Review: Battle Royale

December 7, 2012 in General Topics

Battle RoyaleWay back when I first heard of The Hunger Games, two films popped into my head. The first was the Arnold Schwarzenegger-starring adapation of the novel The Running Man, by “Richard Bachman” (who was revealed years ago to be a pen name of Stephen King’s). Widely viewed in the United States, it orbited my childhood. I sought it out due to my love of science fiction.

The second film slammed like a comet into the firmament of my adulthood. It presented no one-liners, no outrageous costumes or hulking action stars. None of the characters really won–they just lost less. The ending was starkly and typically Japanese, leaving its loose ends unresolved in the way that great cinema often does. That film was Battle Royale.

Having viewed the film adaptation of The Hunger Games recently, I felt compelled to revisit Battle Royale and see if it still help up. This presented a problem. Read the rest of this entry →

Review: The Hunger Games, by Suzanne Collins

November 9, 2012 in General Topics

The Hunger Games, coverIf you subscribe to some of the sexier theories in the realm of quantum mechanics, then somewhere, on another Earth, a man named Scott Corbin released a dystopian fiction novel called The Starvation Sports, featuring a plucky young hunter named Pita Melan, and his erstwhile fellow competitor, Chive Evergreen. Read the rest of this entry →

Review: Super 8

October 11, 2012 in General Topics, Other Stuff

"Super 8" posterThere was a moment, while watching Super 8, when I realized the film didn’t quite know what to do with itself. This is a schizophrenic movie – it wants to be a coming-of-age flick, until it decides it wants to be an alien invasion spectacular, until it decides it wants to invoke the rampaging monster action of Cloverfield.

J.J. Abrams’ past work has been real hit-or-miss, in my estimation. Super 8 is a better flick than most of his efforts, falling just under the excellent Star Trek reboot, but above basically everything else I’ve seen of his.
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Review: American Gods, by Neil Gaiman

September 13, 2012 in General Topics

American Gods, by Neil GaimanDepending on your outlook about the subject matter, American Gods, by Neil Gaiman, is either remarkably imagined, impossibly bleak, or a combination of those two extremes. Gaiman himself poses no easy answers to the questions of faith and the supernatural world, having written a novel that could be seen as the inverse of Stephen King’s The Stand.

King’s work portrayed dueling forces drawing opposed factions of humanity to their banners in the ultimate battle between good and evil–a conflict to decide the fate of mankind. Even one of King’s central baddies, Randal Flagg, had a lastname appropriate to his purpose. Gaiman provides the opposite scenario: here, his powers could fight a savage war amongst themselves, and it’s strongly implied that not only would the average human be unaffected, they wouldn’t even notice. And his protagonist, known only as Shadow, could also be seen as a man with a name apropos to his role.

(Warning: Minor spoilers lie ahead.) Read the rest of this entry →

The Pledge

September 5, 2012 in General Topics

There’s been a recent, nasty public row over RJ Ellory, a bestselling crime fiction writer, posting fake reviews on Amazon.com, including shill reviews of other authors’ books. With the potentially high returns enabled by cheating Amazon’s ranking and scoring system, the temptation has never been higher for authors and publishers to engage in review “turf wars”, or use “sock puppet” review accounts, or even buy reviews.

When these activities occur, they damage the public’s perception of Amazon, other booksellers and e-tailers, reviews themselves, publishing as a whole, and the author-reader relationship. Read the rest of this entry →