Swabbing the links

I need to fine tune the links section of this blog, but I wouldn't be me if I didn't do it in the most drawn-out and complicated way imaginable. So, every day (or so) I'll try to post about one of the links in my blog and explain why I'm either keeping it or getting rid of it.

Sounds fun? No? Tough.

First up, I'm getting rid of the link to the Isaac Asimov Home Page. I originally put it up because I had this grand idea to educate myself by reading all of Asimov's most famous stuff and I wanted a handy reference as to what exactly that might be and in which order it might be best consumed.

But then, digging into it, I realized that I don't really like Asimov all that much. So: gone-dy!

Review: Roberto Benigni's Pinocchio

I've never really liked the Pinocchio story. I mean, what's to like? An obnoxious, spoiled little puppet runs around getting into trouble while being stalked by an equally annoying, self-righteous cricket. There's an enabling old man who might as well be carrying a cross on his back as he searches the world for his runaway "son" and an episodic storyline as Pinocchio jumps endlessly from fying pan to fire and back again. The only thing that I really like about the story is that the Blue Fairy is invariably hot.

I keep forgetting about that though. I hear "Pinocchio" and I flash back to childhood with "Give a Little Whistle" and "I've Got No Strings" bouncing around in my head. So, I don't know what I should've been expecting from Benigni's version, but what I got was an absolutely gorgeous take on a story that I can't stand. Benigni heightens Pinocchio's obnoxiousness with a manic performance, but to his credit, he also perfectly captures the puppet's gullible innocence. The film is undeniably beautiful, from the sweeping, Italian landscapes to the starlit, quaint village streets as the Fairy's mouse-drawn carriage glides through them. It really is a magical experience.

I just wish that the story was less painful.

You will lose everything.

The teaser poster for the next Harry Potter movie (Order of the Phoenix) has been released.

The trailer for it can be seen before the animated penguin movie Happy Feet that starts tomorrow. Someone'll have to tell me how it is though since I'll be watching something else.

To Read: The Book of Lost Things

I'm a sucker for stories about kids who get transported into magical realms. Alice in Wonderland, The Wizard of Oz, and The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe are all great examples. MirrorMask, too.

The plot device loses something when it's a grown-up who gets moved over, like in those fantasy books where a bunch of D&D players get sucked into their game world or whatever. Not only are they better equipped at physically dealing with the new world than little kids, but you have to go through long chapters -- if not the entire book -- of the characters' mental denial of what's happened to them. The children always seem to take their situations in stride while retaining a marvelous sense of wonder about the new world.

So, John Connolly's The Book of Lost Things about a 12-year-old boy who "is thrust into a realm where eternal stories and fairy tales assume an often gruesome reality" sounds right up my alley. The World War II setting, the inclusion of a wicked step-mother, and the re-interpretation of classic stories like "Little Red Riding Hood" and "Hansel & Gretel" all seal the deal.

To Read: Nature Girl

I don't read a lot of thrillers. I usually prefer either a straightforward, whodunnit-style mystery or an all-out, supernatural horror tale. But I suspect that might be because I haven't been exposed to the right thrillers. Carl Hiaasen's Nature Girl could change that.

Hiaasen is known for writing quirky characters and Nature Girl doesn't sound like an exception to that. It has an unhinged heroine who plans to kidnap and terrorize an innocent telemarketer (if there is such a thing) and his girlfriend, a tabloid murderer, a sexually harrassing stalker, a drug-runner, a teenager who's over-protective of his mom, a half-Native American alligator-wrestler, and an accidental hostage: all of whom are connected to each other and converge in an isolated section of the Florida Everglades called Dismal Key.

That plot has the making of a really interesting story in anyone's hands, but in Hiaasen's it promises to be as funny as it is thrilling.

New Comics: 11/15/06

Almost forgot to link to this week's Diamond shipping list and tell you what I'm planning to buy.

By the way, from now on, I'm not going to list trade paperback collections and graphic novels since I don't buy them on Wednesdays with the regular, new comics. I buy those more like books, when I can afford them and have time to read them.

Superhero Comics
52 #28
Birds of Prey #100
Shadowpact #7
Civil War #5
Ms. Marvel #9
New Avengers #25

Adventure Comic
The Phantom #13

Horror Comic
Hellblazer #226

Review: Tuck Everlasting

I'm a fan of The Gilmore Girls, so my interest in Tuck Everlasting was created by a desire to see what else Alexis Bledel was capable of. I didn't realize that the rest of the cast was as cool as they are.

I was really excited to learn that a couple of Alias alumni, Amy Irving and Victor Garber, play Bledel's parents. Unfortunately, they don't have much interesting to do since they're just playing stereotypical, wealthy parents whose primary interests are being pretentious and controlling their headstrong daughter. Bledel's role isn't much better. She rebels against her folks by running away into the woods where she meets the Tuck family, who discovered a magical spring 90 or so years ago that made them immortal when they drank from it.

Now the Tuck parents (William Hurt and Sissy Spacek) spend their years hidden away in the forest near the spring while their sons (Scott Bairstow and Jonathan Jackson) travel the world and come home once every ten years. Bairstow is great as the tortured, older son whose experience with immortality has led him to see it as a curse. Jackson is much more starry-eyed about the whole deal.

Sissy Spacek is completely convincing as a woman who's satisfied with her life, if a little sad about the sacrifices that she and her family have had to make. She's easily the most interesting character in the movie. William Hurt was a strange choice to play the dad. His ubiquitous sad-and-weary performance works okay for the character once the Tucks learn that they've been discovered and will have to do something drastic, but he's not as good early in the film when he and his family are supposed to be care-free and confident in their isolation.

Another cast member that deserves mentioning is Ben Kingsley as a man who knows more than he should about the Tucks and is hunting them down for some reason. Kingsley's character is almost foppish in his mannerisms, but no less menacing or deadly. He does a lot with his generic, otherwise dull, villain role, but you can almost see him straining to do it. That's the way most of the actors are. You can see them fighting to breathe life into uninspired characters. The exceptions to that are Bairstow and Spacek who have some good material to work with and do great things with it.

More than boring characters though, the movie's major flaw is that it wants to make a point about living a full life, but does everything in its power to water it down. This all culminates in a decision that Bledel has to make at the end of the movie. After spending time with the Tucks and falling in love with Jackson's character, she has to decide whether to drink from the magical spring herself or live a finite life as a regular person. In spite of her natural fear of death and her love for her immortal boyfriend, she's haunted by something William Hurt said to her earlier in the film. "If there's one thing I've learned about people," he said, "many will do anything, anything not to die. And they'll do anything to keep from living their life." He says, "What we Tucks have, you can't call it living. We just... are. We're like rocks, stuck at the side of a stream." And finally, "Don't be afraid of death. Be afraid of the unlived life."

It's a nice idea for the point of a movie, it's just not the real point of this one. For all of Hurt's analogy of being stuck at the side of the stream, the movie paints the side of the stream as a very nice place to be. Yeah, the Tucks are going to have to make a change now that they've been found out, but for the last several decades they've apparently been doing just fine. They live in a magical-looking cottage next to a picturesque lake in the middle of a deep, enchanted forest surrounded by majestic mountains. The boys travel the world, seeing everything it has to offer, before coming home for a spell to visit and dance with their loving parents. Bledel's time with them is bewitching. The film spends a lot of time on beautiful scenery and creating spellbinding moments between her and Jackson. It all makes Hurt's speech sound empty.

Even Bairstow's character, as wounded as he is, has the potential to move past his pain and enjoy his existence if only he would. The usual argument against immortality in fantasy stories is that the immortal is forced to watch his loved ones grow old and die. But in Tuck Everlasting with its magical spring that anyone can drink from, that's not a concern.

Spoiler Below

All of this makes Bledel's conflict at the end much easier than it's supposed to be. And it makes her decision not to drink and to live a normal life look ridiculous given what we've seen in the movie up to that point. And the fact that we learn almost nothing about her post-Tucks normal life leaves us unsure about whether her decision ultimately ended up being the correct one after all.

Lots of other stories have done an excellent job of painting immortal life as lonely and tragic. Everything from Mary Shelley's "The Mortal Immortal" to the movie Highlander. I recommend checking some of those out instead. And if you're like me and just want to see what Alexis Bledel can do outside of The Gilmore Girls, Sin City is a much better option.

Wild Cat Books

Just discovered a small-press publisher called Wild Cat Books that specializes in pulp adventure stories. They publish resource books and reprints of old pulp stuff, as well as new tales with classic pulp characters and other stories that are inspired by the genre in general.

I recognize some of the authors who are writing the new pastiches. Ron Fortier, for example, used to do a great webcomic based on the further adventures of the classic Doctor Satan character. And Christopher Mills, who writes the introduction to one of the Captain Hazzard volumes, is an excellent pulp writer himself. Frankly, I'm disappointed not to see his name as an author credit.

Anyway, these deserve further investigation.

Review: The Lake House

I love Sandra Bullock. Primarily because she's cute, but I also think that she's under-rated as an actress. As frivolous as some of her movies may be, she brings depth to her roles that make her characters instantly interesting and empathizable. She was my only interest in The Lake House.

It's a forgettable romance movie with a gimmicky plot, but she's very good in it. I had a hard time buying her as a doctor, but I think that was the script's problem; not hers. We didn't get to see her being a doctor enough. In fact, we didn't get to learn much about her character at all. We don't know why she's so lost and alone, but thanks to Bullock's performance, there's no question that she is lost and alone.

Keanu Reeves, on the other hand, isn't a favorite actor of mine. I like him okay enough in certain roles (Bill and Ted, Parenthood, Speed, The Matrix), but whenever his character doesn't exactly match up with one of the stereotypes that he does well, I usually end up cringing. He's not too shabby in this, but that might be because the script spends a lot more time developing his character than it does Bullock's. We get to see him interact with his father and brother and even if we never do understand why he prefers writing to the unseen Bullock over actually dating the cute girl he works with (who's obviously interested in him), we feel like we know the guy and we feel badly that he's so unhappy.

Shohreh Aghdashloo is tragically underused as a colleague of Bullock's character. In fact, that and my earlier complaint about not getting to see more of Bullock as a doctor make me wonder if there wasn't originally some more hospital stuff in the movie that got cut out for length. 'Cause the movie certainly should've done more with that part of its story.

Still, the movie succeeds in spite of its flaws because it takes two broken characters whom we actually care about and uses them to help fix each other. There's also a nice point to the time-difference gimmick: that when you're in love, waiting for things to happen at the correct pace in nearly impossible to do, but worth struggling with anyway.

You're not Sarah Conner

I posted a couple of months ago about a new TV series in the works called The Sarah Conner Chronicles and said, "If you've got a show with the name 'Sarah Conner' in it, you'd better have Linda Hamilton playing her or a damn good replacement." Well, it doesn't have Linda Hamilton in it.

Variety reports that the role has gone to Lena Headey from The Cave, The Brothers Grimm, and Imagine Me & You. None of which I've seen, but am interested in for various reasons. I don't know if she's a good replacement or not, but I aim to find out.

Happy Robert Louis Stevenson Day!

Today is Robert Louis Stevenson's 156th birthday. He was born in 1850 and apparently suffered from a lung disease as a child. In order to relieve his suffering, his nurse would stay up with him at night when his coughing kept him awake, and would tell him stories about ghosts and monsters and pirates.

Which no doubt influenced him later in life when he sat down to write stories like The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, The Body-Snatcher, The Bottle Imp, Kidnapped, and Treasure Island.

Gonna see if I can swing by Long John Silver's for dinner tonight to celebrate.