The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant, The Unbeliever

I think I started reading this first trilogy about three to four years ago. My transition to a more technologically focused life has made my reading habits become very drawn out. I’ll often put a book down for months at a time, especially if it bores me at all. Unfortunately these books are in the old style of very heavy description, and thus are quite often a bit of a chore to get through. However, they are not bad books, and not your average fantasy series.

The main difference from every other fantasy story I’ve ever read is that the protagonist is a bit of an antihero. An unwilling, angry, self-hating guy with leprosy. He’s transported from his miserable life as a writer whose career has been ended by his disease, to your average fantasy world full of very Tolkein-esque creatures and lore. In the first book, he establishes his disbelief of this reality very strongly, even though it feels exactly like real life; as a leper though his concept of reality has become a dismal one, and he takes this land of health and vigor as a threat to his mental self-preservation. He ends of doing some kind of nasty stuff in this world he claims to be false, and can’t help but hate himself even more. The people of The Land somehow painfully look past his misdeeds, as he is of course supposed to be the fabled savior of legend, reincarnation of Berek the Half-hand (he lost two fingers to his leprosy), bearing the white-gold ring of wild magic, which happens to be his wedding ring from our world.

Then there’s a lot of arguing, Covenant saying “Hellfire!” about 357 times, a bunch of walking and riding horses, and battles of good vs. evil. Most of the story is filled with tragedy at least in part brought into play by Covenants refusal to accept his place as the savior. He goes back and forth between worlds a few times, and each time the real world becomes more and more dismal while The Land follows suit. It’s a pretty difficult read really; not a lot of happy stuff happens. There’s a jovial giant character, but as the story goes on his mirth diminishes, understandably considering his situation of being the last of his kind, for which whose demise he blames himself somewhat unjustly. Of course the end results in a kind of victory for good, although Covenant’s take on the whole thing is still largely one of dismissal, even in the face of death. He’s a pretty frustrating guy.

As a whole I enjoyed the story, it just took a really long time to read it. I think if it had compressed the descriptive stuff and made the characters a little fuller, I would have sped through it much quicker and had a better grasp of the message. As it is though I don’t think I’ll be reading the second trilogy. It’s just too much of a task. Still, it’s an interesting look into the mind of a man who cannot accept that his life can change from a state of decay, and yet pushes away any hope of health in order to continue his painful existence. Remind me never to get leprosy.

FlashForward

This show tried really really hard to be Lost. I think a lot of shows will be doing that for a while now. They even brought in one of the main Losties, a hobbit known as Meriadoc Brandybuck. Too bad they didn’t get the writers. I guess that might be a bad assumption, I’m not sure whether they got any of them or not. I think it would have been a better show if they did though, since it wouldn’t be that big of a feat to make it more entertaining.

The premise kind of kills the show in the first episode. You pretty much know how the series is going to end, because every person on the planet (almost everyone that is) gets to see about 2 minutes of their lives a few months in their futures. These futures are revisited seemingly ad infinitum throughout the 22 episode run, so we don’t even have the chance to forget what’s going to happen and be all surprised. Of course, one question the show asks repeatedly is whether this future can be changed, and it seems it can. However, the stuff at the end changes very little and thus makes for a pretty dull finale.

The future gimmick isn’t really the reason the show fails though; In and of itself it’s a pretty interesting trope. The real failure is the characters. Much like the other ABC POS, V, there isn’t a single really likeable character in the whole thing. The main guy, seen lovingly manhandling the asian dude in the picture I chose, is a highly annoying, serious, stupid, and repetitive pile of emotional trainwrecks. His angry buddy there is equally stupid if a little less annoying. The rest of the cast varies in its blandness but never gets anywhere near its target of say Hurley or Sawyer. Even Jack is better than these cutouts.

The setting is often boring too. It’s a big ol’ sterile FBI center for the most part. I will admit it was all miles better than V’s pathetic CGI sets though. There were even a few kinda nifty sets once in a while, like some weird place in the middle-east and stuff. Meh.

Anyway the show got cancelled. The end of the finale seemed to be setting up for another season, but now those threads will never be woven. I’m okay with that, really, because I almost give a small crap about where it could go, and would therefore probably have to watch season 2 if it had been approved. Thanks TV studio executives, you finally did something right.

Fringe – Season 1

I saw the pilot quite a while before the show went on air. I didn’t really like it. Dunno why. I didn’t start watching again until somewhere around midway through the second season which just wrapped up recently, when I suppose I was bored or something. As it happens, that episode would turn out to be one of the highlights of the season, in which a whole bunch of crazy whatsit happens. Kinda made me wish I’d been keeping up with the show. So, a few episodes later, I made myself buy the first season on Blu-Ray, and got watching. It’s been a good ride.

Fringe is very similar in premise to the much-loved X-Files of yore. However, it has much higher production values, and according to the bits of X-Files that I’ve seen, it seems to have a bit more of story-arc setup although it definitely has monster-of-the-week thing going on. Also Anna Torv is way hotter than Gillian Anderson ever was. Another difference, as far as I can see, is that Fringe is much more science-based than its predecessor, which often got into very mystical thingamajiggers. Still, the “science” is only just based in reality and relies on pretty nutso extrapolation to make it entertaining; and entertaining it often is.

The cast is quality. Anna Torv is of course the resident hottie FBI agent, and does a great job of communicating her emotions despite her somewhat immovable face. Walter Bishop (John Noble) is an old slightly bonkers mad scientist turned good guy with a mission to right the seemingly endless wrongs he’s committed in his forgotten past, and his son Peter (Joshua Jackson) is his reluctant caretaker and generally badass smart dude. His character as a whole is a bit blander than the rest of them though, I think. In a slightly lesser role we have an alumnus of The Wire, which is almost always a good sign; Lance Reddick plays a prominent Homeland Security agent who tells the main group what to do in his wonderfully commanding voice. There’s also a cow.

This first season’s main story arc has been quite slow and hasn’t really gotten very far. The episodes that I’ve seen from the second season seem to suggest that it keeps going at about the same pace. Still, it’s an interesting progression that could eventually become really frakking cool. It’s a bit of shame that I’ll have to wait several months to see more of it, but I’m committed to buying Season 2 when it’s available.

Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time (film)

This movie, if you’re somehow unaware, is based on a video game. A long-running series of games actually, most of them with the same title. There was one game with the same subtitle too, although I haven’t played that one so I can’t do a lot of comparison in this post. Anyway, since it is based on a video game, then the general expectation is that it will be a pile of horse-dung, as that’s been the precedent so far.

The story is basically about a Persian street-rat who becomes a prince and gets the girl using magic things (sound familiar?) to save the world. Jake Gyllenhaal plays prince Dastan, the highly acrobatic protagonist with the kind eyes, alongside Gemma Arterton as the princess and the legendary Sir Ben Kingsley (aka Gandhi) as Dastan’s adoptive uncle. Dastan’s two brothers of actual kingly descent become his enemies through some familiar Disney betrayal and he goes all fugitive-like and falls for the crazy-hot Gemma. The MacGuffin of course is the Dagger (of Time?) which allows the user to turn back time for a little bit and correct a crucial mistake. Apparently differing from the game, this dagger can only be used if you have enough sand in the hilt, which runs out rather quickly and is really hard to replace. Thusly it isn’t used much in the movie, but looks pretty awesome when it is. There’s a bigger thing related to the Dagger but that’s kind of important to the conclusion so I’ll leave it alone.

The trailers made this movie look like a lot of fun with a few dopey bits, and for once I think they did a good job of describing it well. It is a lot of fun. The action is really entertaining, Gemma is one hot piece of woman, the dialog is often funny (particularly one guy who is obsessed with avoiding taxes), and the characters as a whole are not all that unlikable. There are definitely dopey bits. The betrayal was a bit obvious and shouldn’t have made Dastan a fugitive so quickly. Dastan’s character seems a bit too awkward around Gemma than a Persian prince should be, and of course there doesn’t seem to be a single middle-eastern actor in the bunch, all of whom speak with English accents. I can overlook all that though since I honestly enjoyed the movie as a whole. There were times where I though I just wanted it to end, but eventually I just got very drawn into it and let it take its time.

I’d say go see it, but don’t expect anything revelatory. It’s just a pretty solid video game movie.

Lost

I first heard of Lost while getting my hair cut. The woman cutting my hair described it as a very gripping show, but since she was a woman I didn’t give it much thought (I'm a bit on the dumb side sometimes). Then later in college I started seeing short TV spots with Dominic Monaghan (Charlie) featured, which prompted me to make Hobbit jokes. Still later one of my roommates was watching an episode of Season 2 (maybe the premier), and after some scoffing I decided to give it a shot. Not long after the episode ended I got my hands on the first season and burned through it. I became one of the show’s infamous proselytizers.

Now, four to five years later, the show is over. It was a far different beast from that excellent first season, but not at all in any negative way. Starting as a seemingly simple castaway drama/character study, it became a nerd’s dream of supernatural weirdness and mysterious hooks; the audience never really knew what was happening. It became a hugely discussed thing. Everyone had a theory, others several, and most of them were wrong most of the time. I think the writers had a lot of fun watching what the viewers came up with and doing the opposite.

Although I didn’t love all of the characters, the majority were well-written and wonderfully acted. The female cast was of course a joy to look at throughout the series; Evangeline Lilly is seriously good at wearing shirts. The guys ran the gamut of character types, from Jack’s bloated sense of responsibility to Sayid’s dark broody badassery, from Hurley’s constant comedic relief to Faraday’s awkward genius. Some were only around for a while, but for the most part they burned brightly. Benjamin Linus was only supposed to be around for a few episodes (I might be off on the exact timeframe) but Michael Emerson’s performance was so great they expanded his character to remain for the whole series.

There were some missteps, mainly in Season 3, where there was a fair amount of filler and unfortunately necessary character drops, but Season 4 picked up strongly after that. For the most part every episode was highly anticipated. I will miss this show (until I get the massive blu-ray set and spend the next few years trying to watch it all again).

Most people at this point are discussing the finale a lot. I don’t really have a lot to say about it; it wasn’t that mind-blowing, but it was nicely executed and very character-focused. There probably weren’t many better ways to end a show with so many possible paths. There was a definite sense of closure without spending too much time on every line of questions that cropped up throughout the six seasons of madness; my memory for TV show events seems to be not that great, so I don’t even recall the majority of the loose ends. I think it’s good that they left some of the mystery intact.

So, now that it’s over, my Tuesday nights probably won’t be quite as exciting, but that’s okay. There will be other great shows. Lost will always be one of the best.

V

It’s going to be hard to write this without using lots of nasty words, but I’ll try.

I’m not sure exactly why I watched the whole season. It must be some kind of self-hate. It started out boring went downhill from there; the characters are flat, the story is uninteresting, the visuals are 4th-rate, and they made Morena Baccarin look ugly. It’s like they took notes on Heroes, except they ignored the first season.

The show is about some nazi-lizard race from space that want to take over Earth covertly for some reason. They do this by donning artificial human skin, hair and other visible thingies, and acting like humans in all sorts of places. Then once they’re sufficiently entwined in human politics and whatnot the mother-ships swoop in and act all benevolent-like. This of course would work great because humans are idiots. Oddly though, some of the aliens on Earth have absorbed human emotions (aliens can’t have those normally, they’re aliens!) and therefore must rebel against their mother race by being idiots like humans. Thankfully the normal aliens are kinda stupid too.

So then we have a human resistance that teams up with the alien converts and decide the best way to combat political invasion covering up a few murders here and there is to not try to expose them at all, but instead use use half-wit military/guerilla tactics to make themselves look like terrorists. Good job!

I never saw the original series but I bet it’s miles better than this junk. Not even one Lost and two Firefly alumni could save it. Even a pair of cylons showed up once and failed. Even with the boring characters though, I think the part that made me hate it the most was the absolutely dismal CGI. Every single scene in the V spacecraft was blisteringly obvious. The compositing was always blurry as a censored Japanese film, the shadows were all wrong, and the movement/perspective just brought it all together like a dang puppet show. I think the reason it’s getting renewed is because they spent a whopping $20 on virtual sets.

I must be spoiled by sci-fi shows like Battlestar Galactica, Firefly, and even Stargate SG-1. The latter two had humor going for them, which was partly what made them enjoyable. BSG was just excellent through and through while keeping the humor mostly low; V had basically none at all and not much else. It tried to be a serious series. For that to happen I have to care about the outcome. I just hope it all stops.

I think this “review” is about as coherent as the show. I can’t be bothered to write quality for something this bad, I just wanted to say it sucked. So there you go.

Iron Man 2

 

Iron Man (the first movie) was all about Iron Man and being totally awesome. Its successor is about Iron Man and a bunch of other super-sexy people, including the wonderfully presented Scarlett Johansson, whose name is often difficult to spell correctly. One might think that this visual feast might take over the film and turn it into a Transformers-esque mess; this isn’t the case.

I’ve heard quite a few people talk about how the movie is a sprawling, hard-to-follow mess with too much going on. However, they always go on to say that they enjoyed it anyway. Personally, I didn’t think it was that hard to follow, and it was nowhere near the atrocity of Spiderman III. There were a lot of characters. Downey’s acting and his vocal interplay with several of the supporting characters was just brilliant, and god dangit Scarlett is good at looking good, even if her actual acting wasn’t anything to get all that excited about. Mickey Rourke did a better job at playing a Russian dude than I expected. Sam Rockwell did a great job playing the dick, and got quite a few laughs out of me.

The main thing that made this movie great was the comedy. Unlike the other great comic-book movie of our time, The Dark Knight, the Iron Man movies are actually comical, and it works. Really well. When I wasn’t grinning ear-to-ear at the awesomely executed actions scenes, I was laughing hysterically at the many jokes, be they nerdy, double entendre, or just plain silly. This is how you do a funny superhero movie, not Batman & Robin.

Altogether I agree that it isn’t as good as its predecessor. It is, however, really good, and better than the first one in a lot of places. I suppose it could have shined a little brighter if the scope of the story had been lessened a little. I don’t think it hurt the film as much as other people are saying though. I do think the omission of AC/DC would have been a good idea. Stick to Sabbath.

Also, this is one of those movies where you need to stay through the credits. Especially all you NERDS.