LLOTR uses dialogue from the film to make it plain what is happening. It takes a bit of getting used to, but it makes sense when there is so much to condense into a fun gaming experience. The transition is done well: each character in the Fellowship has an important part to play in completing each level. Sam is very useful, with a trowel for digging and planting, a tinderbox to start fires, and Elven rope for pulling things. Merry has a fishing rod and Pippin has a bucket, while Frodo has the Light of Earendil to illuminate dark places. Aragorn can track things and gains the sword Narsil, which can destroy Morgul Lego objects. Legolas has his bow and arrow, which can be shot to create Arrow Poles to get to hard-to-reach areas (which only he can use), plus the ability to jump to high places, Gimli can enter small places (as can the Hobbits) and his axe can cut cracked Lego blocks, while Gandalf can levitate various objects and assemble Lego objects. This is standard procedure for a Lego game, but it just feels right for the Fellowship.

As usual, you can’t do everything within the story levels with just these characters, and you will need other characters to obtain all the minikits, treasure items and Blacksmith Designs (for Mithril objects you can get made at the smith in Bree) – I would advise getting the Berserker, who can explode Silver Lego objects and is strong enough to pull the orange lever on certain objects. Certain Mithril objects you can make can do some of the jobs (Mithril Boxing Gloves can pull orange levers, the Mithril Firework can explode Silver Lego objects), but these involve getting lots of Mithril bricks and getting the Blacksmith Designs, which require the special powers in the first place. However, the sense of humour in Lego games is displayed in these Mithril objects, so they are worth getting. My absolute favourite is the Mithril Disco Phial – it is used to illuminate dark places, but it does it with a disco effect and it plays a techno mash-up of dialogue from the film that is one of the greatest things ever (you will never hear some lines of the film in the same way again), especially when you move closer to other characters and it makes them dance uncontrollably.

The in-story gameplay is fun, in the usual Lego method: smash everything to collect Lego studs, beat up everyone, solve the puzzles, build things and enjoy yourself. Outside the story, you get to visit and explore all the locations on the map – even the map feels more natural and navigable, as you can magically teleport from one location to another via Map Stones, and you can set a trail of transparent Lego studs (like the ghost studs in Lego Harry Potter) to direct you to the destination of a Mithril brick or unlocked character or a new quest. This is a great little feature, especially because there are so many of these extracurricular activities to enjoy, which again feels more attuned to the RPG style of The Lord of the Rings milieu and makes it a delight to play (unlike the same process in Lego Batman 2). All in all, a very enjoyable game.

From A Library: Temeraire

noreply@blogger.com (David Norman) — Mon, 04 Feb 2013 18:00:00 +0000

By Naomi Novik

I have to credit Helen O’Hara, Deputy Editor of Empire Online, for her recommendation of this book; on the Empire podcast, when answering readers’ questions about what good books haven’t been adapted into film, she mentioned this book (with a description of ‘Napoleonic wars with dragons’) and because she is smart and cultural person, I knew I had to read it. And I’m very glad I did because it is a great and enjoyable read.

It is the early 19th century, and Will Laurence is a captain in the Royal Navy. His ship captures a French frigate, only to discover a most unusual prize below decks: a dragon’s egg. Because this is a world in which dragons of many different types exist and they are bred and used for fighting battles. Laurence’s ship is far out at sea but the egg is near to hatching – normally, dragons are hatched on land with trained aviators nearby to handle them – and so it is that the dragon hatches and chooses Laurence; Laurence names him Temeraire after a magnificent captured French vessel (it is the French word for ‘daring’), unaware that other aviators name their dragons with grand Latin names. And so Laurence’s life is changed forever by duty – no longer can he stay in the navy, the world he has known all his life, for he is now an aviator in the Royal Aerial Corps, a world considered unsuitable for a gentleman. The book then follows Laurence, an outsider, and Temeraire, a rare Chinese dragon, as they start their training and enter the war.

This is a really enjoyable read, not only for the novel story idea, but also because of the style of the prose: it is written in a style echoing the times, as does the dialogue and the manners which dictate society of the time. Laurence is son of a lord and has been raised accordingly, and is used to the strict code of etiquette and discipline of the navy, and the ways of a gentleman in polite company. His world is one of rules and conduct, of gentlemen being dressed properly, of women having no place in war; Novik elegantly portrays this society and the differences therein, in a well-researched book that really puts the reader in the historical context of the time. The grounding of the book in the reality of the Navy (I’ve never read the Master and Commander books by Patrick O’Brian – I’ve only seen the film, but I could hear that voice in this book when I was reading) allows the book to blossom into the fantastical without any loss of believability, an impressive feat for a debut novel.

I really liked this book – the world of dragons is so three-dimensional, with the different types (Regal Coppers, Longwings, Winchesters, Yellow Reapers) and the extravagant names given to them by their handlers, the characters (both human and dragon) are vividly drawn and interesting, and the setting is a perfect one for introducing fighting with flying (the battle scenes are dynamic and thrilling) when the world was about to be dominated by the power of the Navy. I’ve got lots of catching up to do – there will be nine books in total in this series (the ninth to be published this year) – and I’m going to enjoy the task.

Notes On A Film: Django Unchained

noreply@blogger.com (David Norman) — Sat, 02 Feb 2013 14:00:00 +0000

Quentin Tarantino is a confident man – confident in his abilities as a film-maker, a scriptwriter, a salesman for his work, and the success of his place in cinema. It is what has allowed him to make relatively few films but at his own schedule, films that are overlong and indulgent but are nevertheless enjoyable, cine-literate mash-ups of exploitation genres. This means that he believes himself when he says that Django Unchained is a film that addresses slavery because of its historical accuracy despite the fact that the film is never going to be treated as a cinematic textbook – there are minor things such as sunglasses, types of guns and the use of dynamite at the time of the film, but the main issue is the total lack of evidence for ‘Mandingo fighting’, the gladiator-like unarmed fights between slaves (if you type 'Django Unchained historical accuracy' into Google, you'll get lots of returns). That’s not a problem – Hitler didn’t die as he did in Inglourious Basterds – but Tarantino can’t have his cake and eat it too, something that Tarantino refuses to see in his self-worshipping blindness. It is this blindness that also prevents Tarantino the director from putting Tarantino the actor in his films – I thought Death Proof would see the last time he was a speaking character, but you should be warned that Tarantino has a cameo in this film, his doughy frame looking out of place on screen, accompanied by a horrible Australian accent. The only thing that redeems this is the manner of the character’s death (it’s not a spoiler warning to say that a LOT of people die in this movie).

This is a very long introduction to my assorted thoughts about Django Unchained, a film that I found more enjoyable than the frustrating Inglourious Basterds and the dull Death Proof, although it is still self-indulgently long (at 165 minutes), takes its sweet time to get to the good stuff and, despite having lots of talking, doesn’t have the same dialogue crackle of Tarantino’s earlier films. However, when it gets to the good stuff, it is deliriously, violently fun and makes the build-up almost worthwhile.

It is two years before the US Civil War (I like how a lot of people have been using ‘antebellum’, meaning pre-war, when describing the timeframe of the move – it’s a good word and it’s nice to see), and Dr King Schultz (Christoph Waltz) is a bounty hunter masquerading as a bounty hunter who frees a slave called Django (Jamie Foxx) in order to locate three men with a bounty on them. They enter into an agreement where they will share the bounties during the winter, after which Schultz will help Django to free his wife, Broomhilda (Kerry Washington), from seedy plantation owner Calvin Candie (Leonardo DiCaprio), by pretending to be a bored rich man and his freed slaver looking to buy a slave from Candie for the Mandingo fights.

For most of the film, it is almost a buddy picture, as Schultz and Django are rarely apart, with Waltz doing his delightful delivery of Tarantino dialogue and Foxx not speaking as much but looking cool in the process. DiCaprio is good in his role, infusing subtlety within the more pantomime elements of his first villainous role, but he is upstaged by Samuel L Jackson, who plays the house slave at Candie’s plantation – he is wonderfully horrific as a slave who hates blacks as much as whites (he is furious with his master when told that Django will be staying in ‘the big house’, livid that a ‘nigger’ will be sullying his master’s home and requiring that they burn the sheets of the bed where he will sleep). Because this is a Tarantino film, there are also recognisable actors in small roles (Bruce Dern in a cameo, Don Johnson as a plantation owner, Jonah Hill as a member of a proto Ku Klux Klan, Walter Goggins as one of Candie’s workers) as well as James Remar playing two totally different roles in the film for no reason. It also has the homage/self-indulgence of a cameo from Franco Nero (‘with the friendly participation of Franco Nero’), the original Django, which feels very close to the current trend of Hollywood to include a cameo for the original star in the remake.

It is a very violent film – at one point, a slave is torn apart by dogs – and the squibs that explode when people are shot are huge, spitting out pints of blood and chunks of flesh for a single bullet. It’s entertaining violence, not ‘real’ violence, cinematic violence, performed to elicit the visceral response of justifiable revenge in the audience. Near the end, a woman gets shot with a revolver but she is blown away like she’s been hit by a cannon, and your response is supposed to be laughter, in that strange way that Tarantino is able to produce. The enjoyment from all the death that arrives at the end of the film is earned from the believability of Foxx in the lead role, and in his love for his wife – you want them to be together, you want him to get revenge on the people who have mistreated him personally and who have abused slaves for years because of their position in society. This is not a film about American history – this is a film about film history (as Tarantino’s films always are), a beautifully shot exploitation film that leaves you with a big smile on your face.

Rating: DAVE

[Explanation of my updated film rating system]

Notes On A Film: Lincoln

noreply@blogger.com (David Norman) — Wed, 30 Jan 2013 20:54:00 +0000

I don’t know if it’s because I’m British or because my knowledge of history, and in particular American history, is fairly basic but I have been aware of Abraham Lincoln on a fairly shallow level. I know he was assassinated in a theatre, I know he freed the slaves and ended the Civil War, but for the most part I know him as caricature – the tall hat, the silly beard and the speeches (and I’m not just talking about Bill And Ted’s Excellent Adventure or Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter, which I suppose you could consider the unofficial prequel to this film) – and not as a real person. Daniel Day-Lewis has changed that with his amazing performance as the great man in this well-written and well-directed film looking at a small but important section of his life.

Lincoln the film mostly takes place over a short period of time in January 1865, and is about the behind-the-scenes political wrangling required to find enough votes in the House of Representatives to pass the 13th Amendment to the US Constitution that banned slavery, which was necessary to make the Emancipation Proclamation into law. The whys and the hows are made clear in the film but it doesn’t talk down or oversimplify matters – this is West Wing: The Early Years, where people talk quickly using terms that are not used outside political discussions and in a language that is representative of the time. And there is a lot of talking – this film is mostly men with silly facial hair in rooms having animated discussions about important things, until we reach the climax of the vote in the Capitol at the end of the film. However, it is thoroughly absorbing, as you watch good actors exchange intelligent dialogue in believable settings about a fascinating point in history.

Spielberg is in serious-mode here (see Amistad, Schindler’s List or Saving Private Ryan) and so keeps a tight control on his Spielbergian flourishes, maintaining an intimate tone to reveal the weight of proceedings. Despite many scenes occurring in small spaces with a necessary sense of crampedness, the film doesn’t feel small or televisual. He matches and enhances the tone of the intelligent script, allowing the events to speak instead of overwhelming them. He also brings out excellent performances from a lot of familiar faces: Tommy Lee Jones is great as Thaddeus Stevens, leader of the Radical Republication faction of the Republican Party and fierce opponent of slavery (and he gets most of the best lines in the film); David Strathairn is typically good as Secretary of State William Seward; Sally Field is excellent as Mary Lincoln, showing her smarts as a political operator and the emotional fragility after the loss of their son without falling into histrionics; and a host of recognisable faces are typically good in other roles (Hal Holbrook, James Spader, Tim Blake Nelson, John Hawkes, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Walton Goggins, Jared Harris).

But it is Day-Lewis who dominates the film. His performance encompasses the entirety of the man and the myth of Honest Abe. He looks taut and thin and walks as if his feet are too heavy in his physicality while the weight of his position and what he is trying to do is evident on his face; he charms people with his storytelling (the anecdote about picture of George Washington in a toilet is great) but he’s also a shrewd political operator when needed, sharp and quick with his understanding and discussion with his lawyer’s skills; he’s an orator, naturally, but also a father and husband, trying to keep his son from fighting in the war for justifiable selfish reason and coping with a wife who almost withdrew from reality due to the death of their son (there is a great scene between the two of them that shows there was life outside of political history). It works to give three dimensions to a character shaded now by history and importance, and is thoroughly deserving of the Academy Award he will no doubt win.

Rating: DAVE

[Explanation of my updated film rating system]

Comic Book Review: Everybody Loves Tank Girl

noreply@blogger.com (David Norman) — Sun, 27 Jan 2013 19:57:00 +0000

Everybody Loves Tank Girl #1–3
Written by Alan Martin
Drawn by Jim Mahfood
Published by Titan Books

Since Tank Girl first appeared in Deadline back in 1988, the visual element of the character and the strips was the main appeal. I have some old Tank Girl comics but I don’t remember much of the stories; it was the art of Jamie Hewlett that sticks in my mind. I think this is one of the reasons that the creative credits on the front cover and on the interior stories has the Mahfood’s name first and Martin’s name second, even though Martin writes the stories. Because the stories here are a strange collection of assorted bits and pieces, nothing resembling a concerted narrative over the three issues, just a collection of fragments that don’t amount to a whole.

For example, there’s a two-pager where Tank Girl cons her boyfriend Booga out of money so she and her friends get a nice meal while he starves; there are splash pages that are like artistic tone poems, with an image accompanied by some strange prose or what feels like a song lyric; there's a short tale where Tank Girl and Booga kill a lot of people while on LSD (which makes for some trippy visuals, at least), or there's the short story about the Sixteenth Annual Australian Swearing Competition that is silly (but the swearing doesn’t feel very Australian). There’s a two-page story of crystals talking to each other (which felt like a homage to The Young Ones), a gunfight with the Wee-Wee Brothers (who stand around with their trousers down, urinating), a story where Booga accidentally kills the people hunting him and Tank Girl by urinating from the top of a mountain and the piss icicles created skewer the hunters – I don’t think juvenile covers the level here. Perhaps the most interesting story is Tank Girl 2: The Motion Picture, which does seem to acknowledge the fact that the film was an abysmal piece of rubbish, but then can only manage the suggestion that any adaptation of Tank Girl would be rubbish anyway, even when Tank Girl (and by extension her creators) is responsible.

The book has very strange references: it was written/drawn/published before the Jimmy Saville scandal, because there is the chair from ‘Jock’ll Sort It’ in one strip, which seems completely unexpected now after the fallout from the affair. ‘Frying tonight!!’, a reference to Carry On Screaming! (1966) – how many reading this comic will get that reference? The next reference – ‘And the quarterback is toast!’ – is at least a little more recent (1988’s Die Hard), but it does make you wonder who this comic book is aimed at. There is one main strip that runs through the three issues, about babysitting ‘Feldman Haim’ (named after the two actors with the first name of Corey from The Lost Boys [1987]), and involves the Arty Farty gang. High art this is not. It also ends with the worst sort of ending – effectively, part of it where the kids gets shot in the end was a dream, which is really weak – that makes it even more pointless. It’s fairly juvenile stuff, but not in an fun way (compare and contrast with Evan Dorkin’s Milk and Cheese, for example), and it wants to be edgy and mainstream at the same time (the opening has a Simpsons reference but there are lots of F and C bombs as well, and there is quite a lot of imaginatively drawn beheadings and killing).

The art, which includes black and white pages with some stories in full colour, is the main draw and your enjoyment will depend on how much you enjoy his work. I’ve been a fan of Mahfood since I first saw it in the pages of the Clerks books written by Kevin Smith at Oni Press and then his own Grrl Scouts, with his cartoony style and thick lines infused with his punk-funk/hip-hop sensibility. However, since those days, his work has gotten looser and scratchier and more influenced by graffiti and underground comix, with attention paid equally to the background details and the main action of the characters. Mahfood fills the panels with minutiae that add nothing much to the story but give a sense of the world and the atmosphere he’s trying to attain in his pages, such as the page inside the ‘hippie-fest’ filled with silly little aspects, or he’ll put in the cover to Funkadelic’s Maggot Brain LP for no particular reason. The book also includes Mahfood’s sketches done for the book, and his finished work is quite close to the sketches – the artwork in the book is just as rough and ready as the sketches, which gives the impression of rushed pages despite all the details. But, in the end, the book is for Mahfood and Tank Girl completists only.

Comic Book Review – Johnny Red: Angels Over Stalingrad

noreply@blogger.com (David Norman) — Sun, 06 Jan 2013 21:48:00 +0000

Written by Tom Tully
Drawn by Joe Colquhoun
Published by Titan Books

This is the third handsome hardback collection of strips of Johnny Red from Battle in 1978 (I reviewed the first volume previously), compiling the storyline where Johnny ‘Red’ Redburn, a British pilot who ended up in Russia fighting with a Russian fighter squadron after accidentally killing another British officer, ends up at Stalingrad in October 1942, where the German Sixty Army is laying siege to the city while Russian soldiers and citizens try to defend it. As Garth Ennis points out in his excellent introduction (where he sets the scene for the stories in the book and tells you more about Hurricane fighters than you ever wanted to know), not only does this book do an excellent job of portraying the brutal reality of this horrific confrontation, it also manages to make heroes of Soviet Communists in a British war comic, which is an amazing achievement.

The first storyline concerns the conclusion of the storyline from the second collection, where the brother of the soldier Red killed is out for revenge (Tully does a great job of setting up this story in the first caption of each strip, which was only three or four pages each week, with the minimum of exposition to understand the story). Although there is dramatic licence in the stories, it is based on historical fact, and the accuracy of the book is also represented in the artwork, which is excellent in its depiction of aerial battles and ground conflict and the ravaged cityscape, packing in immense detail into the many panels needed to tell the story without losing clarity or connection with the characters. Colquhoun has a rough edge to his line work, appropriate to the nature of war comics and their harsher setting, but the detail and attention in every panel is always present and it really puts you in the heart of the action and the intense conflict.

After the first storyline, there a small interlude that isn’t as strong, where Johnny Red is captured by Germans and held to be executed before being rescued by his Russian co-pilots, before getting into the main story about the fighting in Stalingrad and the Angels of Death, a fictional representation of the Russian women of the 588th Night Bomber Regiment, nicknamed the Night Witches. These were heroic women who fought and died throughout the war in the toughest conditions imaginable, and it is to the testament of the book that the fictional counterparts play tribute to their legacy.

Another interesting aspect of this book, again pointed out by Ennis in his introduction, is the portrayal of Captain Nina Petrov, the leader of the Night Witches – she is shown as someone who is equally as competent in war as our main hero and is treated as an equal within the stories, be it flying her obsolete bi-plane in treacherous conditions to bring supplies to the beleaguered Russians in Stalingrad while the German army tries to stop them, to fighting with Johnny Red on the ground in Stalingrad, killing Germans and getting injured. These stories were published in the 1970s, not a great time for the portrayal of women in popular culture, let alone a boy’s comic book, so Tully and Colquhoun have done something special with this book. The stories here are exciting and educational (without being dry) but they also serve as a reminder of history and what it was like in reality (truly ‘grim and gritty’ comics), as memory of the war recedes and the people who served and survived pass away, keeping alive the memories so that we never forget the sacrifices that were made, but all told in excellent comic book form.

Book Review – Foundation: The Collegium Chronicles Book I and Intrigues: The Collegium Chronicles Book II

noreply@blogger.com (David Norman) — Sun, 16 Dec 2012 21:58:00 +0000

By Mercedes Lackey

I like to think that I’m fairly well read, or at least read enough about the areas I’m interested to have some knowledge of a wide variety of different genre-related materials, so it’s slightly embarrassing to admit that, before reading these books, I had never heard of Mercedes Lackey, despite the fact that she is a best-selling author of dozens of books. I never said I was omniscient …

The majority of Lackey’s stories are set in the country of Valdemar on the planet Velgarth, where she has created an engrossing society and populated with a variety of character types tinged with elements of magic and psychic powers. However, you wouldn’t know this from the thirty pages of the first book: we are introduced to Mags (short for his nickname, Magpie), an orphan working in a gemstone mine with other orphans, all treated appallingly by the mine owner. We are shown his horrible day-to-day existence, which feels pretty gruelling to read and makes you wonder why you are bothering to continue. Then the whole book changes: Mags is freed from the mine by a Herald and is Chosen by a Companion, an intelligent magical creature that looks like a white horse with silver hooves and blue eyes, with whom Mags is now bonded and taken to Haven, the capital of Valdemar, to be inducted as a Trainee Herald at the Collegium and introduced to a world that he never knew existed outside the mine (and also to introduce us to this world as well).

Knowing nothing about the Valdemar stories helped me to enjoy this introduction to Lackey’s world. I was pleasantly surprised by the shift from the misery of the mine to the society filled with Healers and Bards and the Heralds (who act as arbiters and soldiers and peace-keepers in Valdemar, under the leadership of the King of Valdemar, who is also a Herald) and the psychic gifts such as Mindspeech and the ability to heal and the concept of the Companion (which is similar to the concept of the Dragons of Pern, with the special bond between dragon and rider, as well as the ability to psychically communicate). It was a great reveal, something that might not be the same for long-term fans of the Valdemar novels. Another factor that was enjoyable was the love of storytelling in the prose: there is a quote on the back from Stephen King – ‘She’ll keep you up long past your bedtime’ – which is quite true because I found I couldn’t stop once I started. The story keeps drawing you through, as you get to know the characters and this new world and the fantastical elements involved. Lackey has also done a great job of world-building; I particularly liked the details of the Midwinter Festival and the ceremony of Midwinter Eve, which was quite touching. A more personal reaction occurred in a passage where Mags has a discussion about his belief in doing what is right and his moral centre, despite being treated so badly his entire life (he had been effectively a slave since he was born), which resonated very strongly, something I wasn’t expecting.

The plots of the two books don’t have well-defined plots driving the narrative – the novels are more about the introduction of Mags to this world and the characters he meets, with a background element about sinister foreigners which comes to fruition at the end of each book in a relatively small way. This is not to the detriment of the books, which I found absorbing and entertaining, but more to do with the strange parallels I found with the Harry Potter novels (each of which has a main plot device driving each book). Both feature an orphan who is rescued from a life of misery, taken to a special school where they find that, in addition to the magical elements that makes them special, they have a gift for some element of that world (for Harry it was Quidditch and riding a broom; for Mags, it’s riding despite never having ridden a horse before); both have no previous knowledge of the world into which they are thrust, and both characters become friends with a girl and a boy (Mags befriends Lena, a Bardic Trainee, and Bear, a Healer Trainee) who become part of their adventures and who seem to be on the path to a romantic relationship; both have a senior figure take a special interest in their development (Mags is taken under the wing of Herald Nikolas, a King’s Own Herald, who teaches him extracurricular lessons to do with spying). The second book sees even more bizarre parallels: Mags becomes a team member for the new sport in the Collegium, called Kirball, which involves strange rules (although perhaps not as strange as Quidditch), and becomes a star player in his first game; like Harry being seen as a danger because he speaks Parseltongue in The Chamber Of Secrets, Mags is seen as a danger because he discovers that his parents were foreigners (FarSeers, sort of more accurate fortune tellers, have seen the King with blood on his hands in the presence of a ‘foreigner’), which sees him isolated from his support network of friends. I know these are not deliberate, and similarities between stories can be seen anywhere if you look hard enough; it’s probably because I’m a big fan of Harry Potter that I noticed these when reading. However, it didn’t take away from my enjoyment from these two novels and the character of Mags. I want to know what happens in the next books and I want to read more about the world of Valdemar – which is going to be a task in itself, considering how many books Lackey has written …

Notes On A Film: Skyfall

noreply@blogger.com (David Norman) — Sat, 08 Dec 2012 21:45:00 +0000

Some belated notes on Skyfall, long after any discussion has finished so I could talk about it with some spoilers, just to get things out of my head. In an interview, Sam Mendes (the first Oscar winner to direct a James Bond movie) talked about the slight influence of The Dark Knight on his approach to directing Skyfall, and how he could make a darker movie with an established cinematic character. The strange thing is that there are other influences of the Christopher Nolan reinvigoration of Batman in the script itself. The main connection is between the bad guy of Skyfall, Silva (played by Javier Bardem with blonde hair and eyebrows) and Heath Ledger’s Joker: they both have the ability to calculate a wide-ranging plan that involves their deliberate capture and other elements that are outside of their control but have predicted will occur based on the knowledge of what the systems will do once they set their plans in motion; this level of predictive power seems to be outside their displayed range of character – the Joker is a psychopath who wants chaos yet somehow shows amazing levels of discipline and research to obtain his goal, while Silva was a secret agent in the field who now displays ‘movie level’ (i.e. completely implausible) hacking skills; there is even a visual link between them in the disfigurements around their mouths. There is also a reveal at the end where a character’s name is dropped to appeal to fans of the Bond movies that reminded me of the similar one at the end of The Dark Knight Rises. It was quite disconcerting.

Skyfall is a film that celebrates Bond in his 50th year onscreen and, in doing so, tries to have its cake and eat it by maintaining the Bourne-style Bond of Daniel Craig’s debut in Casino Royale but also throwback to the well-known tropes of the Bond canon. After an opening chase scene, there is a classic Bond opening credits sequence of twirling shapes and Craig shooting mirrors with the Walther PPK and naked women, all to the thundering theme song by Adele, with excessive mention of the name of the film in the lyrics. There is a new (and younger) Q in the form of Ben Whishaw, there’s a cameo from the original Aston Martin (and mention of the ejector seat) and there’s more quipping in this film, although not to the level of Roger Moore’s eyebrow acting. It seemed a bit odd after trying to ground Bond in a newer, harsher reality in Casino Royale and the weaker Quantum of Solace (the only positive to come out of Quantum of Solace is the alternative theme song by Joe Cornish), but perhaps it’s because I’m not a huge Bond fan that it seemed noticeable.

Skyfall is a smaller, more intimate Bond film. The notional villain may look unusual and have an island base, but the story is about Silva going after M – Bond does fly to exotic locations to discover who he is, and sleep with women and kill henchmen, but it’s all about protecting M and the relationship she has with the agents she controls. It’s an unusual approach for Bond movies, which are usually about someone doing something horrible that will have a drastic effect on the world, and I have to admit that I wasn’t expecting this storyline from this film when I had seen such good reviews for the film, which has had an effect on my appreciation for the film. There is also some delving into Bond’s past as a child, as the family home is revisited and the past still haunts him.

It is a well-made film: Mendes shows he can do action (and gets Roger Deakins to shoot it beautifully) and he works well with the actors, who all do a good job – Craig inhabits the character in the way he moves but also handles the emotional levels; Judi Dench is excellent as usual, and it’s great to see more of her in this film; Bardem is suitably creepy and odd as the villain; and it’s nice to see the quality of actors in a Bond film with the likes of Ralph Fiennes, Naomie Harris, Albert Finney, Rory Kinnear and Helen McCrory. There are good set pieces, plenty of well-choreographed action, and London looks like London in a film, which makes for a nice change.

There are some things that annoyed me to the point of taking me out of the film. There was a small thing (someone getting into a lift and not turning around so Bond could do a cool thing), a slightly bigger thing (Bond doesn’t shoot to wound Silva at a critical juncture for no reason whatsoever, allowing Silva to do something that allows him to escape), a London-centric thing (how can Bond and Silva slide down the escalators on the underground when, in real life, there are metal protrusions all the way along to stop you doing exactly that?) but there was a huge thing: Q is investigating the computer of the implausibly super hacker Silva, which has hacked into MI6 computers and blown up part of the building, and he connects it to MI6’s network in order to hack it – this is incredibly stupid (has he never seen any film ever?) and requires a character who is intelligent to do something absurdly idiotic for the sake of the plot. Sigh.

Overall, I guess I enjoyed Skyfall and would probably recommend it, although I’m not as overwhelmed by it as a lot of professional critics have been, so your mileage may vary.

Rating: DVD

[Explanation of my updated film rating system]

Comic Book Review – Supercrooks: The Heist

noreply@blogger.com (David Norman) — Sun, 02 Dec 2012 13:54:00 +0000

Supercrooks #1–4 by Mark Millar and Leinil Yu

It may sound like a simple pitch – Ocean’s Eleven with supervillains – but it’s a good one (and superpowers make everything better) and the execution is equally good, which means that Supercrooks is a great example of a comic book that tells a fun, high-concept story in an entertaining fashion and leaves you with a sense of enjoyment afterwards. That’s exactly what I want from my disposable pop culture entertainment.

The plot has a similar start to the film – our protagonist, Johnny Bolt, comes out of prison (after being stopped by superhero, The Gladiator) and helps out his old mentor Carmine to steal from a very rich but more unpleasant supervillain (known as The Bastard – Millar isn’t subtle), gathering the old gang together, while trying to win back Kasey (also a supervillain, a psychic), the woman he unfortunately left at the altar when he was stopped by The Gladiator after robbing a jewel store on the day of his wedding. However, this is a different story, and not just because it has superpowers involved. The other high-concept element is the idea of committing a crime in a country where there are no superheroes – the heist takes place in Spanish island of Tenerife.

This is efficient comic books: the first chapter is the set-up, the second chapter is getting the gang together (The Ghost, the world’s greatest burglar; TK McCabe, the telekinetic; Forecast, the weather-maker; Roddy and Sammy Diesel, the indestructible men; plus blackmailing The Gladiator into helping them), the third chapter is the plan and the start of the heist, and the final chapter is conclusion and the reveal (which owes a slight debt to Ocean’s Eleven). Millar packs a lot into these four books, essaying his characters quickly and efficiently, showing how the villain of the piece is truly vicious (and thus deserving of the heist) and letting us know that our gang of supervillains are not as bad because they don’t kill, while setting up the world he has created for the story and delivering the tale in an entertaining way.

Yu is a great artist for this type of tale – although he does has a tendency to draw women who are all pneumatic, he has a sharp, slick style that brings a polished and modern sheen to the story. He is a good storyteller, does great action and can also bring out the humour in the situation, such as the completely nuts situation of the two indestructible men running through the molecular chainsaw in the vaults during the heist, regenerating each time. I’ve loved his work since I first saw it in a Wolverine comic written by Warren Ellis in 1997 and he’s only got better and slicker since.

This is fast-paced slice of comic book action – it’s not world-changing or reinventing the wheel or anything more than a piece of entertaining fiction – but not everything has to be. This does what it says on the tin and does it well, so you have to like it for that. This is being developed into a film co-written by Millar with director Nacho Vigalondo (who gets a co-plotting credit), which ‘doubles the number of twists’ of the comic, although I’m not sure I’d enjoy adding extra to the narrative – it is a lean tale already that doesn’t need extra fat. Recommended.