The Good, the Bad, the Weird

It's always kind of weird when Asians try to make a Western. I mean, I understand when the Australians do it, because they almost had a Wild...well I don't know if it was the West for them, but you get my meaning. But as far as I know, none of the Asian countries really did. Nonetheless, they do make westerns, especially in Japan (whether through Samurai homage, anime, or Takashi Miike's latest film, the boring as hell Sukiyaki Western Django). This latest movie however, with an obvious title riff on Sergio Leone and a billion thematic nods to both The Good, the Bad and the Ugly and Raiders of the Lost Ark, comes from Korea, and despite dragging a bit in the middle, it's a dang entertaining flick.

Tae-goo (Kang-ho Song) is the Weird, an idiosyncratic bandit who robs trains with a pair of Walther P38s and a fleece-lined aviator's cap. On his latest enterprise he's come across a Japanese official who is transporting, along with many valuables, a map to a huge stash of Ancient Chinese treasure hidden somewhere in the middle of the Manchurian desert. Paydirt. Unfortunately, the train is stopped by slick, evil gunfighter Chang-yi (Byung-hun Lee) who's also after the map, which his boss sold to the Japanese for copious amounts of money and now wants back. But guess what? There's someone else on the train, too. Do-won (Woo-sung Jung) is a bounty hunter who's trying his best to capture Chang-yi. Things get out of control and Tae-goo escapes with the map. As he sets out trying to find the treasure, Chang-yi is in hot pursuit, and in pursuit of Chang-yi is...of course...Do-won. Will they find the treasure? Will Do-won catch Chang-yi? Will anyone be able to keep track of these Korean names?

The Good, the Bad, the Weird is a fun film. Make no mistake about that. It's full of lots of crazy action sequences, scenery chewing performances, and a lovably goofy sense of humor. The sets are quite impressive, appearing to be nothing so much as caricatures of sets from other Western movies, right down to the city that's crisscrossed with ropes and wires that are perfect for swinging on, or the inn that's just sitting there in the desert, as out of place as a tavern in one of those old D&D CRPGs. And the direction is snappy and self-assured. Although it's kind of pointless to say this in regard to a Korean film, but it looks amazing (Korean cinematographers are, for my money, the best in Asia...yes, even better than Hong Kong's).

The performances are also good across the board. Byung-hun Lee chews a ton of scenery and spend most of the movie glowering at the camera with one eye, the other hidden behind absurdly stylized bangs. He's the bad guy and he plays it with over-the-top glee. Woo-sung Jung is also fairly good. He generally plays sincere, emotional warriors in epic martial arts movies (okay...in two martial arts movies), so he plays it kind of safe here, turning in a subdued performance. Occasionally he might be a little too subdued, although I think the idea was to make him the "cool" character.

The real standout though, is Kang-ho Song, who is a pretty prolific actor and has proven himself multiple times to be quite good. American audiences (including myself) know him best from Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance and The Host, which were quite different performances in themselves, and here he does something different again, playing Tae-goo with an exuberant silliness which makes him easily the standout character.

As far as downsides, there's a drag in the middle of the movie which could have been tightened up a bit. It's a fun movie, so any lapse in momentum is really felt. And the ending is sort of strange, an ironic homage to The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, but it's not disappointing. In short, if you get a chance, this movie's worth checking out.



7/10

Fault Line by Barry Eisler

I read Barry Eisler's Rain Fall my sophomore year of college and was pretty much immediately hooked. In fact, I was reading Rain Storm the first (and thus far, only) time I left the U.S., finishing it at about two in the morning in the international airport in Lima, Peru. So for the past three to four years, I've been a big fan of his. If you haven't yet checked out his series about half-Japanese assassin John Rain, you're doing yourself a big disservice. He's the best writer of spy/covert operator fiction today, and you need to check him out.

Anyway, Fault Line is not a John Rain book. It's a completely new standalone thriller, and whether or not you like it depends on how much you can deal with its not being more of the same. The plot actually sounds like something you might find in a legal thriller. Alex Treven is a silicon valley lawyer specializing in software patents. One day one of his clients, who has invented a program ominously called Obsidian, is murdered and shortly thereafter, someone tries to kill Alex in his own house. Unsure what to do, he calls his estranged brother Ben (henceforth known in this review as ebB). Why would he call ebB? Because ebB just happens to be a badass military liaison element for the US Government (military liaison elements are soldiers who fall into the same shadowy netherworld of black ops as the CIA's Special Activities Group). The two brothers hit the road, trying to solve the mystery of their hunters, and hopefully not killing each other in the process.

So right off the bat, Fault Line is more of what we've come to expect from Barry Eisler. There's intrigue, political scheming, and of course, super-detailed tradecraft and brutal violence. There's also the requisite sexual tension with some beautiful woman of non-American origin, in this case Iranian-American lawyer Sarah Hosseini. It's fast-paced, violent, and a lot better than most of the thrillers out there.

One of the things that impressed me most about Eisler's latest was his handling of military liaison elements. While anyone who's read his other stuff knows that he's deeply suspicious of black operations and the legality (not to mention morality) of that sort of thing, in Fault Line he actually does a good job of portraying the soldiers who do that kind of work as decent people. They occasionally don't like doing what they do, but they have a logic that they believe in and that they follow, and that's why they do it, not because they're psychopaths who like killing people.

There are really only a handful of complaints I can level against the book. The first one is not really a valid one, and that's simply that no matter how much I prepped myself for a new book, I was going to measure it against the John Rain series. And it just doesn't quite provide the same thrill. There's no exotic globe hopping beyond two early chapters in Istanbul, and you have to get used to a new set of characters with new flaws and mannerisms. I'm also not entirely sold on the third person style of the book. Eisler's been dabbling with it on and off since, I believe, the fourth book, Killing Rain, and here he sticks to it all the way through. And I personally like my third person books to stand off a bit further from the characters, and convey any angst and inner turmoil through action and dailogue, only using the most understated narration if necessary. But there's a lot of internal strife in this book (unsurprising, given that the main conflict is centered in the attitudes of the two brothers), and most of it is explained through limited third person perspective.

As for the complaints I have that are outside of the "It's not a John Rain" book, there are only three minor ones. First, Eisler's pop-culture name-dropping can be just a little too much. You kind of get used to his by-name mentioning of jazz clubs and bars, but here he goes farther, listing web sites, a band, and a whole bevy of Palo Alto establishments. It's a minor thing, but pop culture references are one of my pet peeves (you should see me go to town on a Stephen King novel). Second, the tension between the brothers is pretty exaggerated, even coming to violence at one point, and then it gets resolved extremely fast at the end. Granted, the main plot is over by that point, and no one wants to spend another hundred pages reading about brotherly reconciliation, but it felt a little anticlimactic. And speaking of climaxes, my final complaint is that the sexual tension feels just a little forced. Not artificial, mind you, just a hair unnecessary. Again, I understand why it's there. I mean, look at Eisler's webpage. He promises sex, so he's darn well going to give us some sex. But it felt just a little too forced this time around, especially once you stop and consider exactly how much time has elapsed between the two characters meeting and getting down to business.

But even though I spent way more time criticizing than praising, I still really enjoyed the book. For some odd reason, we tend to complain more about the writers we like best, and Eisler is definitely one of my favorites so I have a tendancy to microscopically examine every new book from him and wax eloquent about their failings, even as I read them at breakneck pace. If you have yet to experience his writing, I recommend starting with either this one or Rain Fall. If you like spy fiction, you won't be disappointed, because he's the best guy in the game right now. It's not John Rain, but it's still well worth the purchase.

7/10

Painted Skin

Supernatural action story? Check. Overwrought romantic subplot? Check. Action heroes who are more righteous than the entire Vatican city? Check. Slick direction by that most viewer-friendly of directors, Gordon Chan? Check. Donnie Yen, rocking the long hair? Check. Painted Skin was at the very top of my to-see list last year and now, having seen it, did it live up to the expectation? Yes, with a few minor reservations.

The plot is a fairly simple folk-tale set up. A virtuous warrior (Aloys Chen) defeats an army of bandits, rescuing a beautiful woman (the ethereal Zhou Xun) in the process. Unfortunately, he missed the part where she was tearing the bandit king's heart out of his chest with her bare hands. Anyway, he takes her home, where instant conflict arises. His wife (Zhao Wei) is understandably miffed that her husband has brought a scantily clad beautiful woman into the house (one is reminded of the popular trivia tidbit that the Chinese character for trouble is two women under one roof). Further complicating this is the arrival of two other people: the wife's old flame, a legendary general (Donnie Yen), and a scrappy demon hunter (Betty Sun). The demon starts eating hearts, love triangles practically explode across the screen, and Donnie Yen flips his hair as if he's in a commercial for shampoo.

So let's start off with the good. Painted Skin is fun. It's simple, it's emotional, it looks fantastic...it's everything a good Hong Kong fantasy should be. Gordon Chan has long been a reliable director, producing slick, non-flashy cinema, from martial arts action (Fist of Legend) to romantic comedy (Cat and Mouse), and he doesn't disappoint here. The action is very stylized, and not all that intricate, but it still looks good, although some of the spear work looks as if it just might have been lifted from 300.

The acting is decent, too. Aloys Chen plays that most noble of Hong Kong film stereotypes, the Righteous Man. He spends the whole movie looking pained, and righteous, and righteously pained. But he does a decent job of it. Zhou Xun is appropriately menacing, and not too hard on the eyes to boot, although her role does become a bit overwrought toward the end. And speaking of overwrought, Zhao Wei realizes that histrionics are what is called for, and spends virtually the whole move either crying, or a hair's breadth from tears. But it's a good performance if you realize that she's doing what the role requires. Although, on a side note, I was surprised to learn that only seven years have elapsed since her performance in So Close...to put it gently.

Finally, I was somewhat shocked that Donnie Yen, while still getting a lot of screen time, is only a supporting character in this drama! Now don't get me wrong, Yen is a preening, arrogant diva who loves nothing more than to mug and flex for the camera before showing off his fighting ability, but darn it, the man is so cheesily cool that he has transcended into being cheesily awesome. And I wanted to see more of his ass-kicking skills! As it is, we see some nice wire-fu and guan dao work from him, but the big surprise is the character he plays. For his last few movies (with the prolific and reliable Wilson Yip), he's always played dark, conflicted characters. Here, he starts out in that same vein, but quickly lapses into a loud, rambunctious, and goofy performance with is actually quite entertaining. As always, he was the highlight of the show.

On a side note, I liked that the film was set primarily in a desert environment. Too many big-budget Hong Kong martial arts flicks are set in the same generic bamboo forests and wooded mountains. Put down the Zhang Yimou template and back away slowly! Nobody needs to get hurt!

As far as negatives, I only have two. First, this movie could have been shortened a good twenty-five minutes. Toward the end it just felt like it was dragging far more than was entirely necessary. A couple of those conversations definitely could have been cut.

Secondly, Hong Kong films, like Korean films, have a tendancy to become overly melodramatic in their closing moments. This one starts a good half hour from the end. It's an almost suffocating overload of tears and screaming and broken hearts. Granted, that's quality Hong Kong cinema, but it almost, almost made even a seasoned vet like me sit up and say, "Okay people, enough is enough."

So finally, Painted Skin, while not without flaws, is a damn good flick. In fact, I still have a few major films to see from 2008, but with a reservation for Red Cliff, just in case (it is John Woo, after all), I'm going to say that Painted Skin was probably the best film of last year to come out of Hong Kong.



7.5/10

The Assassins by Bernard Lewis

The first assassins have an unusual hold on pop culture's imagination. Starting with the orientalist craze of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and progressing through Dan Brown and Assassin's Creed today, they've been shown and interpreted through a thick lens of folklore and misunderstanding. In this book (which is actually pretty old), Bernard Lewis takes a look at the real assassins, their cultural origins and the activities that earned them their notoriety.

For starters, the assassins began as an extremist, fundamentalist sect of Shiite Islam known as Ismaili. They sought exclusion at first, and then eventually set out to enforce their own brand of Islam on the Middle East. Given the extremely centralized, personal power base of most medieval Muslim empires, the best way to accomplish this was through the murder of specific men of power. Eventually, what started as a cultural rebellion turned into a cult with multiple centers of power and many allies throughout the Middle East

Bernard Lewis is basically one of the go-to guys when it comes to the Middle East. He writes simple, clear books that not only analyze history and culture, but contain numerous entertaining anecdotes from original sources, such as the following one concerning Saladin: The great Muslim general received an emissary from the assassins who urged him to send all his men away. Slowly, Saladin dismissed his men, until finally only two were left, his most trusted guards that he refused to send away. Whereupon the emissary asked the men if they would kill their general if so ordered. Without hesitation, the two men produced their swords, and just like that, the emissary had made his point.

Now this sort of story, and the conception of the assassins it produces is not entirely innaccurate, but it accounts for only a small amount of the truth behind these people. Those most interested in this facet of history are best off checking out the last two chapters of the book, chapter 5. "The Old Man of the Mountain," and chapter 6. "Means and Ends." But if you only read those two, you are missing out on some fascinating history, not least the true story behind Hassan i-Sabbah's apocryphal saying, "Nothing is true, everything is forbidden."

Obviously, it's kind of hard to review a lot of nonfiction works, given that one must review them as both a book, and as a purveyor of information. But The Assassins succeeds as both a short, to-the-point explanation, and as an interesting afternoon read.

7/10

Appaloosa

The western has never really gone away, and people keep churning them out from time to time, usually with older, respected actors starring, in an attempt to make a no-longer popular genre financially viable. Appaloosa is the latest such film, directed by Ed Harris and based on a novel by detective author Robert B. Parker.

Everett Hitch (Viggo Mortensen) is a former West Point officer turned wandering gunfighter who has joined up with lawman for hire Virgil Cole (Ed Harris). The two go around, hiring out their skills to besieged towns all across the west. They come to one such town, under pressure from cattle baron Randall Bragg (Jeremy Irons), and set about enforcing their own brand of justice. But as in 90% of all westerns, a woman (Renee Zellweger) complicates things.

All right. For the good, Appaloosa is lensed well. It looks good, although the camera is not very dynamic and prefers to just sort of sit and watch the well-staged scenes. Likewise the action, while not especially flashy, is realistically abrupt and enhanced by the flat, muted sounds of the old west firearms. As a result, the violence feels real.

Finally, Viggo Mortensen is the man. My estimation of him as an actor has been rising steadily since The Fellowship of the Ring, and following his two Cronenberg films I'm pretty sure he's one of the best American actors working out there today. He turns in another excellent, understated performance here as the sidekick who's just a little smarter and a little more conflicted than the main protagonist of the story. As a result, despite the fact that he plays Dr. Watson to Virgil Cole's Sherlock Holmes, he's by far the more sympathetic character.

Which brings me to my first negative. For a film packed with fine thespian talent, the acting is erratic. Ed Harris in particular plays a very strange character, which is probably intentional, but no less distracting. Virgil Cole is a self-taught, slightly manic frontier gunslinger prone to bizarre outbursts and adolescent confusion. And it just feels strange to have such a character be the leading man in a western. Also, I strongly object to any film that proposes Renee Zellweger as an object of desire, but that's just me.

Finally, Appaloosa feels oddly understated and anticlimactic. For the first 3/4 of the movie, you think it's building up to something big, and then it just kind of...ends. I guess it's trying to be a subtle character study, but it's got too many testosterone-filled western cliches for me to take that possibility seriously. In the end, it has the slick production values of Silverado without the fun, and the understated violence of Unforgiven without the depth.

4/10

A World without Thieves

Feng Xiaogang's 2004 film A World without Thieves was yet another sign of the consumption of the eminently enjoyable Hong Kong film scene by mainland China's sanitized, self-promoting movie producers. It starred a handful of well-known Hong Kong actors, not least megastar Andy Lau, it had fantastic production values, and it had a simple, blockbuster-ish plot, while at the same time it was shot in the mainland and helmed by Chinese arthouse director Feng Xiaogang. And in the end it's a decent film, surprisingly commercial in all the right ways, yet it still bears the fingerprints of mainland filmmaking all over it.

Andy Lau and Rene Liu are Bo and Li respectively, a romantically linked pair of thieves who specialize in different areas. Bo is a master of pickpocketing and sleight of hand, while Li is the expert at seduction and blackmail. The movie starts with the two pulling an elaborate extortion on an elderly businessman and rolling off with his BMW. Unfortunately, this is also the last job for the two. Li has decided to quit their life of crime and leaves Bo on the road, heading for a Buddhist temple and seeking a better life.

Here she meets country boy Fuu (Wang Baoqiang) who is one of those characters who could only exist in movies, and perhaps only in Asian films. Having saved up an impressive amount of money by not spending his entire life, he plans to go home, get married and buy a house, a fact he frequently and volubly states because, as he says, there are no such things as thieves. Unfortunately for him, this claim is made in the hearing of about six criminals. Alarmed, Li takes him under her wing and escorts him on his train journey home, hoping her former thief skills will protect him from both a family of vicious crooks and Bo, who has shone up on the train with the joint plan of stealing Fuu's money and of winning Li back.

Okay, this is pretty much a straight up Chinese adventure/drama film. It's got moments of goofy, bizarre humor, some action, romance, and sudden melodramatic outbursts. The movie looks amazing, with great scenery and excellent cinematography. This is one of those places where the mainland tag works out, because the location shots are truly beautiful to see. Despite most of the action taking place on board a train, Xiaogang definitely doesn't waste his budget.

The action sequences are relatively few and far between and when they do happen, they are choreographed in a strange quasi-dance manner, or else CGI complemented. To be fair, it's not an action film and it doesn't really try to be, but the few moments of mayhem are a little strange.

As far as the acting goes, it's pretty much what you'd expect. Andy Lau hasn't really had to work in a movie in ages. As Hong Kong's biggest movie star, since the millennium he's pretty much just shown up and been Hong Kong's biggest movie star in every film. Rene Liu does a decent job although she mostly just alternates between righteous anger and tearful sorrow through the whole thing. And Wang Baoqiang is so naive and genuine that you just want to slap him upside the head. The gang of thieves opposing Lau and Liu all do decent jobs, and are all known actors, but they don't have much to do besides be goofily sinister.

Finally, I'll just say that as one might expect, the movie ends on a suitably melodramatic wannabe tearjerker ending. If you have much experience with non-Japanese Asian movies, you'll probably know to expect this, but otherwise be forewarned. Hong Kong/Chinese/Korean/Thai flicks are odd animals, but once you get used to them, you'll find they have a compelling flavor you can't find in any other country's cinema.

And something I'm going to start doing for my reviews of Asian movies: here's the trailer for A World without Thieves (in Chinese of course).



7/10

The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor

So I've always liked the first Mummy film, and I feel like the second one has a few zany redeeming qualities that make up for its overall cornball-ness. This third film is kind of the same deal. It's not as "good" as the first one, but it's not completely wretched either.

Stephen Sommers is AWOL this time, off directing the G.I. Joe movie, so Rob Cohen is taking over for him, a director known for such solid, artistic fare as xXx and The Fast and the Furious. And he basically attempts to rework the franchise, ripping off Indiana Jones right and left while simultaneously adding his own cheesy blend of over the top CGI action.

The plot is pretty straight forward in its contrivances. The first emperor of China, Qin Xihuangdi was rather famous for wanting to be immortal. And for his army of Terra Cotta warriors. Cohen simply takes it a step further, as Qin (Jet Li) seeks immortality through a witch (Michelle Yeoh). It goes bad, and Yeoh is stabbed. As she flees, she curses the emperor and turns him and his entire army into Terra Cotta. Fast forward to 1947 and a retired Rick and Evie O'Connel (Brendan Fraser and Maria Bello) are convinced to run a diamond from Shangri-La into Shanghai. There they bump into their son Alex, who's supposed to be at college, but is instead following in his Dad's footsteps and digging up evil dead guys with that age-old archaeological tool: the Colt .45. Problem: the evil general Yang (Hong Kong's national treasure, Anthony Wong, who is way better than this movie...or really, almost everything he does these days) wants to combine the diamond and the emperor for wackiness!

Let's get the good stuff down first. In general, Cohen knows how to stage some good action sequences. He likes to go over the top from time to time, but he seems to be taking all his cues from the Indiana Jones series, which keeps it grounded. There's a good chase scene near the beginning, and a battle at a snowbound temple which features Yeti is easily the highlight.

The sense of humor, though it is a little overloaded with smug mummy jokes (which was also the case with The Mummy Returns), is generally better this time around. There's a scene where Rick and Alex argue about firepower which is both a nod to and a one-up of Brendan Fraser and Oded Fehr's gun talk in the second movie.

Now for the negatives. For starters, just to get it off my chest, Rob Cohen talked a lot of crap when he started making the movie about how historically accurate and culturally sensitive his movie was compared to Sommers's Egyptian flicks. Um...yeah. The weapons and equipment looked good. But it's all straight up fantasy. The magic, geography, and the history are all extremely suspect. He has Qin constructing THE Great Wall. While the first emperor did create a wall to the North of China, it was a dirt and wood structure. The actual, visible from space, wall was not constructed until, I believe, the Ming dynasty.

Second, Cohen just doesn't know when to stop with the action. His attempt to mix martial arts into the movie is just horrible. He has non-martial artists executing ludicrously graceful wire-fu in the middle of a crazy brawl, but he completely FAILS to utilize the awesome skills of Li and Yeoh. I mean...just...come on!

And the acting is generally suspect. Fraser and Bello are solid enough, with the former turning in his goofy action hero charm, and the latter gamely providing spunk and comedy. Anthony Wong doesn't get anything to do, and Isabella Leong seems completely unsure of how to act in an American movie or perhaps she thinks that this American movie is SERIOUS FARE. Michelle Yeoh tries to work, but she has a crap role, so it doesn't turn out so great. And Luke Ford is entirely unimpressive as O'Connel's swashbuckling son. He's entirely too serious and wooden. Finally, Jet Li...well, he barely even speaks. He's just there for a paycheck, and it is INCREDIBLY obvious.

So in the end, The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor is an entertaining way to waste some time, but it's not a movie that's going to be on any "best-of" lists or that you're going to feel a special urge to rewatch.

5/10

Battlestar Galactica 4.0

Well, the makers of BSG have oddly enough decided to scam the fans for even more money by releasing season 4 of the hit sci-fi show in two parts...just like season 2. It didn't go over so well back then, and it probably won't go over so well now.

But complaints about packaging aside, Battlestar Galactica remains quite simply the best-written, most thought-provoking, and best looking science fiction show on television. When we left the crew of Galactica, Apollo had resigned his commission in the Navy, four crewmembers had just discovered that they were Cylons in disguise, a Cylon armada had jumped into range of the civilian fleet, Starbuck had returned from the dead in a mysterious Viper starfighter, and we'd gotten a sudden camera zoom to the distant planet Earth.

This season picks up right there, but it doesn't answer the most immediately pressing questions that all BSG fans want, namely: who is the final Cylon model, and how is Starbuck alive? Instead it focuses on a schism in the Cylon nation and an uneasy alliance between the human remnant and the rebels. The humans need the rebels so that they can find earth, while the rebels need the humans so they can get their wayward models. It's a dynamic relationship that keeps things tense and evolving for all ten episodes.

Now one of the things that has always impressed me about BSG is that it is unafraid to make changes. Most TV shows are cautious about bold storytelling, preferring to keep their ensembles and plots ready to reset to square one, when the viewers were happy. Ron Moore is not a guy like that. BSG has gotten steadily more byzantine as it has gone on, and the first half of season four is no change. You really realize this in episode three where he brutally and cruelly kills a character who has been present since the miniseries, and then a few episodes later where one of the nicer, seemingly untouchable characters is shot and loses a limb permanently. BSG is a story winding down to a close, and they're not playing it safe, which I respect.

The writing and plotting remains consistently strong as well. Moore is unafraid of complicated, ugly personal relationships. People change, people become angry, people lose faith. And it's all portrayed here. Characters who originally would have died for each other now hate each other, and characters who found each other abhorrent now go to great risks to preserve the other's life. Likewise, Moore doesn't shy away from bizarre spiritual and philosophical questions and ponderings, which is also a welcome trait in a show which is so very solidly rooted in science fiction.

Finally, a word about the acting. As always, Battlestar Galactica delivers spectacularly. James Callis, Edward James Olmos and Katee Sackhoff are the standouts in this particular set of episodes, but I remain consistently impressed by Grace Park, Tricia Helfer, Callum Keith Rennie and...hell, there's nobody I'm not consistently impressed by.

It's the best show on television, now or ever, people. Watch it.

9/10

The Player of Games by Iain M. Banks

Iain M. Banks is something of a cult figure in the SF&F community. Widely regarded as one of the best space-opera writers out there today, he's not that well known here in the U.S. and his books have been pretty hard to find until Orbit recently released most of them in trade paperback and I decided to give them a try. This one is considered to be one of the best of his "Culture" novels, set in a future where mankind and machines live together in a vast intergalactic empire.

The oddly-named Jernau Gurgeh is a master game player who spends all his time researching game theory, or winning matches against other professional game players who invent all sorts of imaginative ways to entertain themselves in the luxurious, idle Culture. Eventually however, a string of interesting victories, some well-placed blackmail, and a deactivated military bot named Mawhrin Skel converge to send Gurgeh off on a multi-year mission with the Culture scientific organization known as Contact to a far-away alien empire known as Azad. The Azadians have an extraordinarily complex game that they play which determines the very fate of their empire. Gurgeh sets out to be the first human to ever play the game, however he may be in for more than he bargained for as he starts to realize that this game may not be a game after all.

The Player of Games certainly does not lack imagination. From a planet that catches fire every few months, to solar-system spanning AIs, to sardonic, entertaining robot drones, there are a lot of solid sci-fi ideas in these pages. It also manages to wrap up the tale with a satisfying adventure finish, which feels a little surprising given the byzantine characterization and plotting that has come before.

And that's the other thing. The Player of Games is very odd. It's good, it's readable, and it's imaginative, but it's incredibly strange in places. But despite that, it's still fairly easy to relate to the characters, although amusingly enough you may come out liking the robots more than the humans. And given the strangeness, there's room for plenty of clever twists, particularly at the end. The final sentence surprise was quite nice, although I kind of guessed it was coming.

Finally, it's a good space opera, albeit a strange one. It foregoes a lot of more recent space opera conventions, a lot of concessions to military SF or some of the recent video game inspirations of what's on shelves these days, instead throwing back to the classic over-the-top weirdness of golden age sci fi. But it's a good read and worth your time if you're a serious science fiction fan.

7/10

Let the Right One In

This vampire film got a lot of critical praise at the end of 2008, some people even declaring it one of the best vampire movies evere. Well, I won't go that far, but it's pretty solid.

For starters the vampire element is not actually the driving element of the story. The plot centers around a bullied Scandinavian kid named Oskar, who avidly reads newspaper crime stories and takes out his angst by stabbing a tree with a knife in the middle of the night. He's got issues. But his issues are nothing compared to the aloof, sickly-looking girl, Eli, who moves in next door and puts up cardboard over all her windows. Slowly the two strike up a relationship, and Eli starts trying to help Oskar with his bully problem. And he's got to help her with her problem: she needs to drink blood on a regular basis and stay out of the son, or she'll die.

Let the Right One in is a good film. It adheres to vampire folklore and it's pretty gory, but it also moves at a slow, deliberate pace. It's a film that's far more interested in the relationship between its two leads than it is in people getting their necks chewed out. And 13 year old Kare Hedebrant and Lina Leandersson are very good as Oskar and Eli respectively, although being "very good" mostly just consists of steadily underplaying and understating everything. Although it was somewhat shocking to see Leandersson leap onto grown men and rip out their throats, multiple times.

In the end, it's a strange one. It's got all the parts of a horror movie, but it doesn't really feel like one. But make no mistake...it's a good movie and well worth watching.

7/10

Uncharted

So I recently purchased a PS3. I've been an Xbox owner for a while, so I decided to give the other platform a try, primarily so I could play this game right here, a platform exclusive title. And I'm not sorry I did. Uncharted: Drake's Fortune combines great gameplay with all the story elements I love best for a compelling, cinematic gaming experience that has shot straight into my top five games list.

The plot revolves around main character Nathan Drake, formed in the ever-so familiar, ever-so likable rogue adventurer archetype. He's good with a gun, capable of hanging onto a jeweled sarcophagus as it dangles under a helicopter, drops some good one liners, yet still manages to bump his head on a low doorway for the comedy beats. At the beginning of the game, he's just raised the empty coffin of his ancestor Sir Francis Drake off the coast of Panama, opening it to find the explorer's journal which contains a map to the fabled city of El Dorado. Upon arrival at the city, Drake discovers that El Dorado was actually a giant golden statue that was stolen and taken somewhere else in the Caribbean by Spaniards. Setting in pursuit with a spunky reporter in tow, Drake is determined to get his hands on the treasure, even if it means fighting his way through an Army of modern day pirates to do so.

Uncharted takes its primary plot hook from real history and the classification by the Queen of all Francis Drake's documents and maps, although this was more likely to hide British activities in Spanish territories, than to conceal the location of cursed treasure. And the story dictates an incredible variety of levels. Like another of my favorite games, Far Cry, it sets itself primarily in lush green jungle environments, although it has a lot of fantastic level variations, and Drake may find himself scaling a sheer cliff face one moment, then fighting it out in a ruined Catholic monastery the next, before descending into an abandoned Nazi bunker.

The gameplay is a mixture of platforming out of the Tomb Raider or Prince of Persia series, and the cover-based gunplay out of Gears of War or Rainbow Six: Vegas. And there's a definite delineation. One moment Drake will be running through an abandoned fort, sliding and rolling behind parapets and boulders for cover from seemingly endless swarms of enemies, and then a few moments later, he'll put his weapons away and get to work leaping from ledges to hanging vines and traversing ceiling pipes or broken pillars.

Finally, Uncharted is jam-packed with idiosyncratic moments that add just the right touch to the wonderful core. Whether it's Drake's terrified facial expression whenever a grenade lands near his feet, or the way that his clothes actually become soaked whenever he walks through water, or the way that you have to wait for your screen to lighten when you enter a dark room, in simulation of the main character's eyes adjusting to the change, the game has thought out a billion little details that make a difference.

As far as negatives, I really only have two. The platforming, while far more forgiving than in, say, Tomb Raider, still relies on a lot of trial and error. If you guess wrong and jump at the wrong ledge in a sequence, Drake will plummet to his death and you'll have to start the whole section over again. And in the shooting bits, certain battles can be hair-pullingly frustrating as wave after wave of enemies attack you from multiple directions. One particular battle against a mounted machine gun inside a ruined dome required about eight attempts to beat.

But in the end, Uncharted is a stellar game and I highly recommend it to anyone who likes video games. It's going to be a classic one day.

9/10

And for the curious, my top five video games:

1. Jade Empire
2. Deus Ex
3. Far Cry
4. Uncharted: Drake's Fortune
5. Mass Effect

The Monster under the Bed: What are Slasher Movies really about? Part 3 or 3

So here we are finally, the third part of my short quasi-essay on slasher flicks and their tie to folklore and fairy tales. As you may recall, in this third part we're talking about that last vital component to a good slasher film: the protagonist. While Jason or Freddy or Michael may cut there way through an endless number of potheads, loose women and bad boys, they always meet their match when they bump up against Mr. Decent and the Nice Girl.


Take a story like Hansel and Gretel or the Juniper Tree. There you've got little kids. They're innocent, facing something evil that is actually deadly (and gets deadlier the older the version of the story you're reading). This sort of protagonist is echoed in the majority of 70s and 80s slasher flicks where you've got the decent upstanding boy standing against the killer, or the innocent, virginal babysitter trying not to get slashed. What's the point of this kind of protagonist? I think it does two things. First, most children aren't especially delinquent. Yes, yes, I've read The Lord of the Flies too, but in general, the worst thing a child has done is tell a lie or stomp on an insect. Thus, if you read them a story about a clever pick-pocket, they may come to love him as a character, but they never really substitute themselves into the story, because there is a wall between who that pick-pocket is as a character and who they are. So to a certain extent, having characters like this isn't so much about having "good" characters as it is about making them a Tabula Rasa without identifying traits.

Secondly, having characters who are good, decent individuals helps emphasize the villainy of the slasher. We may have sympathy with those guys who are out there getting stoned when Jason breezes through, but somewhere in the back of our mind, we accept the horror movie logic that "well, they shouldn't have been doing that." But how dare the villain go after the babysitter! What has she done to him? Look at all the fairy tales involving monsters and virgins. There just isn't really a story where the dragon shows up and says, "All right, villagers! Give me your most seasoned harlot, or I'll incinerate your home!" This acts as a defining characteristic of the monster. This is why the hero is trying to slay him. Because he's after the helpless. And too often, the best way to portray helplessness is to portray bland decency or naive virginity. Amusingly enough, when I first considered the link between the helpless damsel in distress and the monster, the first film that sprang to mind was Alien and Sigourney Weaver's sudden lapse into panic once she strips down to her white shirt and underwear. For all of Ridley Scott's tough, feminist attitude throughout the movie, he took it back to the old stories just briefly for that one scene.


So finally, what can we say about slasher films? They are updated bedtime stories, designed to frighten and entertain with gruesome imagination, to deliver vicarious thrills and chills, and finally to end happily ever after with the hero or heroine leaving the defeated beast behind, perhaps with a hint that it may return to occupy another story one day. They are not great works of imagination by any stretch, but they are unique reflections of the culture that produces them and its fears and loves. Recently, marking society's trend toward anti-heroes we're starting to see more and more films with characters who are not squeaky clean or may in fact turn out to be villains themselves.


Even these stories have precedent. Once you get past the iconic fairy tales and myths that have come down through the ages, you find ones that are more rooted in the cultures that produced them, stories about tricksters and shady characters, stories about Anansi, or Egil, or Renard. But all the stories have one thing in common: they are simple, direct works of imagination utilizing that most basic of formulas: protagonist, antagonist, conflict. The hero, the slasher, and the body count. It doesn't get more basic than that, and thus like most fairy tales, which can be told in mere minutes, slasher movies remain uncomplex in plot and motivation. They're not great cinema, they're just updated versions of campfire stories.

The Midnight Meat Train

Ryuhei Kitamura becomes another in the long line of Asian directors to cross over into American horror, although his offering is just as edgy and nasty as his Japanese stuff, and is pretty definitely not a mainstream horror flick. Of course, as an adaptation of a Clive Barker short story, how could it be anything but?

Bradley Cooper plays Leon, a struggling photographer who is encouraged by a potential sponsor to stop photographing sanitized things and find something really ugly to take pictures of. Taking her advice late one night, he goes out and photographs a group of muggers attacking a young woman, before scaring them away. The next morning, the woman is missing and he's become a prime suspect. Investigating his photographs he discovers in the background a sinister man in a sharp suit with a mysterious ring on his finger who works in a local butcher shop. As he follows this man around, Leon finds himself becoming darker and more animalistic, to the point that his fiance is even afraid of him. But the story is a lot darker and twistier than even he could have imagined.

The Midnight Meat Train is a strange little flick. Kitamura is no stranger to horror, and his debut film was the overlong and incredibly zany samurai/zombie flick Versus. And this movie has little touches of well-staged action stuck in there with the incredibly gory, nihilistic horror (one standout is a melee battle in a train car full of corpses hanging from meat hooks). As one might expect of a movie with this title, and the name Clive Barker attached to it, The Midnight Meat Train is messy as hell. A lot of the blood and gore is very fake CGI, but occasionally they break out the good stuff, the Karo syrup and latex for some truly nasty bits. But in addition to the carnage, The Midnight Meat Train is very sharply shot with a lot of good angles and stark, foreboding lighting. If nothing else, this director knows what he's doing.

As far as the acting goes, it's kind of flat. Bradley Cooper is a decent everyman, but he doesn't especially shock, and towards the end, where we're supposed to see a more dangerous side of him, he still seems to be in way over his head. Leslie Bibb as his fiance doesn't really have a lot to do except cry, act frightened, and participate in some disturbing sexual situations. Really, the only person who does anything above standard is Vinnie Jones as the Butcher. Virtually mute, he has a terrifying presence throughout the film, although he also manages to sell moments of weakness and humanity well with just his expression. Although one wonders if Jones will ever find a niche beyond British thug/horror movie villain in Hollywood.

Finally, The Midnight Meat Train does surprise with a nasty little twist at the end. It also manages to dredge up a surprising level of poignance for the very ending, although that seems par the course for most Asian horror flicks Nonetheless, it's an affecting ending.

In closing, The Midnight Meat Train is a solid piece of shock cinema, even if it's not completely stellar. If you like horror films, it's worth a look. Otherwise, you're probably not going to find anything to like.

6/10

Watchmen

I started reading comics my junior year of high school, starting with Batman: Year One by Frank Miller. It was pretty good, although it was eclipsed by The Dark Knight when I read that a few months later. However, the second comic I ever read was The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen. To this day, I still maintain that that first volume is one of the most fun stories I have ever experienced, in any medium, and it set me on the track of Alan Moore. With all that said, it was about a year before I finally read Watchmen. And it was just as great as everyone said it was.

Well now Zach Snyder has brought it to the big screen. He made the slavishly faithful 300 a few years ago. And now he gives us what is in many ways a word for word, scene for scene replication of Moore and Gibbons's graphic novel. And it's pretty darn good.

The plot for Watchmen is bizarre. In the future, costumed superheroes appeared in the 1940s and proceeded to change the world. The US won the Vietnam War with the help of the atomically restructured Dr. Manhattan and the nihilistic Comedian. Shortly after being elected to his third of six terms, Richard Nixon outlaws heroes. As America creeps toward nuclear war with Russia, someone murders the now aged Comedian. The only hero to have not given up his ways, the misanthropic Rorschach, sets out to find out why. He enlists the aid of former heroes Nite Owl and the Silk Spectre and they start to investigate, as the world teeters on the brink of war. And this summary only begins to convey the convoluted nature of the plot.

Watchmen is colorful, but depressing. Superheroes in this world are people with psychological issues, who may have actually made the world a worse place by their presence. Governments are unsure how to utilize them, and their methods are violent and ethically suspect, because in the end, they're just vigilantes. This element of ambiguity makes Watchmen a much more thought-provoking film than most superhero flicks, but it also strips away a lot of the crowd-pleasing appeal of less philosophical but in no way inferior films like Spider-man and Iron Man.

It is also, just like the original comic, very R-rated. There's nudity, profanity and a huge amount of gore. Bones are broken and punch through skin, limbs are sawed off and blades are buried in human bodies. This is not one for the kids.

As far as acting goes, it's a mix. Everyone does a really good job, but there are obviously three standout characters. First up is the Comedian. Though he is only in about ten to fifteen minutes of film, Jeffrey Dean Morgan plays the character very well, although I'm curious how his mostly female fan base will respond to his portrayal of a psychotic rapist who shoots a pregnant woman in the face. Billy Crudup plays Dr. Manhattan very well, conveying the thing's (one can't really call him a man anymore) passionless detachment to the real world through his voice, despite the fact that for the most part, the character is CGI. But the real standout is Jackie Earle Haley, although to be fair, he got a powerhouse of a character to play. Rorschach is violent, sociopathic and almost inhuman. But somehow his determination and feral nature made him the fan favorite of the comic book (much to creator Alan Moore's surprise), and Haley does it again here. To be fair, Rorschach is one of my favorite comic book characters, so I was concerned as to how he would be portrayed onscreen, but all my fears were put to rest. Jackie Earle Haley is Rorschach, in all his terrifying, misguided heroism, making him simultaneously repugnant, admirable and poignant. It's a great performance.

Patrick Wilson and Malin Akerman do good, sympathetic work as the Nite Owl and the Silk Spectre, while Matthew Goode is appropriately icy and intellectual as Ozymandias. But those three just don't get as much to work with. It was also entertaining to see Carla Gugino in old-lady makeup as the former Silk Spectre.

In the end, Watchmen is long and hyper-violent, but it's very good. If you can stomach it, I definitely recommend checking it out.

7/10