Archive for March, 2006
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I saw Inside Man with a buddy of mine who figured out The Sixth Sense about ten minutes into it. He’s good at figuring out twist endings and ruining movies for himself. Fortunately for him, Inside Man doesn’t have a twist ending.
The thing about twist endings is that you’re not supposed to see them coming. You think you’re watching one movie, then suddenly you realize that you’ve been watching something completely different. When it’s done well, you don’t mind and you even get a thrill from it. When it’s not, you’ve got two hours of eye-rolling ahead of you.
Mysteries don’t count as twist endings. Everyone knows that there’s a secret and that it’s something we’re all supposed to be figuring out. The mystery succeeds or fails on how well it conceals the solution while still playing fair with the audience. Inside Man succeeds by giving more than enough clues to its solution, but moving at so fast a pace that you don’t have time to put them all together until the end when you’re supposed to. It also keeps you good and distracted with great dialogue that’s both funny and insightful.
The performances are also helpful in giving you something else to think about. They’re all as excellent as you’d expect from Denzel Washington, Clive Own, Jodie Foster, Willem Dafoe, and Christopher Plummer. And they’re better than you’d expect from a typical supporting cast.
And the music… I’m don’t buy a lot of movie soundtracks, but I’ll be getting this one. Mostly for the theme song “Chaiyya Chaiyya Bollywood Joint” by Sukhwinder Singh, Sapna Awasthi, and Panjabi MC.
I do have a couple of criticisms of the movie, but they’re minor. The solution to the mystery is revealed to the audience before Denzel figures it out and the movie slows way down at the end as he puts it all together, but it’s worth sticking with to get to his reaction when he figures it out.
My other minor criticism is with Jodie Foster’s character, but not with the way she’s written. On the contrary, she’s one of the most interesting characters in the movie. She’s unlikeable, but not completely so. For example, there’s a scene where someone calls her the C-word and you can see brief shock on her face before she smiles and decides to take it as a compliment. We completely believe her when she tells Denzel later in the movie that her bite is much worse than her bark (there’s never a moment that she’s not being almost obnoxiously pleasant), but in that one, brief moment with the C-word, we also see that she’s human. I’d never want to spend any time with her, but I liked the character a lot.
What makes her frustrating is that she’s so intriguing, but her purpose in the story is purely to serve as a device through which we learn certain behind-the-scenes information. She doesn’t impact the story in any real way. But, like the dialogue, she’s an awful lot of fun to be misdirected by.
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I just learned about Dub on Steve Niles’s message board and had to share him with you. I’m really into the European (especially French) look in comics lately and Dub pushes all my buttons. He draws pirates, sexy sci-fi stuff, and pretty much everything else that I like.
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Just a quick plug for a roundtable I participated in over at PopThought. The question was about the power of myth in everyday life. I’m honored to be on the same panel as some great writers like Jamie Delano, Mike Carey, and Mike Grell.
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If you’re new to this blog, you may not know that I’m writing a comic about a vampire-cow called the Cownt. If you’ve been reading it for a while, you’re sick of hearing about it.
Either way, I’m excited about this new look that my cohort Gavin Spence came up with to reflect the new direction we’re taking the character. I’m trying to strike a delicate balance between creepy and funny and I think this look serves that very well.
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Wanna see some art from the upcoming Battlestar Galactica comic? I thought you would.
Unfortunately, I haven’t seen any of the interior art yet, but at least we know that the covers are going to be pretty. This is by cover artist Steve McNiven. The interior stuff will be by a guy named Nigel Raynor.
The series will be written by Greg Pak, and if you’re curious about his take on the show, there’s a good interview with him at Comic Book Resources. The first story will be set in between the first and second seasons: after the return from Kobol and before the return of the Pegasus. According to Pak: “In our first issue… the Galactica discovers a group of human survivors in a small Medivac ship under attack by Cylons. Adama suspects a Cylon plot. But Roslin points to the Sacred Scrolls, which contain an ancient prophecy: ‘The dead shall return in an ark of fire.’ Who are the ‘Returners?’ Will they unite or divide the fleet — and heal or break the heart of Commander Adama?”
My experience with comics based on TV shows is that they’re often not very exciting. They’re usually not allowed to change the show’s status quo, so that robs them of all their drama. I’d think this would be especially true of a show like Battlestar Galactica, which is so daring in its willingness to take risks, screw around with its characters, and resist getting itself into a rut. I’m gonna try it out though. Pak is a respected writer and he says he’s got good things in store, especially for Dualla and Gaeta in particular. Keeping an open mind.
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I’ve got a longer post in me about Doctor Who this weekend and about science fiction in general thanks to some whining I did over on my LiveJournal and some helpful insights that I got in return, but while that ferments, here’s some Who gossip for ya.
The Sun is reporting that there’s a Doctor Who spin-off for children in the works featuring former Who Companions Sarah Jane Smith (Elizabeth Sladen) and K-9. The characters are from the legendary and beloved Tom Baker (the guy with the scarf) era of the show and are rumored to appear in an upcoming episode of the new series.
I’m pretty sure that this rumor has been around for a very long time, and the BBC isn’t confirming anything about it. But no one’s outright denying it either, so who knows? Something to watch.
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According to Billy West (via his message board), voice of just about everyone on the show, Futurama has at least another 26 episodes coming. The deal’s still being hammered out, so no news on the where and when, but he sounds pretty confident about it.
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I knew they were thinking about a Blade TV show, but I guess I didn’t realize they were this far along with it. It’s going to be on Spike TV and it’s going to star rapper Sticky Fingaz from Onyx. Apparently, they were passing out DVDs with a trailer for it at WizardWorld LA this past weekend.
I don’t have the ability to watch it at work, so I don’t know how good it is, but you can check out the trailer here.
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This isn’t really a review of S.J. Rozan’s A Bitter Feast as much as it is thoughts about her work in general. That’s because A Bitter Feast, the fifth novel in her mystery series, is representative of her stuff up to that point and it’s all excellent enough that — if you like mysteries at all — it deserves your attention.
Rozan is a New York woman who writes about a pair of private detectives named Lydia Chin and Bill Smith. Lydia is a young, American-born Chinese woman who lives and works in Chinatown. Bill is a grizzled, middle-aged guy who works with her from time to time and has a crush on her. The series does something unique by alternating the point of view from book to book. The first novel, China Trade, is about Lydia’s trying to track down some rare China that was stolen from a museum. The book is told in the first person from Lydia’s point of view, and when the case gets complicated, we learn that she sometimes hires Bill to help out with her more difficult assignments.
In Rozan’s next book, Concourse, the focus is shifted to Bill, who’s hired to investigate a murder at a nursing home on behalf of an old friend who runs the security for the home. We learn that Bill’s relationship with Lydia is reciprocal when he hires her to help him out.
The rest of the series continues this pattern so that Mandarin Plaid (about murder in the fashion industry) returns to Lydia’s perspective and No Colder Place (about death at a high-rise construction site) comes back to Bill’s. A Bitter Feast is about unionizing Chinatown’s restaurant industry — a proposition that quickly becomes violent for mysterious reasons — and, of course, features Lydia again.
There are a couple of things that identify Rozan as an outstanding writer. One is her ability to shift moods with each book to match the personality of the main character. Bill’s stories are dark and brooding; noir, really. He’s had a hard life and you feel that in his books. Lydia brings out a lighter side in him though and that’s evident not only in the scenes in which she appears in his stories, but also in the feel of the novels that feature her. The Lydia books are still filled with danger, but Lydia — who feels she has something to prove to her family and her community — is much more positive in her outlook. As a result, her stories are more fun to read than Bill’s, though Bill’s are deeper; more introspective.
It’s easy to see why Bill has feelings for Lydia. She eases the emotional burden he always carries with him. And his feelings aren’t entirely unrepirocated. He’s the one person to whom Lydia doesn’t feel she has to prove herself, and that means the world to her. So, though each novel is self-contained and doesn’t really reference past volumes, you can see Lydia and Bill in this sort of tentative dance over the course of the series as they try to figure out just how they really feel about each other and what they’re able to do about it without messing up their friendship and partnership.
The other thing that Rozan does so well is to bring New York City to life. I’ve only been to New York once, and only for a couple of days, so I don’t know anything about it from personal experience, but I’ve learned more about the experience of living there from one S.J. Rozan novel than from countless Marvel comics, movies set there, and episodes of Sex in the City. Rozan knows her city and what she doesn’t know, she researches until you can’t tell the difference.
You’d also never know from reading the Lydia stuff that Rozan’s not Chinese. And it’s great that Rozan doesn’t just throw in details to show you how much she’s learned. She’s too talented a writer for that. She knows that offering facts just for the sake of showing off inevitably pulls you right out of the story. Every detail she gives you immerses you further into the story and makes it more real; more tangible.
One thing I’ve learned from Rozan’s novels is that New York is a wonderful place to visit. That’s kinda how I felt during my two-day trip when I was younger and the feeling is reinforced by these stories. I usually feel the need to take a break after reading a Rozan mystery. Not from the characters, whom I love, but from the city, which is too big and too concrete for my tastes. Fortunately for me, the next book in the series is Stone Quarry and it takes place at Bill’s cabin in upstate New York.
Ahhh. Trees.
I’m ready to dive right in.
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Tonight’s the night. SCIFI Channel. 8:00/9:00 CST
I tell you, it almost makes me glad for Battlestar Galactica to be over for the season.
