Tricked

The book Tricked by Alex Robinson is an exquisitely crafted piece of drama. Each character is crafted with a unique and interesting background and set to proceed down the tracks laid for them as they make their way inevitably to the final crash when they all meet. This little world is built with such detail that the tracks become quite clear. By the end, the only question in this reader's mind was would he take the "easy way" out when the final crash came.

It's taken me a while after reading it to figure out why exactly I didn't care for such a well crafted book. The characters do seem to be drawn each with specific differences to set them apart visually, but can you really fault the author for that? Was it the fact of a secondary target for the final "act of violence"? Perhaps a little, but this was certainly not all of it.

The trouble for me was that no one seems to change and grow. There is personal growth happening. As we meet her, one character has decided to find out who her father really is, but we meet her after she finds that he's not really dead and has traveled to the city to meet him. That's background to the character, the story does not follow this growth since it has already happened.

Perhaps the rock star who sees every woman as someone to hit on is growing. It could be, I suppose, but a whirlwind marriage doesn't really seem like much of a change. Seems more like a fling with legal consequences to me. Wait another three weeks, see if he's not cooling to his new wife and looking for another hot flash of fresh love. Nothing about it really seems lasting.

It's possible Robinson's just set it up too well. Everyone was simply too well motivated so that every turn seemed natural and each decision essentially already made. This left for me the sense that each path was simply being followed. The figures played out a disaster. Maybe some of them will learn and grow as a result, but that's in the future.

I want some sort of progress or learning, a challenge that is overcome. None of that happened, so at the end the story felt empty to me.

Some 92 years ago

The poor newspaper reader of old, trained to read single stories in long columns probably didn't know what to think of the comics pages of the time. Still nicely aligned in columns with a picture above a paragraph, but the reader was expected to read across the page instead of down. No wonder they needed to put in numbers to tell the reader the order of the panels. It's interesting how little thought many cartoonists today put into how their layout is communicating the order of the panels when they get creative about layouts.

It was certainly a different medium around the turn of the last century, as seen in this (London) example. Still really an illustrated story rather than a comic. One can certainly be glad that the need to verbosely explain what is clearly drawn already has passed. However, I was particularly delighted by one of the strips in the linked post which seems to particularly work with the form of the even by today's sensibilities.

The comic that's caught my attention is Burglar Bertie (direct link to one of the two examples from above) which occupied the back of this sheet. Instead of stating what's in the picture, this one has been done in the form of a letter to the editor. It is a nice touch that gets in all the key words that make the images unambivalent to the reader of the day yet does not seem to insult the intelligence outright for the reader of today who thinks the picture didn't need so much explaining.

The Banquet

I have just finished watching Hamlet in Chinese (Mandarin). Well, it was called The Banquet and is now called Legend of the Black Scorpion for a re-release, but you start to notice as it hits the main events of the play. The players changed roles in places, a death prescribed to one took hold in that one's opposite instead of that one's counterpart. A few made it out alive who did not even make it to the final bloodbath in the original. Er, I think. There was still quite a bloodbath to be had.

A few of the pieces of Hamlet included felt a little bit of a stretch, but perhaps that's because I had realized by those points in the movie. The moment that lead to realization did fit. It was the play within a play, which has become rather common, but then you remember the dead emperor and the o'er hasty marriage between the emperor's brother and his widow and you realize what this particular play will be about.

I think the old title fits it better. It did, in a strange way, encompass the events in a way that was easy to describe. It served as a good metaphor for the film. The new title is just designed to make it sound exciting and thus encourage purchase. It has far too many contemplative moments to be trying to sound as something so obviously dangerous outwardly. This is devious, the danger hidden. The scorpion just happens to supply the poison.

That Salty Air

The ocean will at once seem familiar and easy to know, with waves rolling along in regular time, and seem wholly mysterious, with dark waters just a few feet below the surface and storms hiding over the horizon. It is usually slow and sometimes gentle, but it is persistent. Within it there are always currents flowing. They gently carry a child playing far down the beach and the waves push him in to a slightly unfamiliar shore when he's finished playing. But sometimes he plays too far out and those waves pull him further instead. Sometimes the currents pull the swimmer under and far down into those deep, dark waters.

The ocean takes the foolish and the unlucky in equal measure. The ones left may raise a fist and a voice at it, but they know it will do no good. The ocean cannot listen and understand. They can affect it no more than the sand and seashells. They may want some sort of revenge upon it but it has the ultimate defense: it moves like water.

Which is why it does not seem surprising to me that the author of That Salty Air does not come from an ocean town. This is a tale of revenge upon the ocean, or rather upon creatures of the ocean in proxy for trying to hurt that which cannot be hurt. Hugh, the main character, is shown as one who reveres the ocean until he receives a letter informing him his mother has drowned in it. Maddened with grief he forgets the responsibilities of his life and wife. She finally brings him back to his senses, but when the sea shows itself to be a fickle and unpredictable thing, he manages one more bought of crazy anger.

This was a tale more of a man who showed himself quite foolish and ultimately got off quite lightly. Sometimes you do. The sea is fickle.

Magic Boy & Robot Elf

I can have fun. I like to have fun. Really. Like this book. This book, Magic Boy & Robot Elf by James Kochalka, is all kinds of fun. And I like it.

The story is of a man who builds a robot to be him. The robot wants to live so tries to take his creator's life right from childhood. (Because it has a built in time machine of course.) Thus the book goes along on a wild rampage broken up by moments of quiet reflection. Somehow the rampage and reflection seem to all fit together.

Each moment of the story is told only in service of that one moment with no ulterior motives of getting the story someplace by the end. It takes sudden left turns just for the sheer joy of seeing what happens. It is a very enjoyable meander through a wild imagination.

Wall-E

There is apparently a cute little robot movie out by Pixar. Other than that, I knew nothing of what to expect in going to see Wall-E.

There is a lot of cute to it. All sorts of saccharine sweet, laid on thick, sappy, cute. And if that's enough for you, this movie is great. But if you peak behind that curtain of cute, it's very empty. For me, the cute was way too much. I found myself rejecting it and the movie just fell flat.

Presented with a robot that had lots of personality, but no traits that would seem to lead from being a robot. In fact, some of it seemed to clash with being a robot. A most decidedly male robot although there should be nothing to make him male. He is tasked with cleaning up an Earth which, thanks to a loss of the law of conservation of matter, is quite covered in trash.

Along comes another robot. This one is decidedly female although there is still nothing about her that should lead her to thinking she is female. These humans that made these two robots seem to have adding in a lot of extra programming that serves to reduce the chances of the robot working well.

Ultimately the only robots that seemed to have a sensible outlook on life were a cleaning robot before it suddenly stopped hating "foreign contaminant" in order to save a really big clump of the stuff and the autopilot. Past that, the motivations of humans and robots were utterly mysterious leaving the action without foundation. Which is why it was quite empty to me.

I also have to love the amount of trash a ship on its 700th year of a planned 5 year outing is able to pump out. That pesky conservation of mass thing has really been kicked. Other than that, I have a couple other solutions to the motivations of the characters of this movie:

1. Watching a sappy movie for 700 years can make a robot become sappy to a degree few humans have ever achieved.


2. This sappiness is infectious. It may require touch to transmit, but it can transmit to other robots.

I did like the opening short. Rabbit is hungry. (Hear the tummy growl?) Rabbit would usually have been fed, but isn't. Until feeding happens, rabbit is quite prepared to do all sorts of ill to the hand-that-has-not-fed-it. Ah, motivation.

some movies

I've actually been off to see a few movies in the last couple of months. First there was:

The Fall. Not very imaginatively named but imaginatively constructed. After a fall a stuntman is hospitalized and possibly paralyzed in 1920s Los Angeles. After a different fall, a little girl is hospitalized with a broken arm. He decides to tell her a story populated by the people she knows and has told him about. Why he does this is he skeleton of plot the movie is built on, but the meat of the movie is art rather than plot.

The stuntman tells a story which is mainly the movie he was working on when he had his fall but we see this story as it is interpreted by the little girl. This is clearly illustrated as he tells of the Indian's most beautiful "squaw" (which I'm fairly certain is not a word used in polite conversation) in all the land but her Indian friend is from the subcontinent so the fabled wife is in finery associated with India. The movie is full of delightful details and certainly would bear, even need, multiple watchings.

Iron Man is a straight up action flick. Lots of fun and largely bloodless violence so rather cartoon like even though it's live action. Well, I guess the more violent parts probably weren't really live action since they're between robotic shells. Good guys win and bad guys lose and it's all quite feel good. Good to see whenever you need brain candy.

Wanted is also an action flick, but with a lot of artistry tossed in in rather silly ways. This one was full of quite bloody violence. I wondered what the dad who came in with his two little kids just after the initial bloodbath and longest of the two sex scenes (which are there to illustrate just how much of a lose our hero is at the start) was thinking. The boy sitting next to me who must have been 7 years old winced a bit during the movie and I quite agreed.

Once in a while the barrage of weird artistic bullets doing impossible things with far too graphic results would have a go at actually being a suspense thriller instead of straight action. But it seemed like the creators found that too slow, so they would get past in as quickly as possible. It had some fun CGI stunts too, but I don't think I need to see this again.

Kung Fu Panda is more brain candy. It seems that young pandas script their dreams terribly, but I love what they do with the textures during this opening sequence. It's a lovely piece of work. Most of the movie is fairly standard for this kind of animation these days, but standard has gotten to look very good. I had the impression that his fur might not be as deep as it ought to be, but there's plenty other things wrong with the panda if you want to get into how he isn't exactly like a panda. The plot itself held together very well. I'm not used to seeing that in an animated movie staring animals. In spite of the claim of "kung fu", there was no actual Eastern philosophy of any kind that I can remember in the movie. Again, something to watch when what you are looking for is well executed silly.

I also caught the trailer for Star Wars: Clone Wars. I was impressed, but not in a good way. They have decided to take a series of short cartoons that were done in an innovative and artistic 2D animation and remake them into a single movie done in a 3D style that was innovative in the 1980s but now just looks cheap. My two questions are "Why?" and "Who would bother to go see this?" Certainly won't be me.