Movie Review: The Wolfman

The Wolfman, starring Benecio Del Toro, directed by Joe Johnston.

The Wolfman has a few good things going for it, but not enough to balance off the bad things, which include the acting, the directing and the writing.

Benecio Del Toro is not a handsome man. I haven't seen him in anything else*. Does he play leading men? He is also a Puerto Rican playing an Englishman who has been living in America since he was a child, but he sounds like a Puerto Rican who has been in America and maybe seen a few American TV shows. He has trouble with the accent.  Oddly enough, Emily Blount is English and plays an English woman, but still seemed to have trouble with the accent. Maybe she's been playing too many Americans.

Joe Johnston, the director, evidently believes (wrongly) that you can never have too much of a good thing. There are some nice atmospheric shots of the fog in the forest early on. There is also a very nice time-lapse shot of the moon. Then there a few more time-lapse shots of the moon. And some time-lapse shots of other stuff. You become a little bored of time-lapse shots. Johnston also uses that staple of the modern horror/thriller, the forced jump scene. That's when something or someone shows up or is revealed suddenly behind the character in a scene, at the same time as some boo-yah effect in the music soundtrack. Johnston uses this over and over again. I hate this method. Yes, it makes you jump. It's a natural reaction. But my next reaction is anger. This is a cheap shortcut in a fear movie. The director is unable to earn a real fear reaction, so he resorts to tricks that fake the real thing.


As far as the story goes, I hated the father character. Which is not to say that I hated the character itself, which would be a desirable reaction to the screenplay, but rather that I don't think the character worked in the movie and I would have preferred it's absence.There was no real mystery about the father being the other wolfman. There was a ton of animal imagery surrounding the father, in case we missed all of the other not so subtle clues to his secret identity. The father was purposely portrayed as a creep. He was too nasty, I thought. His character didn't work. How did his other son, who was killed in the beginning, not know that he was a wolfman, having lived with him all of his life? Why was he determined to become the wolf and kill when apparently wolfmen cannot remember anything they do when they are wolves? Why did his faithful manservant allow him to run free after keeping him safe for many years? Did he kill the man servant when he was a man or a wolf? These questions are not answered or explored in any way. I think they added him so they could have a big wolfman duke out to climax the film, but even that didn't really work for me.

I will say that the wolfman itself  looked great in close-up , howling and thrashing about, but looked awful when it was running, especially when running on all fours.

 I have one general problem with werewolf movies: there is no cure, there is always a tragic ending. This is actually discussed in the movie by Emily Blount's character, who states that if magic caused the condition, then surely magic can cure the condition. I agree with this, and wish it were pursued more fully. I find it unseemly that a good man can be cursed like in these movies, and doomed.

For a great werewolf movie, even though it too is a tragedy, I still recommend American Werewolf in London.

*Okay, I looked him up on IMDB, and I have seen him in The Usual Suspects and Sin City. I just find him unmemorable, I guess.

Book Review: Fearless: The Lost Fleet Book 2

Fearless: The Lost Fleet Book 2

The Lost Fleet is set in a far future and concerns the battle between the Alliance and the Syndics, deep in space. Ostensibly the Syndics want to conquer and the Alliance wants to be free. They've now been at war for over a hundred years. The soldiers fighting on both sides have known nothing but war in their lifetimes, and this colors their actions in battle. Thrown into this is John Geary, an officer when the war began who through suitable Buck Rogers mechanisms has been frozen and reawakened at the time of the story. Complicating matters is the fact that John Geary is now known as the legendary hero Black Jack Geary to the modern fleet, and he is thrown into command of the fleet just as it faces a devestating attack from the Syndics.

The first book in the series, Dauntless, layed out this premise and its consequences. John Geary is out of touch with modern tactics, but the tactics from his time are much better suited to survival and long term victory.

This second book does not advance the overall story arc very much. The main action has to do with several large space battles that occur as the fleet tries to advance toward home without facing overwhelming resistance from the Syndics. This is a cat and mouse game that was established in the first book. As in the first book, the battles are interesting in how tactics and communications are affected by ships moving at speeds significantly impacted by speed of light effects, but really nothing new is added there beyond the first book. The main new elements involve some character development for John Geary in the way of personal relationships, and the discovery that some party outside of the Alliance and the Syndics may be influencing the events of the war, possibly for nefarious reasons.

The writing is good except for the dialog, which doesn't ring true, especially in the audiobook version. The book is interesting enough as a step in a series, and I will continue reading the series, though I hope things pick up. This entry is kind of like episodes 5-10 of a long running TV show: not much meat but a few interesting tidbits thrown in to maintain interest. Here's hoping it turns out to be more Lost than Twin Peaks.

The books in the Lost Fleet Series:

1. Dauntless
2. Fearless
3. Courageous
4. Valiant
5. Relentless
6. Victorious

Book Review: Proven Guilty - A Harry Dresden Novel

Proven Guilty (Harry Dresden Book 8)

Proven Guilty is a solid entry in the Harry Dresden series. Harry is his usual sarcastic, hard-headed, sleepless self, and a large number of regular characters make appearances somewhere along the way. People Harry cares about are put in danger, and Harry beats up monsters, the bad guys, and himself until he finally triumphs in the end.

Harry Dresden books are not the deepest, most serious you can find, but they are fun quick reads with a good sense of humor and driving plots that seldom flag.

This one has a little more going for it in the end than many of the others in the series, in fact. We find out that many loose threads in the previous books, plus a huge loose thread in this book, are tied together in some overarching bad guy plot that we can only assume will be tied up in future installments.

The loose thread in this one is so large, in fact, that for a while I kept saying to myself, "What did I miss?!?" Thankfully, Butcher comes back in the end and discusses the very question I was having, saving me from having to look for my missing brain cells, or go back and review the audio-book for the section I missed (more on that later). In fact, the only problem I had with Proven Guilty was I thought it was over, since the action had bee resolved, but it just kept going on. This was done in order to bring in the overall story arc, but I still felt a little bit like I was left hanging for a while.

As a service to readers of the series, or those who might be interested in starting, here are the books of the Dresden Files series, in order:

1. Storm Front
2. Fool Moon
3. Grave Peril
4. Summer Knight
5. Death Masks
6. Blood Rites
7. Dead Beat
8. Proven Guilty
9. White Knight
10. Small Favor
11. Turn Coat
12. Changes

I mentioned in passing that I listened to this on audio-book. I love me some audio-books. I subscribe to Audible, and I get two audio-books of any kind for an extremely reasonable price.  As I drive 90 minutes each day to and from work, I consider this a life saver. Before audio-books, I was wasting my time on boring and repetitive music radio, or sports talk that had become so crude and not about sports that I couldn't even let my children listen to it anymore.

There can be problems with audio-books, though. You get some bad readers. The reader of Proven Guilty is James Marsters (Spike from Buffy the Vampire Slayer!) and he is very good. Some books are not well structured to be audio-books. They have footnotes, diagrams or other quirks that require the printed word to come across correctly. You tend to miss things occasionally because you get distracted by, say, that annoying driving thing. This is a problem because it is very difficult to leaf through an audio-book looking for that section you kind of missed to find out who Petunia is and why she is trying to kill the hero.

Finally, I want to mention Jim Butcher's excellent web site. He has a lot of interesting information, not the least of which is how he structures and writes his books. Worht looking at if you are interested in writing, or even if you're just interested in how books get written!

Movie Review: From Paris With Love

From Paris With Love is a fast paced action flick that is fairly entertaining if you don't think too hard about it.

From Paris With Love stars Jonathan Rhys Meyers as James Reese, a low-level spy with wanna be big time special ops aspirations. John Travolta plays Charlie Wax, a bigger than life, martial arts expert, missile shooting explosion of the kind of spy Reese wants to be, a man whose closest relationship is to his gun (he's even given it a name), and Travolta plays him with nearly over-the-top gusto.

The plot has something to do with drugs and terrorists, though the two are never clearly connected and this is the weakest part of the movie. It all servers as a loose framework for mayhem anyway, as Wax screams into town and pulls Reese along the way as he shoots, kicks and blows up his way through the Paris underground. Despite bullets, bodies and bombs galore, the cops only show up when it is convenient to the action.

In the end, nobody seems to notice much. The political big wig threatened by the terrorist only wants to know whose head will roll because she was delayed in arriving at the generic international conference. Can you imagine the media coverage if something like From Paris With Love happened in real life? I guess that's why we have movies.

Movie Review: (500) Days of Summer

(500) Days of Summer
(500) Days of Summer is a charming, light-weight, quirky, creative, romantic non-love story.

(500) Days of Summer stars Joseph-Gordon-Levitt (once of 3rd Rock from the Sun, which I never watched, and lately apparently a rising star in a quirky collection of largely independent movies, none of which I have seen) as Tom Hansen, an aspiring architect turned greeting card writer, and Zooey Deschanel as the Summer of the title. On the face of it, (500) Days of Summer is yet another boy meets girl, boy gets girl, boy and girl run into inevitable relationship trouble movie. It plays fast and loose with the structure of the typical rom-com though, and in the end plays fast and loose with the rom-com finale structure as well.

I love the way the story is presented. It is told non-linearly, and the parentheses in the title reflect interstitials in the movie that tell us what day we are looking at in the 500 day relationship between Tom and Summer. Along the way we get fantasy musical sequences, split screen takes on alternate realities, and various pop culture references that show us what Tom is thinking and feeling. I thought the direction worked very well for the story. Having just seen The Hurt Locker and now seeing the praise heaped upon the direction of that movie (which I did not care for), I would prefer to see some love directed toward director Marc Webb for this movie. While (500) Days of Summer is not a heavy ponderous drama like those preferred by the film Academy, I though the direction was particularly apt, creative and effective.

On a side note, my fourteen year old son declined to watch because, he said, “I've never seen a funny romantic comedy.” So we've been trying to think of some funny romantic comedies he might like. So far, I have Roxanne, When Harry Met Sally, You've Got Mail, Play It Again, Sam and Groundhog Dog.

Book Review: Spin

Spin, by Robert Charles Wilson.
The problem with Spin is that the concept is greatly intriguing but that the story is lousy. The climax happens right at the beginning and everything after that is downhill. Whereas we hope that the story is heading somewhere interesting and exciting, it turns out the whole story is anti-climax.

Spin is based on the concept of someone or something placing a barrier around the entire planet Earth that causes time on Earth to pass much, much more slowly than time in the rest of the Universe. The story is told through the prism of Tyler Dupree, a doctor who is (sometimes) peripherally involved with a project trying to solve the riddle of purpose of the barrier. Jason Lawton is Tyler's childhood friend. Jason is actually running the project, but we only occasionally interact directly with Jason. All we learn about the project, we learn through Jason telling Tyler, and this is does not make for a captivating way to inform the reader. Jason's sister Diane is also an important character, but she is not involved in any way with the central mystery and is used solely as a way to demonstrate a different manner in which people react to the barrier's existence.

Unfortunately for what turns out to be a character driven work, the characters are not that interesting. They seem to be holding the story back and away from the good stuff, that dealing more with the core concept.

Also, the details of the Spin are not entirely believable. People on Earth are able to monitor changes to Mars even though time passes much, much more quickly on Mars than on Earth. Mars should just be a blur in the distance based on its speed relative to the Earth observer. In fact, people on Earth should just see a blank glow, no stars, no planets, because relatively the view of the sun should completely dominate the sky.

The concept is better than the execution. The author is very good with concept. I have also read Julian Comstock, from the same author, and it suffers from similar problems. Julian Comstock is set in a future Earth that has reverted back to an 18th century type existence after some future calamity. Again, the concept sounds intriguing, and the world is well conceived, but the story and characters go nowhere.

I may be addicted to those original concepts, though. In fact, even though I'm lukewarm on the two books of Wilson's I have completed, I've seen another that interests me, The Chronoliths, because it sounds so interesting. I want to read it just to find out what it is all about. And I'll probably be disappointed. Someday I'll learn.