True Blood

The first season ended last night, and I was pretty happy with the finale. It's been a very enjoyable show. It's a bit of an oddity in the vampiric drama, as it's more of a socio-political satire than anything. It's not full of the greatest acting, nor writing, but it has qualities that make it still a good show. These include an interesting take on vampires, and a bunch of hot girls on an HBO show.

The satire part of it uses vampires as another target for racism and bigotry. They still include other examples of this, with both black and gay (in one case both) characters going through the usual routines. Well, the blacks aren't really targets themselves but some think they are, thereby showing their own racist tendencies. However, the vampire is the most prominent oddity, as would be expected by the title. You've got lynchings, religious outrage, and all that jazz.

The vampires themselves are pretty cool. They have most of the traditional traits, like adversity to sunlight and silver, and of course the affinity for human blood. They differ in that garlic and crosses have no effect, and they don't necessarily sleep in coffins or hanging from rafters. They seem to be trying to keep most of the weird stuff in as much of a scientifically plausible context as possible, although this gets a bit hairy later on in the season. The main vamp, Bill, often tries to pass off vampiric weaknesses as fairy tales only to have them surface as truth later on (burning in sunlight, maybe some other stuff I forgot). A bit of a neat thing is that the vamps can move really fast when they want to. This was actually a development that occurred during the editing for the show, as they were trying to cut down on the length of some scenes. It looks cool and saves time. The retractable fangs kind of tick me off but I don't suppose it matters much.

It's a good show. I like Anna Paquin.

Preacher

A friend of mine nagged me into reading this. It's been sort-of on my list for a while, but I finally got around to reading it. Like Sandman and Watchmen, it's held in high regard by a lot of people. It really is very good.

The main thing about this comic is it is extremely sacrilegious. It reduces all of the Christian spiritual figures (God, Satan, angels, etc.) to much less than lofty heights. It makes God out to be a self-serving ass-hole, and much of the heavenly host to be a bunch of morons. This is pretty different from anything I've ever read/seen before. It definitely worked; a lot of time it was quite funny.

Another important aspect is the violence. There is some gosh-darn gruesome stuff in this thing. Sometimes it seems there is scarce a page without a depiction of somebody's head being blown away. Again, sometimes this works out to be comedic.

Of course my favorite part of it (as usual) was the characterization. The characters were well defined and likable. One in particular, Cassidy the vampire, is fleshed out very well. Parts of his character are exposed throughout the story in a way that makes him the most believable vampire I've ever read. Great stuff.

Apparently there is currently a movie being planned, to be helmed by Sam Mendes. Sam did stuff like American Beauty and Road to Perdition, so I think he could pull it off well enough. Of course, it isn't definite yet. There's no script, and this story has gone through development hell on a number of projects before, so it might not actually happen. Considering the subject matter I wouldn't be surprised if it gets scrapped due to protests. I'll watch it if it happens though.

Sandman

So... this is probably the comic I took the longest to finally check out, except for maybe Watchmen. It doesn't make much sense since I'm a fan of Neil Gaiman and this is pretty much his seminal work. I think the main reason I put it off so long is that it's a dang huge story. Something like 75 issues, most of them 25 pages long. Dang is it worth it.

It still took me a long time to read it. I started out borrowing the Absolute Edition from a friend, which was entirely amazing, but he had to take it back before I got half-way through the first volume because he had to move. So I managed to get it some other way. The version I got was not the Absolute Edition, so it wasn't quite as pretty and not always very high quality either, but it was still very enjoyable. Neil Gaiman is an excellent story-teller, and in this instance he's telling stories about stories about stories. So great. The cast of core characters is just brilliant. There's a whole lot of ancient lore weaved into it, like the Norse gods and faeries and whatnot, not unlike Gaiman's American Gods novel. That makes it especially interesting.

Possibly an even cooler thing is the tie-in with the rest of the DC universe. The Sandman character is actually sort-of based on an older DC character that I don't actually know much about. A few lesser-known characters pop up, and in one panel Batman and Clark Kent make a cameo. That was a real treat.

In essence, this is really a collection of stories, not just one. There were several that really stuck out to me. The one I remember the best is the story of the Emperor of the United States of America. That one really got me emotionally involved for some reason. Some immigrant, disillusioned by the so-called opportunity, is at his wit's end and begins to fall into the clutches of Despair, who challenges Dream (the Sandman) to keep him from her. He accepts the challenge and grants the man empirical rule of the country through a dream. Of course no one really accepts this rule except for him, but it keeps him going and makes him loved by many. In the end, Despair never gets him and he helps a lot of people. The ending really almost pulled some tears from my ducts.

So, it's a great thing. Anyone who hasn't read it should. Now I have to start reading the extensive collection of spin-offs.

The Graduate

I first heard of this film in a documentary or some such about Dustin Hoffman quite a few years ago. I'm not sure why I saw it. I think it was after I saw Rain Man. I didn't think about it at all until a few days ago when it turned up in some lame list about movies where the protagonist's main goal is to get some tail, and they expend a lot of effort to get to that goal. I might include a link to that list later. I remembered that it's supposedly held in high esteem, so I checked out imdb to make sure and discovered I was right. So I watched it.

Great movie. It's really not what I expected. I knew about the MILF seductress thing, but that's about all I knew. I had no idea how much Simon & Garfunkel's music was intertwined with it all, and most of the plot was unknown to me at all. Dustin Hoffman was great; I can't really relate to a lot of it, but his performance did get across the emotional maelstrom that I'm sure most people have experienced quite well. A lot of it was funny, some profound, and a good amount pretty darn ridiculous. It's got the whole coming-of-age deal which is usually fun.

I think possibly the best part of it all was the music. It really gave me a new appreciation for Simon & Garfunkel; The Sounds of Silence is such a fantastic song. I need to listen to them more. A featured review of the film on imdb stressed the perfection of the music in the context of the characters, especially that particular song. A lot of the time Hoffman goes around oblivious to the sounds around him, seemingly shutting out all of the confusion.

I enjoyed it.

Y: The Last Man

I just spent about 4 hours going through the second half of this series instead of working on a huge project that's pretty much due in a couple days. That should give an idea of how good it is. Tomorrow's gonna suck.

The story isn't really an original one. This dude Yorick is the last dude alive on Earth; that is to say the only male. Except for his monkey Ampersand, of course. For a reason that's never fully exposed throughout the 60 issues, every mammal possessing a Y-chromosome died simultaneously, leaving the women to clean up the bodies.

What I really liked about it, aside from the somewhat gratuitous lesbianism and occasional well-drawn nudity, was the core group of characters and their relationships. I suppose that's what pretty much everything is about though. Yorick himself was great; constantly spouting off pop-culture references all the time and rarely getting a response.

I don't really have a whole lot to say at this hour, so I guess I'll stop. Maybe I'll write more later.

Now is later. So, it really was a great read. Pretty long too. I'm a fan of post-apocalypse stuff so it was right up my proverbial alley. I think I like the fact that you never really really find out what definitely killed all the guys; instead you're given a whole bunch of possibilities to choose from. Being science-fiction, a lot of these choices are pretty out there, but fun to think about.

Okay I guess I still don't have much to say. It was good. I'll leave it at that. Read it.

Procrastination Theater Part II: Semargl and Wolverine

A while ago I posted during a somewhat busy period of school in which I had no desire to do anything of substance, so I wrote a blog post about something or other. That time has come again. Well, it's not quite as busy now, but for some reason I feel like I'm putting stuff off anyway. So you get to read some lame reviews. Yay!

Semargl - Manifest

My last post was on an album that has become one of my favorite metal releases ever. This one was a favorite before that one (and still is). The Amenta hailed from Australia, these guys from the Ukraine. That's a neat thing really; extreme metal can come from pretty much anywhere. Just recently France has become something of a hotbed, producing acts like Gojira and Hacride. There are still a few holdout domains like those in the Middle East, but for the most part the black tide (not a reference to the new thrashy band that I hate for no reason) is encompassing the globe.

Anyway, this album is great. Genre-wise it's I guess what you'd call blackened-death metal, although I think it has more black qualities than death; not in any conventional sense, however. You won't find the walls of lo-fi distortion, symphonic keyboards, or raspy screeches of its roots. It mostly just retains the absolute animosity toward religion (specifically Christianity), and just an indescribable feeling of evil that is the primary tenet of black metal.

What sets this album apart from basically all other music in its genres is the extremely bouncy sound. The bass player seems to be taking lessons from Flea of the Red Hot Chili Peppers. The distortion level of pretty much everything (except the vocals) is remarkably low, and the sound is well produced. It's all just really damned enjoyable.

The only thing I don't really care for is the supposed subject matter (I don't think they released the lyrics). The band is openly anti-Christian, and this album itself is a manifest of war against the religion, ergo the title. The words printed in the booklet are not the lyrics; instead they are the manifest itself, it seems. I haven't actually spent any time reading them since I don't think it's worth my time, but a brief glance made it look pretty serious. Anwhow, I just like the way the album sounds.

Here're some video samples.

Wolverine: Origin

I found this randomly and remembered that I had been wanting to read it. So I did.

It's really good.

It's not what I expected; I didn't think they'd start with his childhood; I don't know why. I think it's great how they make you expect one kid to turn into Wolverine and then make it some other kid instead. I haven't actually read any X-Men comic books, at least I don't think I have, but this seems like it's a lot better than I would expect from such things. There's a lot of emotion and drama. Kinda bleak really.

One thing I'm not entirely clear about is whether his claws were initially meant to be physically part of him or whether they were implanted with the adamantium; I had always assumed the latter, leaving his healing factor to be his only real mutation. It's cool this way anyhow.

The Amenta - Occasus

I haven't posted about music in a while, mainly because I just listen to too much of it. I guess I'll just write when something hits me in a profound-ish way. This album does that. I've had a digital copy for quite a while now, maybe a year or so, but just got a physical version the other day while browsing through the used CDs at StereoShop. That was the first time I've been there, and I was impressed by the number of good albums I found there. I'll probably be heading back at some point; maybe when I get a car.

Anyway; Occasus can be pretty well defined as an industrial death metal album. There are also bits of black metal going on, but not strongly enough to merit inclusion in the genre labeling. The Amenta is one of those bands that likes to make themselves sound really serious and evil, not unlike Semargl, another favorite of mine of which I just ordered a record today. I'm pretty sure their main schtick is nihilism, i.e. the belief that nothing actually exists and that reality is a projection of our own minds. My introduction to nihilism was The Big Lebowski, so I don't really know a whole lot about it. Their lyrics don't seem to consentrate much on nihilism itself, although they do touch on it (especially on the track 'Nihil'). Most of the time they're just painting a big bleak picture of some sort of doom or something. References to gods or demons and whatnot all over the place. I don't really care all that much about the subject matter, and I didn't even know a single line from the lyrics until I bought the album.

The music is what's important. It's primarily a wall-of-sound deal with jackhammer drums and heavily distorted guitars, interspersed with creepy computer screeches and hums, and of course the vocalists deep grunt-growls all over the place. This album took quite a while to grow on me, probably because of the vocals really. They aren't all that great, but I think they fit the music nicely. This guy seems to have left the band though and their next album, n0n, is going to have a big ol' collection of established vocalists. You can hear one track from the album, 'Slave', on their myspace. Anyway I'm rambling.

It isn't all just in-your-face metal. There are several ambient passages, some in between songs and others in the middle of songs. I think they're really what make it special. Going from systematic pummeling to more randomly flowing apocolyptic noises really create an atmosphere that brings me back again and again. I think you can really call this a work of art; not something you can say for a lot of metal albums.