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seriousficThe Vampire's Assistant: Cirque du Freak
This is really two movies in one. And I don't mean like how in Terminator you've got both a love story and an action movie.
In one of these movies, there are a bunch of celebrities playing sideshow freaks, who are charming and interesting. Like the 7-Up guy or the woman from 30 Rock who isn't Tina Fey. Oh, and Salma Hayek is in there too, but I'm not sure what she's doing. Well, aside from wearing a low-cut top, which is always welcome. The freaks get a big introduction sequence doing their acts for the freakshow, so you're thinking that we're going to really get to know them, but instead we get movie number two.
In the second movie, there's a war brewing between the mean vampires and the nice vampires (And since you've seen a genre film before, you know this just means that some character actor says "The war has begun" at some point and then everyone goes about business as usual). Oh, and there's the Chosen One and destiny and some fat fuck hamming it up all "Ask me about my mysterious backstory!" Thanks, don't care. Even Willem Dafoe's stupid moustache can't save this second movie, with scenes like the hero's best friend asking to be made a vampire, then swearing vengeance when he's refused in a total "Look, ma, I'm a supervillain in training" manner. This isn't foreshadowing so much as fore-splattering-with-black-paint.
The first movie makes you think you're in for a smart, satiric look at the vampire myth, with John C. Reilly's vampire master goofing around and a kid vampire who takes a Nintendo DS into his coffin (they lie. Him having a DS is just an accident, not him planning to have something to do while he's waiting to be dug up). Unfortunately, all those moments are pretty much in the trailer and from then on it's just lame backstory that, like all bad world-building, assumes we care instead of giving us a reason to care. It does lead to some entertaining vampire fights, although they could've used the kind of cartoony escalation Joe Dante used to do. All we really get is a tween version of the climax of Blade.
A sidenote: The characters say "You're who you are, not what you are" at least twice, so that must be the moral, but earlier in the story, the master vampire tastes the eventual villain's blood and goes "You have bad blood, you can't be a vampire." So... people are born evil, but it's their choice? Okay, movie.
One by Conrad Williams
I wanted to like this book, mostly because the cover art is pretty cool. It ends up being little more than a blend of The Road, I Am Legend, and Day of the Triffids. And not the best parts either.
Richard Jane (who is referred to as Jane for the entire book... weird) is a deep-sea diver doing his oil rig job when an Event happens. Because he's underwater, he's spared the gruesome fate the world has taken. Everything seems to have taken a damaging dose of radiation. Most everyone is lying dead on the streets, so Jane sets out to journey to London to find his son (his mother is one of those harpies who doesn't understand A Man's Got To Do What A Man's Got To Do, so he could give a rat's about her. In light of his increasing obsession with his son, this doesn't strike one as terribly feminist). This takes up the first two hundred pages or so of the book, and although the prose is very good, it's not the most interesting thing in the world to read about a man walking a lot, scavenging for food, and missing his son.
There's only one real interesting episode, where Jane (the hero of Canton, the man they call Jane...) and his merry band of survivors meet up with some other survivors who were partially caught in the blast and have been driven insane with pain. Unfortunately, this thrilling action is cut short by Jane blacking out within a page and then waking up after the whole thing has been resolved. I literally put down the book here and said to it "That's it? You could only get one page out of horribly burned psychotic murderers?"
So Jane reaches London, doesn't find his son... duh... and after two hundred pages, realizes... dun dun dun!... the bodies aren't decaying.
Yessirree, after two hundred pages, the book decides it's a zombie novel. Now, forgive me, but this strikes me as a serious deficit in pacing here. There could've been some real spooky shit here with the zombie apocalypse starting up. People hearing screams in the night, corpses disappearing, the feeling of being watched. But no, the chapter literally ends with a zombie sitting up and then it skips ahead ten years to the Omega Man pastiche.
Now, nothing against zombie novels, but after two hundred pages of walking around, you'd think the book was going in a different direction. Like, more walking. If it's zombies, there should be some of that right off the bat. There should be some set-up, some foreshadowing. Why do we need to spendTwenty Minutes Two Hundred Pages With Jerks? It's like two entirely different books that happen to be between the same covers.
So we get a lot of pages where Jane reminisces about them figuring out the zombie threat and working on a cure and setting up safehouses and I'm like "That? You couldn't have shown us that? Two hundred pages of walking to London and you couldn't fit in dealing with zombies?"
I should also mention that in the two hundred pages of walking, there's this subplot of a mysterious benefactor who may just be in Jane's head. She disappears from the Omega Man pastiche, but shows up again at the final showdown, in which we get this huge infodump in which Jane theorizes about her motives. By then, I'd half-forgotten about her. We couldn't have resolved this in that two hundred pages of walking? We couldn't have a better way of sending her off than her just showing up in the big battle and Jane thinking to himself "wait a minute, she must be..."
So now there's a whole new plot, about getting to a raft that will hopefully take them to somewhere better (there's also a murder mystery that never gets resolved), so Richard and his new friends set out for the coast. This part is pretty good, making you wonder why there needed to be two hundred pages of walking to set it up. Throughout this section, there's been ominous mention of the zombies eating men but only dragging away women, and in the course of events, Jane comes across the Horrifying Truth (tm). And in the very next chapter, he's rallied an army to attack the zombies, all Braveheart and shit. Again, two hundred pages of walking, you couldn't spend a little more time on the plan to attack the zombies' homebase?
They succeed, then Jane dies and is reunited with his son in heaven after killing a tiger. The end.
No, I'm serious.
Okay, if you must know, there's also a bit of an undue (to me) focus on the fact that Jane's new love interest in the Omega Man section is pregnant with his kid. Why is it that these action heroes always get so het up about their unborn babies? It was pretty risible in the last season of 24. "Well, you killed my wife, that I could understand, but did you know she was pregnant? That's the part that really steams me!" Yeah, babies are cute, but it's like once their seed's been passed on (to a virile male child, of course), that takes precedence over the woman they supposedly love. No female can hope to match the awesome power of father/son bonding! Give me a break.
This is really two movies in one. And I don't mean like how in Terminator you've got both a love story and an action movie.
In one of these movies, there are a bunch of celebrities playing sideshow freaks, who are charming and interesting. Like the 7-Up guy or the woman from 30 Rock who isn't Tina Fey. Oh, and Salma Hayek is in there too, but I'm not sure what she's doing. Well, aside from wearing a low-cut top, which is always welcome. The freaks get a big introduction sequence doing their acts for the freakshow, so you're thinking that we're going to really get to know them, but instead we get movie number two.
In the second movie, there's a war brewing between the mean vampires and the nice vampires (And since you've seen a genre film before, you know this just means that some character actor says "The war has begun" at some point and then everyone goes about business as usual). Oh, and there's the Chosen One and destiny and some fat fuck hamming it up all "Ask me about my mysterious backstory!" Thanks, don't care. Even Willem Dafoe's stupid moustache can't save this second movie, with scenes like the hero's best friend asking to be made a vampire, then swearing vengeance when he's refused in a total "Look, ma, I'm a supervillain in training" manner. This isn't foreshadowing so much as fore-splattering-with-black-paint.
The first movie makes you think you're in for a smart, satiric look at the vampire myth, with John C. Reilly's vampire master goofing around and a kid vampire who takes a Nintendo DS into his coffin (they lie. Him having a DS is just an accident, not him planning to have something to do while he's waiting to be dug up). Unfortunately, all those moments are pretty much in the trailer and from then on it's just lame backstory that, like all bad world-building, assumes we care instead of giving us a reason to care. It does lead to some entertaining vampire fights, although they could've used the kind of cartoony escalation Joe Dante used to do. All we really get is a tween version of the climax of Blade.
A sidenote: The characters say "You're who you are, not what you are" at least twice, so that must be the moral, but earlier in the story, the master vampire tastes the eventual villain's blood and goes "You have bad blood, you can't be a vampire." So... people are born evil, but it's their choice? Okay, movie.
One by Conrad Williams
I wanted to like this book, mostly because the cover art is pretty cool. It ends up being little more than a blend of The Road, I Am Legend, and Day of the Triffids. And not the best parts either.
Richard Jane (who is referred to as Jane for the entire book... weird) is a deep-sea diver doing his oil rig job when an Event happens. Because he's underwater, he's spared the gruesome fate the world has taken. Everything seems to have taken a damaging dose of radiation. Most everyone is lying dead on the streets, so Jane sets out to journey to London to find his son (his mother is one of those harpies who doesn't understand A Man's Got To Do What A Man's Got To Do, so he could give a rat's about her. In light of his increasing obsession with his son, this doesn't strike one as terribly feminist). This takes up the first two hundred pages or so of the book, and although the prose is very good, it's not the most interesting thing in the world to read about a man walking a lot, scavenging for food, and missing his son.
There's only one real interesting episode, where Jane (the hero of Canton, the man they call Jane...) and his merry band of survivors meet up with some other survivors who were partially caught in the blast and have been driven insane with pain. Unfortunately, this thrilling action is cut short by Jane blacking out within a page and then waking up after the whole thing has been resolved. I literally put down the book here and said to it "That's it? You could only get one page out of horribly burned psychotic murderers?"
So Jane reaches London, doesn't find his son... duh... and after two hundred pages, realizes... dun dun dun!... the bodies aren't decaying.
Yessirree, after two hundred pages, the book decides it's a zombie novel. Now, forgive me, but this strikes me as a serious deficit in pacing here. There could've been some real spooky shit here with the zombie apocalypse starting up. People hearing screams in the night, corpses disappearing, the feeling of being watched. But no, the chapter literally ends with a zombie sitting up and then it skips ahead ten years to the Omega Man pastiche.
Now, nothing against zombie novels, but after two hundred pages of walking around, you'd think the book was going in a different direction. Like, more walking. If it's zombies, there should be some of that right off the bat. There should be some set-up, some foreshadowing. Why do we need to spend
So we get a lot of pages where Jane reminisces about them figuring out the zombie threat and working on a cure and setting up safehouses and I'm like "That? You couldn't have shown us that? Two hundred pages of walking to London and you couldn't fit in dealing with zombies?"
I should also mention that in the two hundred pages of walking, there's this subplot of a mysterious benefactor who may just be in Jane's head. She disappears from the Omega Man pastiche, but shows up again at the final showdown, in which we get this huge infodump in which Jane theorizes about her motives. By then, I'd half-forgotten about her. We couldn't have resolved this in that two hundred pages of walking? We couldn't have a better way of sending her off than her just showing up in the big battle and Jane thinking to himself "wait a minute, she must be..."
So now there's a whole new plot, about getting to a raft that will hopefully take them to somewhere better (there's also a murder mystery that never gets resolved), so Richard and his new friends set out for the coast. This part is pretty good, making you wonder why there needed to be two hundred pages of walking to set it up. Throughout this section, there's been ominous mention of the zombies eating men but only dragging away women, and in the course of events, Jane comes across the Horrifying Truth (tm). And in the very next chapter, he's rallied an army to attack the zombies, all Braveheart and shit. Again, two hundred pages of walking, you couldn't spend a little more time on the plan to attack the zombies' homebase?
They succeed, then Jane dies and is reunited with his son in heaven after killing a tiger. The end.
No, I'm serious.
Okay, if you must know, there's also a bit of an undue (to me) focus on the fact that Jane's new love interest in the Omega Man section is pregnant with his kid. Why is it that these action heroes always get so het up about their unborn babies? It was pretty risible in the last season of 24. "Well, you killed my wife, that I could understand, but did you know she was pregnant? That's the part that really steams me!" Yeah, babies are cute, but it's like once their seed's been passed on (to a virile male child, of course), that takes precedence over the woman they supposedly love. No female can hope to match the awesome power of father/son bonding! Give me a break.
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Re: Politeness
Date: 2009-10-25 04:09 pm (UTC)