Book Review:: Ender's Game

Orson Scott Card is an author who's words I've read several times and nodded along too in agreement, and yet I had never once read any of his fiction. I've read works of his dedicated to the craft of writing and his knowledge there finally convinced me to make reading Ender's Game a priority.

Ender's Game closely follows Andrew Wiggin, known as Ender, as he is selected and groomed for a great destiny within the military defence of Earth. In this future, mankind has found an uneasy peace on earth after surviving two waves of invasion from a ruthless alien race known only as "buggers". As a planet they collude to build a massive fleet and harvest from the brightest and best children the future stars of this war machine.

Ender is one such child, only he is worked harder than all the others, as he is the most promising. The story does a wonderful job, in the classic "hard SciFi" way that focuses primarily on the technology and the world around it, of unfolding a detailed "what if" scenario to completely flesh out the world and events to follow.

It asks and answers questions such as, how do you train children from a young age to be armies, to lead armies? How do you train them to fight in zero gravity? To think in zero gravity without the limitations of earth-like thinking? How do you fight an interstellar war? How do you help children cope with the mental strain?

Much of the novel is gruelling, and tortuous as we follow along through Ender's trials and triumphs, such as they are, and it is all fascinating. I did feel it wore on me. There wasn't much for hope, or compassion in this story, and there felt to be precious little positive emotion in it. I believe this was by design as Orson Scott Card set out to make us understand the unbearable cost of what was done and from the payers perspective, from Ender's.

Many people will and should enjoy this book, especially young people, because in many ways it celebrates the ability of youth to achieve great things and is at it's heart an underdog story, albeit a brutal one.  Given the main events it'd be easy to expect this to be a cautionary tale, but only in the final pages does this really occur and then it feels more like a segue into a sequel then any real message.

My main complaints against the book are it's muddled theme especially in regards to the end. While this is written and titled as if it's the story of Ender, it's treated in end and at various stages much more like the story of Earthlings in the Third Invasion. I think this allowed OSC to explore many more ideas he had but ultimately took away from the power of his central material and at various times made us more interested in largely unimportant characters (Ender's siblings).

I guess in the end I just wished there had been some moralistic message after going through Ender's trials with him. What was there was handled in such a wash of denouement exposition it didn't really resonate. Orson Scott Card exhibits a very analytical understanding of cause and effect in relation to human emotions, relationships, and society and science. His work is solid and well written here, but to my disappointment, it is not Lord of the Flies in Space.

I give Ender's Game 9/10.

MMO Review: Lord of the Rings Online (LOTRO)

Lord of the Rings Online (LOTRO) has gone Free to Play in the same style as previous Turbine games such as Dungeons & Dragons Online (DDO). The main difference here is that LOTRO is a superior game.

While it vied to capitalize on the recent successful movie franchise, LOTRO licensed the video game rights from the books and as such, uses none of the imagery from the movies. That said it does a wonderful job of evoking a cinematic experience with such innovations as clever little intro videos for each race and class and nice short segue videos for important transitions in the main story arc of your character.

The game obviously takes the written works of Tolkien very seriously and there is a great deal of care taken to imbue every character and location with every factoid you could mine from it.

More after...

Classic Movie Review: Beat the Devil (1953)

I still can't remember why I got my hands on Beat the Devil to review - it is an obscure movie with a very peculiar comedy to it.  It stars Humphrey Bogart, Jennifer Jones, Gina Lollobrigida, and a supporting cast of four "desperate fellows" on an ill-fated trip to Central Africa to exploit a lead on a Uranium-rich tract of land.

The trip serves to provide the setting, first an idyllic seaside stop-over then an ocean voyage, and the intrigue. a 5-way business arrangement held together more by suspicion then trust.  The real story here is not the Uranium mine at all, but the bizarre antics of these characters as they all interact with one another.

Much like while doing my review of Bringing up Baby I was surprised at the timelessness of the comedies of the 50's.  Co-written by Truman Capote, the script was produced day-by-day and the actors tasked with performing them hot off the presses.  This plays through in the way this movie feels more like skilled improv than a traditional movie.  There are some wonderful characters at play, from the Chilean German with an Irish name who waxes poetic about the meaning of time, to the Blonde Beauty who is fickle with her affections yet liberal with her imagination.

Beat the Devil is punctuated by stunning set pieces of dialogue.  Tongue-in-cheek interchanges and occasionally insightful mini-soliloquys make quick work of your defences and will render you raptly aware of the bizarreness of each character.  For me, it is reminiscent of the distinct characters found in Charles Dickens - lively, colourful, and just a bit bent.  Although there is at most 3 settings throughout the movie it has the feeling of being a mad capering adventure in that the situations seem as improvisational as the acting.  Whether it was the dialogue or the situations, I found myself laughing out loud more than once and chuckling over the few recurrent gags that sneak in under the wire.

I've never seen Humphrey Bogart in a film before and I'm not sure this was the best introduction of him as an iconic actor, although it has the benefit of my seeing him disarmed from any affected grandeur.  Now I know him as an interesting actor, who can turn a deadpan phrase and still seem the dashing lead.  I want to note also that I had never heard of Jennifer Jones before, but after her charming, intelligent turn in this film, I can imagine she had the hearts of many young men firmly entrenched in wishful thinking.

One thing you can expect from Beat the Devil is never to hear a bland or clichéd statement responded to without a cupful of wit and on that topic I'll let our protagonist Billy have the last word, "The only thing standing between you and a watery grave is your wits, and that's not my idea of adequate protection."

Movie Review:: The A-Team

Four Army Rangers form a crack team of special operators, running 80 successful operations over 8 years.  This is the kind of success and off-the-books team the CIA needs for a Top Secret op that involves as much money as you can print with your own private U.S. Mint and as much protection as the worst of Iraq's underworld can muster.  Too bad it blew up in their face.  Now they must get the bad guys and clear their names.

If that sounded vaguely familiar, chances are you were thinking more along the lines of this summers hit The Losers than the 80's iconic TV Show.  In fact these movies have a lot in common, maybe too much, to the detriment of this A-Team reboot.  While the movie ditches the main premise of the majority of seasons of the TV show in favour of a palatable 3-act introduction to these characters, replete with massive action set pieces, it does manage somehow to sneak in the 'feel' of these characters we know and love.  That said, this remake lacks the heart the TV show had.

In the 80's this show was a child of the times, it was after Vietnam, America was a lot of things and confused might have been one of them.  Enter four Desparados, wrongly convicted men, who travel the country and risk their lives to help the innocent, the downtrodden, and the oppressed.  Often for a pittance, fashioning what they would need for their cunning plans out of the vehicles and farm equipment so often at hand.

Fast-forward to 2010 and we have Iraq-vets trying only to help themselves in a tongue-in-cheek Bourne style war with the CIA.  Leave that to The Losers, in a lot of ways, they did it better.  Don't get me wrong The A-Team is a funny movie, and the action scenes are memorable.  The key was the casting, all the characters came out on screen and I enjoyed watching the interplay.  I was impressed to learn B.A. Baracus is actually played by a UFC fighter, I had no idea this guy was not a character actor.  All said, I would have traded in Liam Neeson for another actor, but maybe I just never got over Star Wars.

As with so many of these reboots what we got was a script written as a revisionist back-story introduction to the characters we used to know and in so doing, we rob them of the setting and actions that made us love them.  If Hollywood's plan was to cash in on yet another 80's memory with no clear understanding of what made it a phenomenon, well, I guess they must love it when a plan comes together.

Classic Movie Review: Bringing Up Baby (1938)

Why this movie? I asked twitter to suggest a great movie that came out before I was born in '79 and HeyLady33 suggested Bringing Up Baby as one of the most memorable.  I was skeptical at first but I found that it was on both an AFI 100 Movies list and also on Filmsite's 100 Greatest Films.

The Story is a screwball romantic comedy sparked by a chance meeting on a golf course that throws a million dollars, a marriage, a leopard, and rare dinosaur bone all into mayhem.

My Thoughts Wowee!  This movie was an absolute rollercoaster ride.  It picks up staidly enough and gets quirkier and quirkier as we go until it becomes an absolute free-for-all of mile-a-minute banter and comically misconstrued wordplay.  Hepburn's character Susan is an absolute charmer with her carefree and flippant approach to the quibbles and concerns of Grant's hapless David as she tries to win his affections, however haphazardly.  There is a real duality between these characters, two peas from a pod, and their interactions bring out a part of David that is polar opposite to the side his fiancée evokes.

The Talisman Book Review

Stephen King & Peter Straub - The Talisman

Published: 1984      Genre: Fantasy, Horror
Expect: A 6-part mini-series in 2012, A series of Graphic Novels

I picked up this book because it supposedly has tie-ins to the Dark Tower series of King's and what I found was, that is the absolute wrong reason to read this book.

Synopsis and Positives

This is essentially the story of the young boy, Jack Sawyer, that sets out on an adventure of hardships and trials and moments of incredible beauty to save his mother's life and so much more. It is a story of magic and moral allegory. It has a clear undertone of the sort of evil modern lifestyle message that King so often represents but does it primarily through his contrasts between two very different and yet very similar worlds. Some of the events, characters, and concepts are worth reading, especially for a novel from 1984. I can see how this book may have been influential and inspiring in it's time. It is a sometimes painful litany of the trials and horrors survived by a 12-year old boy on a seemingly hopeless, yet predestined, quest.

Negatives and Discussion

Stephen King has the unholy knack to keep you riveted to the pages to find out what happens next and that did not waiver here, even though at times, I didn't particularily find myself liking the book! Some of the things about the book I disliked were 1) some elements of the particular writing style I didn't vibe with and these may have been Peter Straub's contributions or things King was trying out, but I fear I wasn't expecting them 2) I felt at times that the story was too unbelievable, too childlike, too incongruous, or too darn heavy!

In all fariness, a lot of my dislike in 2) was my preconception that this was The Dark Tower Appendix A when at most this book is The Dark Tower's feeble ancestor, or to put it another way: The Talisman is to the Dark Tower (DT) as The Hobbit is to the Silmarillion. The Talisman is in the spirit of the Dark Tower but in miniature and infancy, it is a childs tale of adventure in it's form but with some jarringly unchildlike imagery along the way. In regards to DT this makes perfect sense since only The Gunslinger (DT Book 1) had yet been published when this story hit the shelves but the problem is that so very much of this story feels and sounds like The Dark Tower that you can't help continuing to make the comparisons.

While I'm being fair, some of the frustration and incongruency the story wrought with me was somewhat convieniently explained or justified towards the end of the book, while some other of it is just left as is. I think most of the reason these hanging bits frustrated me was my need to tie them into the Dark Tower, whereas in a standalone tale (which this is) they could be accepted as simply being part of the magic. Although, for the life of me, I never understood why a 12-year old boy in 1981 would describe someone's looks in terms of a 1950's movie actor. Heck, maybe this is accurate as I was 2 years old in the year this story took place and the fact the book was published when I was only 5 should mean I cut it some slack if I found a lot of the metaphors and references were sending me to wikipedia. I guess the lesson there is that if you make too many pop culture references in your timeless classic, you end up needing some publishers Shakespearean footnote armada to explain them 30 years later.

Conclusion

This story is a fine and novel tale for it's time, and if you can avoid comparing it point-to-pont to the Dark Tower - either because you haven't read it, or are not that type of compulsive person - you will probably enjoy it if you can get through the considerable grim parts that comprise it's bulk. And for a mere pittance used or a few bucks more new, it's a pretty safe investment for 700+ pages.

Now, I start the sequel.

Avatar Review and VIP Theatre

I saw this at the Wellington VIP Cinemas in 3D on the weekend and here is my brief overview of both.

First off this was my first 3D movie ever and my first visit to the VIP cinema ever. There were a number of neat 3D moments but none that were more than a novelty which really surprised me since the vast majority of this movie is computer generated which would allow for a lot of stunning 3D moments. I was left with the clear impression that a really good 3D movie would need to be specifically filmed to take advantage of that display medium and very likely be entirely CG with simple colour themes, perhaps a scifi of some sort. I wear glasses and after wearing the tinted 3D glasses over my own for a number of hours my eyes and head started to feel taxed, also a lot more of the movie seemed kind of flickery than maybe it should have.

As for the movie, it followed almost exactly what I thought would happen in the narrative after watching only one trailer. The story is predictable in it's major elements and evokes some amount of both Deus Ex Machina near the end and simultaneously fails to suspend my disbelief in the motives for some of the actions on screen. Maybe this latter is due to a lack of investment in the future world these events take place in - we have only the off-hand word of the "villian" characters to go on that certain pressures are legitimate influences to allow certain contradictory actions.

That said, it was compelling. The story really did have me interested in how they were going to pull off what I thought was coming and the majority of it was pretty cool. This would have made it a watchable and fun movie for me but what the story really does is offers a vehicle for the visuals and concepts. The visuals and concepts in this movie are stand-out the reason to see it in my opinion. This is a really cool place, with really interesting creatures and plants and customs and represented in some of the most stunning computer generated scenes I've seen in a movie. This is not a Pixar movie or a plastic feeling Spirits Within, this is computer generated effects at their best. Acting was great and the translation to the CG characters was flawless... often in video game mocaps and lower quality CG movies actions are overwrought and mime'ish, but here these are living creatures. For these reasons, I'd like to have seen it without 3D to get the full clarity of the visuals. As it was it felt a bit like looking at the Mona Lisa in that funky stereovision.

As for the VIP experience I'd say if you want a big comfortable seat (with a bit of recline) and no hassle seat reservations or are dying to drink while watching a movie or hate watching a movie with kids and teens disrupting things, this place is a well worth the $5 premium. In short, it's ideal for a date. If you want to kick right back, the first-row seats fully recline La-Z-Boy style. VIP Downside? I'm not actually sure how much of the movie I remember...

All in all a good movie and worth experiencing in the theatre even if the main story arc is predictable. The 3D is worth checking out if you've never seen 3D before or are a fan of 3D in movies, otherwise this movie has a lot more to offer than just that. Oh yeah - if you loved this movie, perhaps check out the fantasy version: Ferngully.

Movie Review:: Ninja Assassin

Ninja Assassin - Legendary Pictures


A movie about ninjas produced by the Wachowski brothers and Legendary Pictures. Awesome. Or is it?

To be honest, I was dissapointed by this movie. It had a predictable storyline and the fight scenes were difficult to follow as they were very dark. I'll come back to these. The acting was adequate and the story and ending left it open to a sequel. The main weaknesses of the movie for me were the slightly silly feeling Europol agency and agents, they felt like they came right out of a Hong Kong Jackie Chan movie to me, and the lack of emotional investment in the main character's motive.

The latter shortcoming was a result of the way the backstory was shot. Often I could not tell which child was which and so there was a difficulty in attaching the emotions to the right person. Also the backstory scenes leaped ahead years at a time and with a limited building of the emotional connection between the characters that was, to me, a result of the brief nature of some of the clips. In the end I didn't really feel the lines the main protagonist were throwing around in the heat of his revenge were powerful enough to really motivate that revenge considering the desparate brashness of it. But that's just me. In reality, I didn't need any of this because the story arc was pretty predictable with maybe one or two slight novelties along the way, and at that some of them even seemed gimmicky or cheesy to me.

Visually, the movie had a lot to offer. Some original and cool effects and fight scenes that were unfortunately often hard to really make out. I will concede I watched this movie at Galleria which seems to have a poorer viewing experience than a Silver City (poorer sound too). The darkness, though, was for effect as the ninjas lurk in shadow and it is their magic. I'd like to see this again on a good TV to catch what I missed in the theatre. One thing that I could not miss was the blood and visceral death effects. The blood here isn't the bright, contrasting, almost comical Kill Bill blood but the deep ruddy blood of film noir but gushing in gouts that could sicken a horror afficionado.

In the end I had to ask myself, what was this movie trying to be? I think, it was trying to be a nostalgic ninja movie updated with some cool ninja effects and brutally hyper-realistic fight scenes (realistic if you take the premise that ninja are as supernatural as legends posit) that don't flinch at the question, what happens if someone with incredible strength hits you full swing in the head with a razor sharp katana. These things it excels at and so, this movie succeeds in the fashion of Ninja Scroll. In that regard, I think a well considered sequel could have a place and if they beef up the story (now that the stage is set) to incorporate the other 8 ninja clans we could have a very cool movie.

My recommendation: If you are not a steel-gutted fan of ninjas or a voracious consumer of the occasionally innovative action special effect, don't bother with this movie.