And then the piano falls out of the sky…

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It would appear that I don’t know when to quit.

About half a year ago I read The Blade Itself by Joe Abercrombie. And I didn’t like it very much, as Jonas delighted in pointing out to me when I was cursing about the sequel.

So what do I do?

Well, obviously I go straight ahead and put the second book of the First Law trilogy on my Christmas wishlist. That’s like, logical. Right?

Actually it isn’t, but I did it anyway, for the same reason that I’m still reading the spectacularly uninspired works of Kristen Britain  and still toil through the chaotic, pun-infested mess that the Xanth books have turned into.

Why do I do this to myself, you may ask, and the answer is that this is a bit of an extension of my First Rule of Reading: Never Put Down a Book Once You Started It. By which I don’t mean that you need to finish War and Peace in one sitting, but you may not decide on page 266 that you’d rather read Twilight: New Moon. And the same goes for series. Barring extraordinary circumstances I like to finish what I started.

After this brief excursion into a compulsive reader’s convoluted mind, back to Before They Are Hanged. One of my two chief criticisms of the first book in the trilogy was just that: it was the first book in a trilogy. The Blade Itself suffered greatly from being mostly just buildup and character introduction. I am glad to say that the second book of The First Law trilogy actually has something closely resembling a story. Nothing groundbreaking, mind you. The usual shtick of having to find the immensely magical thingamajig that has been hidden away by the Gods/fate/some powerful dude in a white robe to save mankind from the great evil that it bears (see David Eddings and J.R.R. Tolkien for reference), but it’s a story nevertheless. After the first book I’m not going to be picky on that score, trust me.

Unfortunately my second criticism was that all the characters were unlikable bastards. That hasn’t changed so much. Actually not at all, come to think of it. (Although I have to give the Most Unlikable Character EVER Award to someone else this book around. The winner is Ferro Maljinn, for successfully hating everything and their dog. Logically the woman should keel over dead on the first page, because she’s realized that she hates the air in her lungs and is therefore refusing to breathe. Yes, I know, edgy characters are *in*, but there is such a thing as taking it too far.)

*Takes very deep breath*

Where was I? Right. Miserable, whiny, unlikeable sods. One and all of them. Still the book somehow manages to grip you. At least a little. There was a spark of interest in me as I read, ever so slightly outweighing the tidal wave of sarcasm that I had in store for the book. Until the end, that is. Then the sarcasm crashed down on me as book turned more and more absurd.

You see… here’s what happens: At the end of the book each and every single of its myriad point of view characters will say the words “life is pretty good right now, come to think of it”. I’m paraphrasing right now, naturally, and the phrase is delivered with varying degrees of enthusiasm and conviction, but it’s always there. And an average 2.6 pages after the character in question has said this…

(I’m sure you’ve already guessed. Come on, it’s not very hard.)

… a piano falls down from the sky and crushes him into lots of tiny bits.

Now, that’s interesting if it happens to one character. Maybe two or three if there’s a lot of them. But all of them? I can even see what Mr. Abercrombie was trying to say. Life’s a bitch. I might not agree, but I have to give him the right to his own opinion. The thing is that, as a dramaturgical device, it gets old around the third piano or thereabouts.

Summing up: Before They Are Hanged is definitely better than its predecessor. And that’s saying something, because I’ve read far worse than The Blade Itself (also a lot that was better by miles – so much for that argument). In the end the reader is left groaning at far too many far too forced tragic endings, and the only ones that come out smiling are the local piano manufacturers. I’ll reserve my final judgement until I read the last book of The First Law, but so far I’m not really impressed. And I’m still waiting for Ferro Maljinn to kill herself as soon as she realizes that she hates her own guts.

Game Over In The Land Of Swirling Colors

/ verenakyratzes / 4 Comments

Colors, so many colors.
Blue, red, green, yellow, blue, purple, pink, more pink, neon pink, double pink.
They will not stop.
They move.
Jerky.         Shaky.         Uncontrolled.         Indistinct.
Truck. Two trucks. Giant Bullbars.         Orange.         Whirling.
They dance.
They will not stop.

Make them stop.
A fist. Two fists. Giant knuckles. Red. As blood. Red blood.
And the spinning colors.
Nipples.         Two.         Three.         Too many to count. Nippeldy nipples everywhere.
And above all:
Gerard Butler, floating, soaring, rising over Times Square.
Game Over.

Postmodernist poetry or an attempt to review Gamer (a.k.a. Quick Ways To Turn Your Brain Into Elderberry Jam)?

You decide.

B-Movie Double Feature

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Greek video stores got everything. Every Hammer Horror film ever made, every Asian Disney rip-off you can think of and all the B-movies in the whole wide world.

We like that. On evenings when we’re just not strong enough to sit through three hours of Julia Roberts or Tom Wilkinson looking very serious and not saying a whole lot, when we’ve already seen all the comedy, fantasy & sf and horror movies that are worth watching, there is another kind of horror that lures us in front of the TV-set: the B-movie.

B-movies are the pinnacle of Hollywood entertainment. If you doubt me just take a look at Uwe Boll’s A Tale of the King – A Dungeon Siege Tale and keep your eyes peeled for the plastic Orc-asses. That’s true art.

An added bonus is that every once in a while you’ll actually see something that you’re glad to have seen. Like the recent Syfy Channel miniseries of The Andromeda Strain. Or The Devil’s Tomb (or The Devil’s Tomp as the Greek DVD jacket proudly proclaimed).

Now… let me get this straight: The Devil’s Tomp is not a good movie by any measure. It’s just that given the recent track records of both Cuba “I-haven’t-made-a-good-movie-since-1999” Gooding Jr. and Ron “B-movie-man” Perlman we expected the worst.

And we didn’t get what we wanted. The Devil’s Tomp is

halfway decent. Good acting, not too ridiculous dialogue. The production values certainly are sound. Of course there is the obligatory hot lesbian sex. I guess there’s some clause in the WGA statutes th

at says that religiously themed horror movies have to have at least one scene containing hot lesbian sex with optional zombie involvement.

Well, that’s it for The Devil’s Tomp. I wouldn’t recommend actually seeing the movie… at least if you don’t feel the urgent need to throw away two hours of your life, but it wasn’t a total loss either. I’ll try to be funnier on the next movie I review… wait a minute. That should be easy. Real easy. Because…

The other movie we saw that fateful night was Against The Dark. Promising title, not very promising, actually decidedly unpromising, cover art. Fat Steven Segal and cartoon vampire vixens that don’t even have the decency to show up in the movie that they’re posing for.

Now, I’m not a Steven Seagal fan. Actually the whole eighties and nineties martial-arts-are-so-cool-shtick largely passed me by. Steven Segal, Chuck Norris, David Carradine… they all came and went without leaving as much as a roundhouse kick to remember them by in my mind. I do think Jet Li is pretty cool though.

So you won’t hear any of that Steven Seagal is one of the grand masters of Hollywood… shame that he doesn’t get appreciated anymore… I still could sense the force of his real talent behind those tacky lines…  Not from me. No way, José. The man is grossly overweight, has the acting ability of a very short plank of wood and should have realized about ten years ago that he’s too old to still have the moves.

There’s an upside to all this: He’s hardly in the movie. That’s the funny part, come to think of it. The movie’s marketing is 120% Seagal-centric. He’s on the cover, the tag line says something very tacky about his sword and how he intends to stick it into vampire-zombies in very creative ways, the plot summary makes you think that he is the only reason the world hasn’t ended yet.

Only that ain’t so. More than half of the movie is dedicated to the story of six or seven survivors of the apocalypse that are stumbling through a disused hospital building and seem to be not very good at anything besides picking their noses while the vampire hordes snack on their mates. And wandering off and getting lost, they’re rather good at that too. In addition the hospital that they are in for some reason has only got one exit (in the underground parking garage, where else) and they absolutely have to get there before the generators shut down and… I don’t really care, to be frank. I only wonder what happened to the concept of ground-floor windows.

At some point Steven Seagal pops up in the company of two leather-clad martial arts vixens that, I wish I was kidding, haven’t got a single line in the movie. Not. A. Single. Line. And they ain’t doing much fighting either. They mostly show their… other talents. (If you know what I mean, nudge nudge, wink wink.)

And that’s it. One would think that the story involves just a teensy bit more than getting out of the door-less hospital of doom, while picking off the characters like tin cans from a fence, but it really doesn’t.

What had us stumped is that Against The Dark even features a few nice shots. And some pretty bizarre scenes. The kind that you’d expect in a nightmare sequence in a Tim Burton movie. That makes you wonder if the screenwriter was thinking of a slightly different kind of movie when he penned the script. It’s hard to describe, but the movie almost feels as if it could be good if only it had been filmed with another genre in mind. And another lead. And different dialogue. And… you get my drift. I’ll leave you with the epically eloquent, artfully articulate first lines of actual dialogue in the movie. Enjoy! They’re, like, awesomely profound:

We’re not here to decide who is right or wrong. We’re here to decide who lives and who dies.

Art In Its Truest Form

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Now… I haven’t seen this and I’m not sure if I want to (a lie, I love trashy B-movies). I am, however, willing to believe the IMDb user reviews for once, which seem to agree that this isn’t exactly Academy Award material. We saw this jewel, this miracle of cover design, in a Greek video store, the kind that’s got every movie ever made, but sadly didn’t have the time to take a look at it while we were there. I don’t doubt that it is delightfully horrible.

But, and it’s a big butt (forgive my childish humor), the poster is pure, sheer art. Beautiful from the tip of her army-issue high heels to the rim of her green sweatpants.

If there was an Academy Award for Best Poster Design, I’d nominate Stinger in a heartbeat.