Bone (1991-2004)

Bone is what you get when you mix high fantasy with newspaper comic strips. The main character Fone Bone and his cousins look like they stepped right out of one of the later. They aren’t really humans, more like white, smurflike creatures. They flee from their home, because one of them, Phoney Bone, just did one con too much on the people of Boneville. They land somewhere else, a place full of (realistic painted) humans. But their arrival is not as coincidental as they thought, and soon they are amidst events full of queens, knighs, dragons and all the other stuff you can expect from high fantasy.

Bone is an excellent mix of adventure with light-hearted humor, utilizing the two formative aspects of the series to the best effect. It’s gorgeous too look at, fun to read, and has enough twists and turns that you can’t ever be sure what happens next, but always want to read on. If there’s one discordant note, it’s the ending. I thought it so unsatisfying that it made me go a bit sour on the whole series.

From the beginning I expected Bone and Thorn to get together. Sure, they aren’t even the same species, but this is comics and fantasy. I expected something like the ending of the first Shrek movie, instead the Bones just ride into the sunshine, leaving everyone behind. I dunno, but that was a letdown. On the whole it’s still a good read.

Watchmen (1986-1987)

Who watches the watchmen? The quintessential question that Watchmen asks. It never states the answer outright, but it’s obvious that there’s no higher authority than the watchmen themselves. But since most of them are either inept, insane or outright alien to human thinking, they aren’t doing a good job at policing themselves. Watchmen is happily deconstructing superheroes, painting a moderately realistic picture of what superheroes might be if they were real. It’s a rather dense read that demands all your attention.

The thing with the pirates displacing superheroes in comics was a clever bit. I only realized it on my second read. And yet, for all that Watchmen does well, the ending of Watchmen was a letdown. The final plan to unite humanity. Does anyone really believed this could work. It’s like the ending of Independence Day, and everyone laughed about that one. Unity in the face of a common enemy. That might work for 24 hours.

Some last words on Rorschach. It’s funny that one of the most unappealing characters in the comic is the one who succeeds where all the other “heroes” failed. Who watches the watchmen? Rorschach did, and then his morals got him killed. Which makes him, in an ironic sense, the best of the bunch of heroes.

The Black Hole of Carcosa (1988)

Kamus is back on Darkworld, not expecting much trouble. But things play out different. The new Lord of Darkworld, who got into his position thanks to Kamus’s unmaking of the old one, tries to modernize the Darkworld. Not everyone likes this, and civil unrest is brewing.

The first Kamus book by Michael Reaves played the whole thing more or less straight. Shirley’s book seems to start in a similar territory, but soon goes into a completely different direction. TBHoC is a full blown satire, never taking Kamus or the whole case too serious. Hell, when Fightin’ Jesus comes down from the sky in an elevator, in his hands submachine guns, you know that this isn’t Reaves’s Darkworld anymore. And yet, the plot never completely dissolves. Even in the most absurd situation there’s a tenuous connection to plot progression. It’s definitely not for everyone, especially if you expect a “realistic” Kamus sequel, but I enjoyed the absurdity of Shirley’s version.

Ghost Rider (2007)

GR is not a particularly good movie, but a fun one nonetheless. Also, it helped that I never read any GR comics before. It’s about a guy, Johnny Blaze, who in his youth sold his soul to the devil to safe his dad from cancer. Years later, when daddy devil has problems with devil junior, Blaze transforms into a bike riding, burning skeleton. His mission: stop devil junior from getting his hands on a mighty paper contract full of evil souls.

I could easily pick the plot apart, or the acting (especially Cage gives an odd performance as Blaze), yet I still enjoyed the movie on a dumb-but-fun level. GR is a movie that never takes itself too seriously, and yet plays the whole concept of the devil’s burning skeleton more or less straight. Odd, but it works most of the time. I just wish the movie had shown more action, Blaze’s enemies are too easily defeated.

Counting Heads (2005)

Counting Heads‘s partly quaint setting is forged out of the nanotech futures that were en vogue in the wake of Drexler’s Engines of Creations, mixed with a heavy dose of Orwell’s 1984. Which makes for a deeply conservative future, where everything, from economics to politics, is either on today’s level, or even more backwards. This is just an observation, alas, not a fault, but interesting nonetheless, considering how the book has been called visionary by some people.

The real faults are manifold. The title implies overpopulation, parts of the book seem to be about the loss of privacy and an absolute surveillance state. And yet there’s no theme that really stands out, as if Marusek wasn’t sure what he wanted to write about and just put everything into the mix. The development of the plot mirrors the conceptual mess. What starts big ends in a hunt for a MacGuffin, without really resolving any of the more interesting plot threads.

And then there are the characters. On the one hand the book’s antagonistic force is a shadowy, all-powerful conspiracy, and yet most of the people we meet, active characters or background figures, show incompetence and ineptness in plenty. This gap in competence between characters and conspiracy members is just too unbelievable. Neither of the characters were likeable or interesting either, which made it even harder to read through the whole book. Halfway through the book I really had problems remaining interested at all, still reading onward, hoping it would get better. Not this time.

Righteous Blood (2002)

Righteous Blood is a sort of mini-collection, bundling two of Cliff Burns’s novellas into one package. While I thought the first one lacked a bit of narrative resolution in the end, I prefer it over the second story. Kept has a tight plot with a good resolution, but I thought Phil was the better realized main character. Both Maxine and Phil do nasty things, but in Phil’s case these naturally evolved out of the context of the story, while in Maxine’s case they are just established from the get go with a thin explanation.

Living with the Foleys

A homeless man, Phil, is living in the garage of the Foley family, something the Foley’s aren’t aware of. Through the venting systems, sounds travel easy there, Phil has intimate knowledge of the going ons of every family member. And so he is the only one who can see the slow unraveling of the Foley family. But Phil has taken a liking to them, and especially to his place in the garage, and isn’t going to let the family go kaput.

Living with the Foley’s has a truly original and weird set-up, presenting a completely normal situation from a truly strange viewpoint. And all that is just a playground to trace the life of a man who has withdrawn from his former life, only to realize that until you’re dead you’ll always hurting, always caring for others, even if you live at the bottom. But there’s good stuff too. What’s the meaning of life? That’s a hard one. Or not at all.

Kept

Maxine is the caretaker of a house where strange people dwell. Her job is to make the house secure and, well, take care of everything, from plumbing to dealing with outsiders. Maxine is also a women with a peculiar hobby. She picks up men who want to fuck her, takes them home, drugs them, straps them on a bed, and slowly tortures them to death for a nebulous movie project. But her last subject turns out to be as nasty as she is. After he has freed himself he begins to kill the inmates of the house, one after another.

Kept is a classical hunt-the-hunter action piece, a relentless story that always keeps the reader on the edge about what happens next, brimming with tension until its gory resolution.

Night Watch (2002)

The past is a different country, something that Sam Vimes finds out the hard way. During a conflict with a murderer Vimes and Carcer, the murderer, get transported three decades into the past. The city is controlled by an insane lord, whose secret police is torturing and killing innocent people. And the Night Watch, the organization Vimes will lead in the future, is just a shadow of what it will be, full of corrupt policemen. The smart choice would have been to sit one the sideline, watching history unfold. But Vimes has to take action to preserve his future. The man who taught him everything when he was just a young copper, was killed by Carcer, and Vimes has to take his role now.

If you liked the first Night Watch books, where the plot still concentrated entirely on Ankh-Morpork and its politics, and the Watch was still very small, then you’ll like this one. It was a smart move by Pratchett to put Vimes back into a setting were he couldn’t rely on all the power he amassed over the time. He is back to square one, and the only thing that he has is his skill and knowledge.

Happy Feet (2006)

Happy Feet is a movie I probably would have enjoyed much more when I were younger, when I still believed that something like the happy ending of the movie could have really happened (I actually like happy endings, but a movie that tries to aim for a serious theme, I expect them to go through with it all the way). Now the ending leaves a bitter taste, reminding me of all the animals that have gone and will go extinct thanks to us humans. Compared to reality, the ending of Happy Feet looks either like a really bad joke, or plain wish fulfillment.

The movie itself has far too much music for my taste. Despite it being an integral part of the plot, it soon became annoying. Another problem are the characters themselves. There’s a reason why other animated pictures with anthropomorphized animals have many different kinds of them as characters. If you have too many of the same, they all look alike. I really had a problem to distinguish between most characters in the first half of the movie.

Also the plot of the movie seemed a bit unfocused. First it’s an ugly duck plot, then it’s about tradition vs something novel, and the last part of the movie is about finding the aliens (us humans) and help the penguins to survive. The inclusion of the environmental message was far from being subtle, but like I already said, worse was the happy ending. If you want an environmental message, a reference to reality, let the penguins starve to death and the main character rot in the zoo.

Zeliard (1990)

made by Game Arts . (Fansite, DOSBox, OST)

While playing the fantastic freeware game La-Mulana I remembered Zeliard, an old game I played until exhaustion years ago. Both are 2d-platformer with a high difficulty, but because of the great gameplay you’ll always come back. I remember that I parsed my way through the in-game conversations with a dictionary by my side, getting only half of the hints to solve the puzzles. That made the game even more frustrating, as if the intricate and complex levels weren’t hard enough.

The levels in Zeliard have a strange topology. Start at an arbitrary point and go right, and you will reach the same point again (the same goes if you go left, up or down). This made mapping the levels extremely annoying, but without maps you would have been completely lost, especially in later levels. At one point near the end I got stuck, because I didn’t understand a hint. One door led to three points. Two or three years later I played an old save game, got the hint and completed the game. Winning the game, after I had given up, made it a much sweeter victory.

300 (2007)

I went into this movie expecting to hate it; my preconceptions ready at hand after I had read enough reviews on the net. And taken at face value, it’s a horrible movie. Pretentious, silly, campy, always ready to present a distorted historical view, laden with questionable ethics. But I’m not sure the label movie actually applies to 300. I see it more like a pop-opera, where the staginess is intended, where even the violence is stylized to look unreal. From the get go 300 doesn’t want to look like a real movie, the colors, like the history, is distorted.

It’s like the Hercules/Xena TV series, cranked to the tenth degree, though without any hint of humor or knowledge of how ridiculous everything is. When Leonidas cries: THIS IS SPARTA!!!, you’re either offended by the whole stupidity of it or deeply amused at the whole hilariousness.