Rosencrantz & Guildenstern, Ltd.

Archive for July, 2009

I’ve now read up to The Battle of the Labyrinth, the fourth book in the Percy Jackson and the Olympians series by Rick Riordan, and I wanted to do a quick rundown of my thoughts about the series before I get to the last book.

I was introduced to this series by one of my aunts, but I’ve been reading my mom’s copies.  Let me say first that even after I finish the series, I fully intend to purchase the whole series myself.  I try to read a lot of young adult (YA) fiction because I’m an English teacher, and let me first say that I think this series is excellent for middle and high schoolers.  Like Riordan’s characters, his writing style is action oriented, moving quickly through the story.  His prose is straightforward and not overly descriptive (which is a good thing).  He gives you just enough description to jump-start your imagination without spelling everything out; this is excellent for teenage readers, as many of my students suffer from a lack of imagination.

When I first started reading The Lighting Thief, I immediately began comparing Riordan’s world with American Gods by Neil Gaiman.  The two share a similar concept: as people move, their gods move with them.  Riordan’s mythology, however, is much more focused.  In American Gods, the gods of the old world moved with the immigrants to America: Slavic, Norse, African, Indian, etc.  Riordan, however, sticks with Greek mythology, and instead of moving with individual immigrants, the gods move with Western Civilization (Greece being considered the foundation of it).  For both authors this presented an interesting challenge: incorporating the old gods into current society.  Riordan does an excellent job with this, and as with his descriptions, leaves some of it up to the readers.  For example, he never fully explains where the Lotus Casino comes from, giving those familiar with Greek mythology a little treat and those not-as-familiar something to find themselves.

From a character perspective, Riordan keeps his adolescents fully adolescent: like all teenagers, they are between childhood and adulthood, capable on the one hand of adult reasoning in some situations, and falling back into childish behavior in others.  The boy-girl relationships are particularly annoying in a realistic way.  I keep wanting to scream at the characters to just talk with each other openly, but like many males (myself included), Percy Jackson is often completely oblivious to the feelings of the girls around.  Despite the teenagery-ness of it all (and that’s not a criticism), I’m interested in finding out how the current love-quadrangle plays out, given the fleeting nature of most adolescent “love” relationships.  The gods are continually annoying in their lack of maturity, but as with the teenagers this is realistic, given how they were often portrayed in the mythology: capricious, easily insulted, and filled with self-importance (much like teenagers).

There are probably a couple of points that will annoy Greek mythology purists.  The biggest thing at the moment is the mixup of Kronos/Cronus with Chronos (they weren’t actually the same), but if one really wants to get picky, Riordan’s left himself a loophole (based in the history of mythology) to explain it away: the Greeks themselves weren’t sticklers for continuity and often had contradictory stories about their gods.

In the end I highly recommend this series to all readers middle-school and above.  I can’t speak for younger readers, primarily because I have very little experience with elementary-school children, but I imagine these books would be good a more mature fourth or fifth-grader as well (parental discretion should always be in force, of course).

Chiller is like the poorer cousin of the SciFi (soon to be SyFy) channel, but I will give them credit for filling a niche in cable television.  The idea of a 24-hour horror channel is pretty cool, but I do wish, much like SciFi, that they had more quality stuff to show.  Regardless, even bad horror movies are often entertaining in their own right.  So, for this inaugural edition of “When Horror Goes Wrong,” I bring you two vampire movies: Rise: Blood Hunter and The Thirst: Blood Wars.

Rise: Blood Hunter’s only distinction is that it stars Lucy Liu as a reporter-turned-vampire/vampire hunter and Michael Chiklis (The Shield) as (what else?) as police detective Rawlins.  Liu’s character, Sadie Blake, is investigating vampire-themed parties and the deaths of two girls (one of whom is Rawlins’s daughter), and in the course of her invesitagion gets turned into a vampire by Bishop and his “family” of vampires.  After waking up in morgue, escaping, and killing a man in a homeless shelter, she attempts to commit suicide by jumping off a bridge over a busy freeway.  She is recovered, alive but beat up, by Arturo, who gives her the tools and information necessary to begin her quest for revenge.  After destroying the other vampires, Sadie eventually teams up with Rawlins to destroy Bishop, but makes Rawlins promise to kill her after she kills Bishop.  They track down Bishop, discover Rawlins’s daughter Tricia turned into a vampire (then taken down by Sadie) and then kill Bishop.  Rawlins fulfills his promise to Sadie by stabbing her with a dart, but Sadie still ends up waking up in the morgue at the end of the movie.

I decided fairly quickly after watching a bit of this movie that I didn’t want to get too deep into it.  First, the movie annoyed by beginning in media res and then flashing back to six months before the opening.  Why is this a problem?  After all, starting a story in media res is a tried-and-true device, used with great effect in everything from The Iliad to James Bond.  There is a key to in media res that this movie completely misses.  What’s going on should be action, with the intent of capturing our interest.  The beginning of this movie, instead, is an abortive and completely superfluous lesbian kiss and Sadie shooting some old guy with a crossbow.  Furthermore, after starting in media res, the action of the story should continue moving forward and any relevant information about what went before can be filled in as we go.  However, this movie’s in media res is so far into the story that we have to flashback to six months before.

Second, the first (chronological) deaths that occur happen to, predictably, two collegey girls (the requisite blonde and brunette) who die essentially because they’re stupid.  The blonde is, of course, the stupider one, going first into this shady-looking house where the vampire-themed party is taking place.  The brunette (Tricia Rawlins) is only slightly smarter, going into the house to look for her friend.  Both end up dead, the blonde permanently and Tricia only so long as it takes for her to become a vampire.

Rise: Blood Hunter suffers from a strange illness that often affects B, C, or  D movies.  Paradoxically, the movie feels long but with very little happening.  The reporter-angle is never really covered, the characters are never really developed beyond stereotypes, and the big relationship of the movie (between Sadie and Rawlins) only happens near the end.  The character of Arturo, who seems to know what’s going on with vampires, is not seen again once Sadie begins her hunt, and Rawlins gets very little screen time until the end.  There’s supposed to be some sort of dynamic in his relationship with his daughter, but because she’s also out of the movie so quickly, that’s never developed.  Finally, with the exception of the beginning, it never tries very hard at horror, or mystery, or for that matter anything else this movie is supposed to be.

The Thirst: Blood Wars is a much different movie that Rise: Blood Hunters, but still suffers from the same feeling too long with little happening problem.  Thirst gets credit for two things.  First, it has Tony Todd (Candyman) as a the head vampire, and he has a good time hamming it up.  Second, the movie’s idea of vampire hunters: people almost turned to vampires, but who resisted the urge to drink blood, faced a sunrise, and survived, is actually kind of cool.  Like a lot of low-budget movies, however, this one fails to capitalize on its idea.

The movie takes place almost entirely on a college campus, and the reason is pretty obvious: it was a cheap (or even possibly free) location.  The acting is mostly horrible (except for Todd); lines are usually just said, rather than acted.  With the exception of the last couple minutes, the picture is very flat and uninteresting; bullet-time effects are used to dubious results a couple times, but other than that there is nothing interesting visually in this film.

Story-wise, I suppose it could have been interesting with a higher budget, but as it stands it wasn’t enough to really keep me interested, primarily because the characters are just stereotypes.  There’s Will, the “hero,” who’s a wimp, Jane, his potential love-interest and basic good-girl, Ash, the goth-girl, and Rico, a military buff, and Darren, jerky jock.  Darren, it turns out, is the son of a vampire hunter (called sentries), but he never went through the total process.  He did, however, receive some training by his dad, which he basically uses to bully people around.  When Darren attempts to rape Jane, Will tries to save her and stabs Darren with a piece of glass.  Darren bites Will and begins Will’s transformation into a vampire.  I have to admit that I missed exactly why Darren was able to turn Will; I’m assuming that Darren was able to do that because of his vampire-hunter heritage, but I really don’t remember.  Regardless, a vampire chick continues the turning process and gets inside Will’s head, encouraging him to complete the turning by sucking some human blood.

The rest of the movie basically boils down to this: Will resists his transformation and for some reason is super-strong, even for a vampire.  The vampire-hunter dad seeks revenge for the murderer of his son, and they all end of at vampire-leader Julien’s (Todd) coven for a showdown.  Various rather boring fight scenes ensue, and in the end Will resists the urge to feed and sees a sunrise, become a vampire hunter himself so he can hunt down the vampire chick who was in his head.

That’s really it.  I spent most of the movie confused about who was the vampire hunter’s son (for a while I thought it was Will), I still don’t understand fully how Will turned into a vampire, and I really don’t get why Will was so powerful.  They kept referring to Darren as a sentry, but according to his dad he wasn’t really a sentry, so that was confusing.  Plus there was a whole subplot of a struggle within the vampire coven and Ash wanting to become a vampire and throwing herself at Will and another vampire in the hopes of being turned.  With all this happening, I never really got a good handle on the movie, and that, combined with the bad acting and cinematography, just makes this barely even fun enough to watch ironically.

Overall, I have rarely been disappointed more by a vampire movie than I was by these two.  Neither one really embraced the whole vampire thing and had fun with it.  Instead, they usually took themselves too seriously and were unable to pull it off.

So, after quite a long while, there’s an update over at puddleglummusic.com.  I’ve uploaded another original demo that I recorded about 3 years ago, entitled “Reveal.”  Like everything I’ve done so far its an instrumental (for the moment).  I’m planning on rerecording it this summer and polishing it up a bit more; in particular, I’m going to add real drums (well, real electronic drums instead of a drum machine) and bass guitar.  Let me know what you think (and I’m always open to constructive criticism).

I’m finally back from an 8 day trek across Texas, down to the Hill Country, then to Houston, and back up to Lubbock; in all I clocked around 1400 miles on my car.  With my internet being spotty at best, I didn’t have much of a chance to post anything, but now that I’m back for a couple weeks, I should be able to get some more stuff up.  With that in mind, I thought I’d make a few comments on the upcomming SciFi Channel name change.

I mention in one of my reposts (Adventures in Bad SciFi – Bloodsuckers) that I have had a love-hate relationship with the channel.  Both SF (hard science fiction) and sci-fi (space opera, Star Wars, and other “(insert genre)-in-space” fare) are two of my favorite genres of literature, movies, comics, and overall entertainment.  Add horror and fantasy into the mix, and you have the vast majority of my reading/watching material right there.

However, I have not really watched the SciFi Channel as much as I expected to.  That has been a result of a couple of things.  First, much of what’s on it is bad.  It’s just not quality; hence my soon-to-be-resumed series ‘Adventures in Bad SciFi,’ which was inspired by the weekly “SciFi Channel Original Movies” that play on most Saturdays.  It is true that there has always been bad, cheesy sci-fi; it’s almost a subgenre.  But unless a movie is bad enough to be entertaining, then it’s just boring.

Second, I have reached a place in my life TV-wise where I just don’t watch much serial television the way I used to.  I haven’t watched a regular series as it airs in years.  Instead, I tend to watch TV shows (such as Doctor Who) in large chunks of episodes, on DVD, DVR, or other means.  As a result, I have yet to watch much of Battlestar Galactica, which is really right up my alley, every Friday.  I’m probably going to get the DVDs and watch it that way.

Thus, my SciFi Channel viewing as been spotty.  I also forgot that the executives at the channel have added shows that are either non-sci-fi/fantasy related (ala ECW; why is wrestling on it at all?) or reality shows (Ghost Hunters got old after 10 mins of one episode; “Oh, no!  It’s dark and our cameras can’t capture crap, but we’re all freaking out anyways!!!”) and I just get tired of that crap.

So, with all that said, how do I feel about the name change?  First, it’s a stupid name.  When I looked at it, it immediately became “sifee” (short i, long e) in my head.  They claim the renaming allows them to trademark the name (which they can’t do to a genre like “sci-fi”), but the claim that the new name somehow makes the channel easier to identify is ridiculous.  However, given my general feelings about the network as it is, I’m not really surprised.  I’m not going to boycott the new SyFy or anything like that.  I’ll just keep doing what I’m doing: barely watching it at all, except maybe every Saturday evening for a really bad “original movie.”