Mini Review: The Shadow of the Torturer (The Book of the New Sun #1)

In the past I've made no secret of my appreciation of the wilted beauty of Dark Souls: a video game portrait of high fantasy that has come to ruin; regal, majestic worlds that have met with slow, inevitable decay.

It seems grim -- to want to see magical kingdoms hurtling through their end times -- but ultimately the death of an imaginary realm fits into the greater story that we like to hear: the promise of rebirth. We like to anticipate something wonderful beyond the spectre of destruction. I will be writing more on that topic later on, but for now understand that this is the context in which I approached Gene Wolfe's The Book of the New Sun (which I discovered during my search for more fiction like Dark Souls).

Taking place on "Urth", a world under a dying sun, the series tells of Severian. He is taken in as a baby by the Guild of Torturers, in an alternative version of Buenos Aires known as Nessus. Throughout the first book, there are hints that there will be a "New Sun", signifying the end of Urth and the beginning of something else. I will leave the rest of the details of the plot, as -- much like Dark Souls -- part of the fun for many fans is figuring out what is actually going on. Reading the setup for the rest of the series spoiled me on several big plot reveals to come, and I don't wish to propagate that.

As to this book, The Shadow of the Torturer is an intriguing first step into the greater journey Severian undertakes, written in a lyrical style that is (believe me) far too difficult to replicate. Gene Wolfe must be commended for presenting just the right amount of information about the world, the events of the plot, the backstory, and even the apparent intelligence of the protagonist in tantalisingly vague terms. Each discovery only grows the mystery as you learn more about the world, with the reader's mind filling in the blanks.

Unfortunately, this vagueness also makes the book a difficult read at best. With only the promise of further ornate mystery to come, there isn't much to hook the reader except for Wolfe's style of prose. Fans of Dark Souls are probably the best prepared for this solemn doling out of story breadcrumbs, especially as the characters also act and think in a very alien manner. Readers seeking high-octane action or quality drama will be disappointed.

I enjoyed The Shadow of the Torturer as literary example of wilted beauty, and will be continuing through the series. However, I am wary that the narrative's opacity might begin to drag, because just like in movies, I come to a story for the characters and the plot, not just aesthetics and feelings.

I listened to the book on audio. The performance was good enough to elevate the book from 3 / 5 up to 4 / 5 stars.

Review: Warcraft

That's more like it!

Each year it's the same story: there are genre movies I like, genre movies I hate, and several that I thought I would enjoy but instead just end up being disappointed. And rather than the bad movies, the third category is the worst because articulating why something is disappointing to fans of a franchise is maddeningly difficult.

Movies like Days of Future Past, or the empty Oblivion, or even the recent Hobbit films, mostly enjoyed by my peers but relatively unimpressive are likely to make me question whether I really do enjoy movies, or if I'm just a grumpy, critical curmudgeon.

However, there is a fourth, much rarer type of movie that comes out every now and again that solves this problem. They can remind me why I love movies so much in the first place.

2016 has been unusually rich in this prize category: 10 Cloverfield Lane and April being two wonderful films, though entirely different. Now I can add Warcraft to that list.

Make no mistake: Warcraft is nowhere near to the level of quality that the movies above have reached. Like the similarly messy Prometheus, this is a franchise-starter that's filled to the brim with ideas but chopped up mercilessly to achieve an under-2-and-a-half-hours running time. By the end of the first hour, all of the little time-saving cuts add up, resulting in an unfortunate feeling of story whiplash.

If you can get over the pacing, Warcraft is creative, thrilling and thoroughly enjoyable, because, thankfully, the characters are nowhere near as doofy and lifeless as the cast of Prometheus. But before I dive into why Warcraft was so pleasing, let's take a look at the basic premise.

Based on the first game in the long running series, 1996 strategy title Warcraft: Orcs & Humans, the film portrays first contact between (you guessed it) Orcs and Humans. I have never played the games, but I gather that the story was originally a fairly basic "good guys, bad guys" affair -- one that Duncan Jones has expanded and re-interpreted into something less black-and-white.

Echoing 2014's Dawn of the Planet of the Apes, the true battle is against conflict itself, with the orc protagonist Durotan (Toby Kebbell, playing the inverse of his role in Apes) and human protagonist Lothar (Travis Fimmel, trying his hardest to be Viggo Mortensen) struggling to end the war before it begins. As you may have guessed, they might not be entirely successful in a series with "war" in the title.

So if you couldn't tell from my tone at the start, I really liked Warcraft and was willing to accept some of its flaws. There are a few that are unforgivable though: Lothar's son Callan is a characterless non-entity, robbing the human side's fatherhood story of any gravitas. Additionally, the greater cast is sorely lacking in age diversity: it seems like everyone on Azeroth was born within five years of one another (perhaps in an effort to represent the median age of World of Warcraft players?).

Still, while the human side has its complaints, it isn't enough to drag down the excellent orc story. The movie's high quality performance-capture animation brings to life creatures never before seen in "live-action" and, unusually for such depictions, I didn't immediately wish it was done with puppetry instead.

Toby Kebbell's Durotan is brilliantly portrayed: emotionally affecting and given some of the best dialogue in the film as he stands amid the sadly misled Orc Horde. The Horde is misled by the orc shaman Gul'dan, who has been twisted by evil "Fel Magic". As great a hero Durotan is, Gul'dan is a thoroughly terrifying villain, standing out in an otherwise brightly coloured fantasy film.

I have to mention the palette: even when it comes to the villains, it's much grander than your standard modern blockbuster, filled with glowing rings of magic and wide, unrealistic vistas (by which I mean fantastical, as they should be!). At times it made me wish I was watching an adaptation of any of the great fantasy novels of my adolescence, but even one step removed from them, the derivative world of Azeroth is like a breath of fresh air in a Hollywood dominated by superhero films.

The colours aren't the only visually interesting part, either. Duncan Jones has to be commended for his quietly audacious authorial voice: like George Lucas, his acting direction could use some work, but the creative ideas herein are presented unadulterated. Big special effects scenes, intimate character scenes, funny background events and well staged fights prove his talent. We would be privileged with a series of movies like this -- and the film's success in China particularly seems to suggest we will see at least the one sequel. Please, Legendary keep the same director at the helm!

Finally, I must restate the tragic evisceration of the theatrical cut of this film. By no means perfect, the original director's cut may not even be substantially better than this version, but at least it would have been complete. Even if Duncan Jones doesn't return for Warcraft 2, the least they can grant him is a release of his director's cut on home video.

Fresh, messy, colourful, impractical and layered, Warcraft gets 3.5 / 5 stars but with a strong recommendation to fantasy fans.

Review: Sicario

According to the start of "What I Want From Movies", readers probably won't be surprised that I tend to avoid these sorts of movies. It's mostly a combination of lacking the three elements that I like in movies, as well as the highly graphic violence.

Despite that, last year's Sicario is very notable to genre fans because -- shortly after its release, to critical success -- the film's director Denis Villeneuve was attached to the upcoming Blade Runner sequel. It isn't hard to see why he was picked for the latter movie, based on his skill with this one, but the films' tones are likely to be very different.

The Setup

During an FBI raid of a suspected cartel hideout, Agent Kate Macer (Emily Blunt) and her team discover a horrifying cache of corpses in the walls of the house. After two of her fellow officers are killed by a booby-trap, her boss recommends her for a task force assembled by the DoD to implicate those responsible.

Kate quickly realises how ill-prepared she is for the border warfare that the DoD and CIA are involved in, with the team led by agent Matt Graver (Josh Brolin) and the soft-spoken Alejandro Gillick (Benicio del Toro) immediately crossing into Juárez, Mexico in order to extradite one of the men high up in the cartel. It only gets worse from there.

Combining a disturbing original score, graphic content and mostly unlikable characters, this movie made me angry in a way that the film makers probably intended. The entire point of the film is to show the dirty work the CIA get into, and at the same time follows the growth of two characters whose motivations couldn't be more different.

"By the end, you will understand." -- Alejandro Gillick

Part way through Sicario, viewers begin to suspect the real meaning of Alejandro's words, and the movie transforms into something new. I won't spoil what, suffice it to say that the first half was better from a narrative perspective, but the second half makes the movie complete by satisfying the thematic perspective. These kinds of movies (ones with a particular thesis that they wish to convey) aren't the sort of story that one watches for narrative catharsis, so the switch in perspectives is understandable.

Creative, Terrible Horror

While juggling the movie's thesis with Kate's character development, and showing the brutal nature of the job, Sicario goes about telling smaller, intimate stories through various visual storytelling techniques, particularly inspired by comic books and anime.

Shots are happy to cross the line if it makes for a better effect, and ambiguity abounds in realistic scenes of underworld crime and violence. Much of the movie happens without dialogue, and tone is often established not by the score (which is generally, as stated above, at the same disturbing level throughout) but by the inserting of different ideas and tableaux. One recurring visual is that of a character washing their hands and looking in the mirror -- an on-the-nose idea, but used in the right quantity not to feel overdone. Another scene early on inter-splices images of the corpses with the discovery of the cartel's explosive booby-trap.

I eagerly await his new Blade Runner, because Villeneuve's directorial choices make for nail-biting tension scenes and creative metaphorical ideas. Combined with the learned eye of cinematography legend Roger Deakins, there is always something interesting happening in frame.

Unfortunately, despite an excellent command of visual language, the movie's colour palette is as suffocating and drab as the score -- again, like the tone these are intentional decisions, but a movie can be beautiful and disturbing at the same time (see my review of The Conjuring, coming soon). I won't take the opportunity to complain about colour timing in modern films, instead I will borrow the illustration a friend of mine used, that the film "looks like it was filmed through somebody's urine sample".

The Verdict

As a narrative hound there are certainly problems to be found in the story of Sicario -- especially after the half-way point -- but they aren't the rushed-script problems of the latest overwrought foreign-appeal-bait movies (Orci and Kurtzman really need more time to work on their scripts). Rather, they are the kind of deliberate decisions one makes when trying for a war story with this much verisimilitude. As such, I cannot fault the movie for being itself, just because I might not like a story with dark characters, gore and unsettling music.

Sicario has a lot to recommend it: it's a suspenseful thriller that tells a haunting story. However, it's not recommended if you like the kinds of movies that I enjoy. Yes, not every movie has to "entertain" or be "fun" -- some are made to move you emotionally -- but the truth about movie magic is that so much more can be done with the medium than simply try to depict realistic events, especially in such a gruesome way.

Sicario gets 3 / 5 stars. It's a very good film, but not for me.

Review: Eye in the Sky

"Never tell a soldier that he does not know the cost of war." 
-- Lieutenant General Frank Benson (Alan Rickman)

As a fan of epic fantasy stories, the son of an army officer, and a Christian, the role of war has been an issue I've had to grapple with my entire life. Sure, people around the world are conflicted on the morality of war, but just as many -- if not more -- see violence as a necessary evil in the pursuit of the greater good.

Eye in the Sky, from South African director Gavin Hood, does an exemplary job of presenting a clash of ideologies. Multiple viewpoints on conflict, casualties, collateral damage and politics are brought forward and substantiated, but none are presented as the definitive answer to the questions raised in war. This is cemented in the film's ending: rather than follow Hollywood formula and create a "new stability" (that is, a final way of solving the conflict of the story), Eye in the Sky leaves the audience hanging, because the ideological conflicts within this thriller haven't been solved.

Of course, these debates would be pointless if we had no dramatic buy-in, and the good news is that Eye in the Sky is also a tremendous story, well told. In any other decade, it would be a visionary science-fiction yarn, similar in dramatic scope and "big ideas" to the book behind Hood's previous film, Ender's Game. Today, with the exception of some visual shorthand for the benefit of the audience, it is instead a very contemporary story dealing with real world issues and realistic technology.

Taking place all around the world, Eye in the Sky centres on a mission to capture Al-Shabaab extremists in Nairobi, Kenya. Colonel Katherine Powell (played by Helen Mirren) commands from Northwood Headquarters in England; pilot Steve Watts (Aaron Paul) in Nevada flies a drone as the titular "eye in the sky"; and Jama Farah (Barkhad Abdi) works on the ground in Nairobi for undercover surveillance, among dozens of other characters including the late Alan Rickman's Lieutenant General who supervises the mission from London.

At first, the expansive stage and large cast feels very Steven-Soderbergh-ian, particularly like Contagion. As the situation on the ground develops, the protagonists are forced to make more and more difficult decisions. Discussions about ethics, politics and the chain of command are so tense that it begins to feel more like 12 Angry Men.

One could be concerned that as a thriller the story gets bogged down in these politics and turns into the dreaded "people talk in rooms" kind of drama that bad imitators of 12 Angry Men might produce -- but the quality of acting and firm grasp of visual storytelling is actually more comparable to sci-fi anime like Ghost in the Shell. This is probably not an accidental similarity as Japanese movies have explored drones and the dehumanisation of war for decades. For the same reason, Eye in the Sky comes in highly recommended to fans of Metal Gear Solid.

The movie is not, however, easily recommended to audiences seeking escapism, and nor should it be. The aforementioned open ending is going to be a turn-off if one expects a perfect resolution, but that is part of the point. Eye in the Sky is solid, thrilling entertainment with an effective original score to boot, but like some of the best science fiction it is equally interested in exploring questions of humanity and ethics that might not have definitive answers. It just so happens to be less science fiction and more science fact.

For accomplishing everything it set out to do, Eye in the Sky gets 5 / 5 stars.

Review: The Huntsman

It's obvious to say it, but expectations can have a huge effect on how we receive a movie. Expectations were not high for the original Snow White and the Huntsman, which may have helped its success -- it wasn't as bad as yet-another-Snow-White-adaptation could have been, and included some really nice visuals around a collection of bankable actors.

Even with low expectations, however, I felt that it was unimpressively bland enough to characterise with the "genie's wish gone awry" kind of story: "Oh, you want more epic fantasy movies? Here's yet another gritty re-imagining of a done-to-death fairytale. You want a strong female lead? Sure, but we'll slather her arc with generic Chosen-One portentousness and cast Kristen Stewart."

As you might be beginning to tell, I wasn't a fan. Still, including the aforementioned big-budget visuals, there were aspects to the movie that were quite good -- such as Charlize Theron's scenery-chewing Evil Queen or James Newton Howard's magical score. Not enough to raise my hopes high for The Huntsman: Winter's War, but enough to get me into the cinema.

The story of The Huntsman opens with a prologue establishing the Snow Queen (a naked attempt to rip off Elsa from Frozen) showing us why she steals children to create an army of huntsmen with which she can TAKE OVER THE WORLD. Going on for about ten minutes too long and broken up with Liam Neeson's overly explanatory narration, the film then awkwardly leapfrogs the events of Snow White and begins in earnest.

Positives, Mitchell, stay on the positives. Like last time, JNH's original score sets the mood appropriately and has some beautiful stand-out moments. What's more is that, with some exceptions, the colour palette is wider -- including a creative twist on the enchanted forest of the previous film that adds an Amazonian flavour. The costumes again, like last time, are all detailed and interesting in their own ways and the computer generated effects have a baroque kick.

So it's safe to say that the MVPs of The Huntsman are the production designers, because once you move past the look of the film it gets a bit murkier. At times, I would have said this movie felt like it came out of 2008 or 2009 in the wake of the Writer's Guild of America strike: the actual script of The Huntsman feels written without writers. Here and there are some good ideas but they are strung along with the most basic Joseph Campbell drudgery without any of the finesse required to turn it into an actual narrative. Hero? Check. Conflict? Check. Retrieving the Sword (or Mirror, as it is)? Check. Symbolic Death? Check. The Road Back? Check.

These are milestones intended to guide the story, not to make up the substance of it. The Huntsman is clearly trying at points to create a screw-ball rom-com atmosphere a la The Princess Bride, but without compelling characters and the growth thereof, the script is so inconsequential that there is no depth for the leads to find in their roles (Chris Hemsworth and Theron are back as the Huntsman himself and the Evil Queen respectively, with newcomers Emily Blunt as the Snow Queen and Jessica Chastain as Sara, the Huntsman's lover). The fact is, none of the characters have any perceivable character arc.

This is kind of essential in an adventure story.

I don't ask for anything major, just any change at all (and falling in love doesn't count: that's practically law in a fairytale). The Huntsman? Same at the end as he is at the start. Sara? She appears to have been on a journey, but it's just running in place and she ends the movie the same way she started. The villains? Emily Blunt at least has some kind of drama, but it's so telegraphed beforehand that even the characters don't seem to treat the twist as very much at all.

The worst part of this is that it's actually making me pine for Snow White from the previous movie. It may have been a generic Chosen One arc, but at least she grew and changed over the course of the story. Of course, this leads us to the elephant in the room that even the movie thinks is an elephant in the room: the missing major characters from The Huntsman's predecessor. Every time someone mentions Snow White's kingdom, the movie suddenly turns into a made-for-TV spinoff. "That stuff totally happened, it's just off screen!"

Not helping the made-for-TV tone, the action scenes are so perfunctory as to be almost non-existant. Forget the most boring use of a "rickety rope bridge sequence" that I can think of in an adventure film, the fist fights and clashing swords are cut as though to obscure each action as much as possible.

Don't get me wrong: I don't mean the incomprehensible shaky-cam nonsense of dudebro action flicks -- the actual framing of The Huntsman is decent. No, what this film does is more perplexing.

In a normal fast-cutting action scene, the idea is to draw the eye to an action by setting it up, and then follow it through, using the momentum to draw the eye to the next action. What The Huntsman does is like the opposite.

Instead of cutting from action to action, the actual actions themselves take place between the cuts and we're left with just the setup and the results. This seems to be a symptom of the greater issue at play where in The Huntsman there just isn't a lot of variety in shot length -- it's like the filmmakers were worried that the audience would get bored if there wasn't a completely new frame every few seconds.

Even given all these complaints, the movie isn't the absolute worst. It's inoffensively okay, not bad. In a world where Batman v Superman is so divisive, The Huntsman at least tries to please.

I only wish it had tried harder.

Being charitable, I'd say The Huntsman earns 2 / 5 stars.

Review: 10 Cloverfield Lane

This will be the first of two posts on 10 Cloverfield Lane, first is a review of the film itself and the second will be a genre study. This first part is spoiler free and the other will have marked spoilers.

How you respond to Bad Robot's new production 10 Cloverfield Lane will almost certainly depend on how much you were expecting a sequel to 2008's Cloverfield.

First-time director Dan Trachtenberg's movie has little-to-no connection to the first Cloverfield, but it's also destined to suffer disinterest or even rejection from two extremes: anybody who was hoping to see the original story continued; and also haters of the original who are turned off by the use of the title for this new movie.

For what it's worth, I found some enjoyment in the original film but hoped that whatever Matt Reeves directed next wasn't as aggressively average and doused in shaky-camera antics (I was rewarded in 2014 with his flawed but great Dawn of the Planet of the Apes). If you were in the same camp, you probably weren't clamouring for Cloverfield 2. However, you might be better positioned to enjoy 10 Cloverfield Lane.

Mary Elizabeth Winstead is Michelle, who after an argument with her fiance leaves New Orleans and drives out to the country. She has an accident on the highway and blacks out, only to wake up inside an underground bunker owned by Howard (John Goodman). Howard is a conspiracy nut and disaster prepper who alleges that there's been "attack" above ground and, as far as he knows, Michelle, he and a third survivor, Emmett, are all that remain of the human race.

So begins a no-fat rollercoaster ride filled with mystery and tension, grounded in fantastic performances by the two leads. Goodman is intriguing (given the twisted story structure of reveal upon reveal) and is alternately welcoming and frightening. His potential untrustworthiness – whether intentional or simply by his being an "outsider" – is a good parallel to your reaction while watching the film. Has Howard rescued Michelle, or simply kidnapped her and invented a catastrophe? Is he the antagonist of the story? His he a "monster", much like the kaiju Clover? Is the movie even science-fiction? You won't get a peep from me.

Winstead, on the other hand, brings to life one of the best protagonists of the year so far. Her story-arc is core from minute 1 through minute 103 (the movie is 103 minutes long). It's uplifting to see a film whose production staff were dedicated to providing cathartic character growth and at the same time not shirking the horror of being trapped in a confined space with people you don't know.

The acting isn't the only thing that keeps you engaged. Battlestar's Bear McCreary provides a fitting original score, though you could say that it is closer to the Bad Robot "house style" than Bear's own. What his music truly succeeds at is blending into the sonic fabric of Howard's bunker. When Michelle is feeling emotional, that's the accompaniment. When she is surprised, the strings will sting.

Yes, there are jump scares in the movie. Yes, like many mysteries, once you know the outcome the tension will probably be deflated on future viewings. Despite this, I take issue at the idea that these will sour 10 Cloverfield Lane with time. Like Psycho (more on that in the next post) the world suggested within the story is layered and interesting enough that you will never be bored, even knowing exactly what happens next. In the end, the film is a high-quality experience either way, with great twists and believable characters.

But what about the Cloverfield connection? Do you need to have seen the first movie at all to get more out of 10 Cloverfield Lane? The answer is a resounding no. Abrams and company have made it clear with this sudden departure and subsequent interviews that the idea of a true sequel to Cloverfield is less interesting than using the strange, smaller-budget associations of that title to tell what amounts to a sci-fi anthology series, like a big-screen Twilight Zone. That might be the most thrilling part …

10 Cloverfield Lane earns 4.5 / 5 stars.

Stay tuned for another look at 10 Cloverfield Lane next, with a focus on how it fits into the cinematic canon of "high-quality B-movies".

Review: April and the Extraordinary World

If you grew up reading Asterix the Gaul or The Adventures of Tintin, you were probably intrigued by the trailers to Avril et le Monde truqué, or April and the Extraordinary World. The film, which uses a combination of computer-assisted hand drawn animation and CGI, is an original story based in a world created by bandes dessinées artist Jacques Tardi.

If you want the pure experience, go now, watch the movie and come back afterward. In a nutshell, if you enjoy Franco-Belgian comics, steampunk or Hayao Miyazaki's movies this will definitely be up your alley. I won't spoil anything major about the plot in the review below, but part of the fun in April is the thrill of discovery, much like the principles of science that motivate the characters therein.

There's a modern term that describes Science Fiction, Fantasy and Horror (and Historical Fiction sometimes) collectively as Speculative Fiction. Stories about the "What If".

Existing in the space between futuristic, historical, magical and scientific, April is very much a speculative-fiction story. In this case: what if the Franco-Prussian War never happened? What if there was nothing more to stand in the way of the French Empire? Add to that: what if the world's scientists began to disappear?

Of these scientists, two happen to be the protagonist's parents. Left with a priceless snowglobe, a love for science and a cat who can talk as a result of a failed experiment, April spends ten years stealing, sneaking and generally waifing-it-up around Paris trying to recreate her family's secret serum (the relevance of which I will leave up to the movie to detail).

April is not a spunky, Barbie-doll teenager but a much more down-to-earth personality who bears the weight of an orphan but is also weighed down as a citizen of the disgusting capital that Paris has become. The might of the French Empire was so hungry for fuel to fight its wars that it deforested the entire continent, belching so much smoke into the atmosphere that most Europeans wear gas masks in 1941 and the countryside has been turned into a grey wasteland. 

For April, the loss of her family and the destruction of the natural world might as well be the same thing: her first hopeful encounter in years happens at a memorial to the last tree and the journey to find her parents takes her away from the smoggy horror she's known for years. Her talking cat, Darwin, is the closest thing she has to a family member, and the smoke in the air is likely to take him from her too.

April charts an alternate history that results in, thanks to the lack of scientists, a world where electricity was never discovered and the burning of coal and wood is the only source of energy. Combined with the oppressive French Imperial regime, you have a recipe for classic steampunk.

Much like The Matrix and the genre of cyberpunk back in 1999, readers already familiar with this kind of setting might find the opening narration somewhat over-explanatory as to why April's world is this way. Most movie-goers, however, are less likely to take the preponderance of airships and chunky wood-fired machines for granted -- in which case this is the best introduction that one could ask for. Instead of treating the aesthetic as a fashion statement, April does a remarkable job of exploring both parts of the term "steampunk": an empire that needs fuel for its machines of war (the steam) and a dismal world where the only heroes are the outcasts and abnormals (the punks).

While its exploration of steampunk politics is a rare occurrence on film, the actual plot of April is pure old-fashioned adventure-romance, meaning not the lovy-dovy kind of romance but the two-fisted, derring-do kind. Taking inspiration from Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow, Howl's Moving Castle, Raiders of the Lost Ark and even James Bond and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles at times, the film-makers clearly knew what they wanted to produce and who they were making it for. Often, thanks to the nearly perfect pacing, exciting action and silly slapstick, the movie seems to be blossoming out of pure love right before your eyes.

Is the plot predictable? Mostly, with a few minor exceptions. Do the villain/s plans seem far-fetched? Quite. Will the protagonists find themselves in a beautiful natural environment after spending the first half of the story in a smog-choked, overcrowded city? You bet! But accusing April of being unoriginal in these ways is as pointless as doing so to any of the aforementioned properties. Part of what makes something a "genre" in the first place is a set of guidelines and touchstones that are familiar to the audience, and April is no exception.

That said, if you happen to be sensitive to what Doug Walker (of the Nostalgia Critic) calls the "liar revealed" story¹, it rears its head in April, though it is downplayed to an extent: it's only so important to the characters until they next get into trouble (which as you might guess is quite often in a pulp adventure tale).

Strangely enough -- though I cannot be certain of how and when the production of April lines up -- there are multiple reflections, plot points and even visual motifs that seem to simultaneously evoke and rebuke last year's Tomorrowland. Perhaps it is from the overarching premise of disappearing scientists and the imminent death of the natural world. Even the villain/s motivations seem to expound upon and better rationalise the kind of character that the former film's Governor Nix became.

Regardless, while there are certain logistical questions left at the end of April that even the film admits may have gone a bit too far, it manages to tell a complete story in the way that Tomorrowland failed. Rather than a protracted first act and rushed conclusion, April goes to great lengths to provide a full beginning, middle and end. This is a movie that understands that an adventure (rather than say, a mystery story) needs the plot details to be doled out over the course of the story rather than dumped on the audience all at once in the climax.

Many of the fantastically staged action scenes wouldn't have had as much impact if the secrets had been withheld in this way -- and they really are fantastic. The aesthetic of the film is hands-down the best translation to animation of Tintin artist Hergé's pioneering "ligne claire" style (of which Jacques Tardi makes ample use in his work) that I have ever seen. I have not read many of Tardi's comics but I understand that his style also makes use of highly detailed backgrounds, another beautiful component of April's visual identity. The few conspicuous uses of 3D CGI are integrated as well as they can be and mostly just to maintain sensible proportions when depicting vehicles.

The biggest negative I have about April and the Extraordinary World is akin to one of the villain's core motivations: prejudice. That is, prejudice in the anglosphere against French films, and especially animated ones. When I showed the trailer to a friend earlier in the year, he remarked, "oh, an art film."

This is a movie that deserves to be as popular with kids and adults alike as any of the upcoming Dreamworks and Pixar projects, but like the stop motion extravaganzas of LAIKA is probably destined to be seen only as a cult classic. It has humour in abundance, wondrous sights, thrills and even manages to sneak in commentary on the importance of family.

April and the Extraordinary World is no Star Wars or How To Train Your Dragon -- the plot is maybe a tad too conventional -- but in a world with angry superheroes and lightspeed remakes or nostalgia grabs it allows the audience to have a different sort of adventure. It stands out from the norm, and that makes it extraordinary -- 4.0 / 5 Stars.

As they say in France, fin.

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1 That is to say, the rather overused device where a hero is caught in a deceit, and subsequently ostracised -- causing emotional turmoil in one or more characters who thought they could trust them -- even though the audience is well aware that the heroes will kiss and make up before the finale.

Review: Amulet Book One: The Stonekeeper

On the back cover of Amulet Book One: The Stonekeeper, by Kazu Kibuishi, are these words:

"Five -- no, three pages into Amulet and you'll be hooked."

-- Jeff Smith, creator of BONE

I ask, dear reader: how could I resist?

Note: while I'll try not to spoil major plot reveals, I recommend if you want to go in fresh that you leave now and come back once you've read the book. If you've already read Amulet, you probably have a much better idea of what I'm talking about!

The Story

Let's see. First, it's your standard kids' portal fantasy: something terrible happens to one or more family members of the protagonist/s and they enter another world filled with magic and wonder but also dangers, a terrible villain and a whole lot of saving to do. So far, so Narnia, so Pan's Labyrinth or anything in between (incidentally, doesn't Jim Henson's Labyrinth qualify as halfway between?).
It doesn't sound like a story that has much new to offer, right?

Wrong.

The Art
Amulet first shows its true potential through use of an evocative, chiefly grey-blue colour palette, shot through with other tones, similarly subdued. This is reflective of the nature of magic in the setting, also quite subtle but beautiful in its own way. Among these styles are characters who, frankly, took a while to grow on me visually. It's hard, for instance, to take the kids' mother's incredibly long head seriously.

But that's all okay, because the design of Amulet's world is the real draw. Already I can't wait to read the next book, because a plethora of giant molluscs, alien elves and intelligent teddy-rabbits show that Kazu Kibuishi tried his darnedest to separate his story from the pack. Along with these Lovecraft-lite monsters and cute robots, the entrance to the magical parallel world of Alledia is a spooky and original opening to Navin and Emily's adventure.

Laid out like a Zelda dungeon with less puzzles, there are the aforementioned molluscs, treacherous cliffs and strange fungi galore to feast your eyes upon. Then, we reach Charnon House in the middle of an underground lake. I can just taste the promise: every new location suggesting mystery, then when explored, new horizons are revealed. Kibuishi must have been taking notes from Tolkien for that one.

And this is all without mentioning the magic and technology. There are the robots like Miskit, flying machines, the actual house -- whose true nature I will leave for you to discover -- mixed in with the mysterious sorceries of the elf prince and the titular Amulet.

The Setup
We have to face it. This book is an adventure, certainly, but like all first books its true purpose is to introduce the struggle and enchant the reader; make them want to read more. There are plenty of interesting threads premiered -- the biggest of course is that Navin and Emily need to save their mother -- but of them all I was struck the most by the nature of the Amulet.

It's the primary plot device: the source of magic for the protagonists and apparently the means of defeating the Big Bad Guy, the Elf King. But immediately, it is treated with as much ominousness as it is with promise.

This is not your typical plot pendant, it's actually more like the use of alchemy in Fullmetal Alchemist. That is, for a story ostensibly directed at children, the magic of the Amulet is more ambiguous than usual. We're telegraphed from the word go that things are going to go wrong. Will Emily suffer a terrible fate for having bound herself to the Amulet? Are the protagonists even the "good guys" that Silas makes them seem in the first place? Such ambiguity is tantalising and I look forward to where Navin and Emily's adventure takes them next.

The One Big Con
Alas, very few if any stories are perfect and the rule is upheld with Amulet. You might think I have nothing but praise because it pushes all the right buttons on my story brain, and to a certain extent I thought that too. Except that there's one aspect of Amulet: The Stonekeeper that I cannot stand, and it's the pacing.

Now I'll be the first to admit that I absorb comic books in a less-than-ideal manner. Despite my love of visual art, my more primal reading tendencies take over. My eyes snap from balloon to balloon to eat as much of the story as possible, regarding the rest only so much as I might notice the paragraph breaks in a novel. Paradoxically, this means I occasionally take longer to finish a comic book because I like to go back and actually take in the illustrations properly.

Yet, even I noticed that the panels, page after page, were dreadfully decompressed.

I have nothing against decompressed comics per se. I just believe that manipulating the passage of time is a technique to be used across all comics. I'd go so far as to say that deliberately slow comics are less accomplished narratively than those that use a diversity of panel numbers, sizes and representations of time.

Amulet: The Stonekeeper covers maybe one third of the ground that Out from Boneville does and it does it with fifty pages more. That's two whole issues of a regular magazine comic! This is like one of those two hour movies that you just wish could have been edited to ninety minutes. True, when the inevitable Amulet movie is developed they could probably use these decompressed panels as storyboards, but that doesn't help when there's really only enough story content to fill two episodes of a half-hour cartoon.

Okay, that last part used a lot of comparisons to other media. Let's stick with comics: Amulet: The Stonekeeper feels like the beginning of an arc, not an entire arc unto itself. It's a proof-of-concept, and a great one. But that doesn't excuse it for taking its sweet, sweet time getting the story to where it needs to be for Book Two.

The Verdict
Well, I should probably start coming up with a rating system if I'm going to actually review stuff. Amulet is off to an exciting start and if the pace improves, it could easily be one of my favourite fantasy comics (there don't seem to be that many around, do there?).

Amulet: The Stonekeeper 
3.5 / 5

What I Want From Movies -- Part 1

(picture from letterboxd, movie social media)

Princess Mononoke. Terminator 2. The Dark Crystal. Mad Max: Fury Road.

Why are the four movies on my profile my "favourites"? For starters, there are a few elements that I love in movies more than all the craft in the world (though 'course, it always helps that the craft is good too):

-- Grand stories with relatable themes
-- Larger-than-life characters and epic drama
-- Fascinating worlds and beautiful visual composition

Lucky for me, there are a lot of movies that can offer at least one of these. Occasionally, it is why I'd rather watch a gangster picture than an actual science-fiction or fantasy movie -- I'll nearly always choose epic scope and dramatic story over cheap thrills. 

Sometimes it's even why I'll admit that a movie isn't perfect and still enjoy the heck out of it: see 2012 or 9.

... okay, it's a little weird that both examples I picked weren't really titles so much as numbers.

Moving on.

The point is that the movies I've said are my "favourites" have all three bullet points and more. If I could choose the movies that I'd make, or pick the movies that other people make -- these four would be the gold standard. "Make more like this," I say.

Oh and, before I get stuck into each of these points for today's movie: let it not be forgotten that there's a fourth, subsidiary element that I love in movies and that's a good score. Princess Mononoke certainly has that one down. While I've liked movies with bad musical scores, they never reach the top of the heap¹.

Princess Mononoke is a classic little-w "western" in the sense that it has a drifter-type character coming to a new town/city/land and (intentionally or unintentionally) becoming wrapped up in the local conflict just as it builds to a head. This conflict is, in all-but-a-few examples, between an upstart group of greedy and/or technologically superior humans and the incumbent culture -- aliens, first peoples, elves, you name it. 

Over the course of the story, the wandering knight, or gunslinger, or samurai, or former Confederate captain, or martial arts master in question will pick a side, or none at all, and change the conflict for good (though not always for the side he joined in the first place). This also makes Princess Mononoke a spiritual predecessor to Avatar, but as we will see, I think it does a much better job of exploring the nature of conflict and human relationships.

Okay, so the movie probably already has your attention with its basic plot setup: after all, it's rare that one of these never builds to an epic showdown -- sometimes over land, sometimes over ideologies, often over both. This pretty much guarantees that the first two elements I mentioned at the top are covered. 

Our wandering hero this evening will be played by Ashitaka, the last prince of a persecuted Japanese people, the Emishi. He is cursed and must leave his home to find a cure before it kills him -- and just for fun, I'll point out that the soundtrack for the first leg of his journey is actually titled "The Journey to the West", in case you weren't already sure what genre this epic story was going to be. 

Other larger-than-life characters include the spirits of the forest (which, despite the English translation, you must understand are not "gods" as the anglosphere thinks of them); Jigo, a shrewd merchant with very few morals; and the leader of the local humans, Lady Eboshi, who is not the kind of antagonist you might think she would be in a western story (this time also meaning European stories as opposed to eastern ones). 

Above all, San, the titular "Princess Mononoke" (aka. Beast Princess) is the most important character in the story, having been raised among the wolves of the forest and practically forsaken humanity. Her relationship to Ashitaka is more tense and passionate than any Pocahontas wannabe and doesn't go the direction you're expecting, either.

Ashitaka is unusual in this mix as he does not automatically side with the humans of Irontown, who the spirits of the forest are so keen to get rid of. Rather, as he says, he wants to see "with eyes unclouded by hate", and come to a mutually beneficial cease of hostilities. 

As one might imagine, this is particularly difficult when (most) men and beasts have viewed each other as enemies since the beginning of time. The unfolding of this story I will leave unspoiled, but suffice it to say that Princess Mononoke treats all of these ideas with due gravitas and even manages to show the shades of grey that Avatar forgot about around the time that Stephen Lang was cast as the big bad military villain.

The last element I mentioned up top might be even more prominent than the first two in this movie: Princess Mononoke creates an absolutely gorgeous world through the use of traditional animation and computer-enhanced multiple planes. Even the touch of mid-90s CGI is used deftly, leaving no elements dated by today's standards. The forest is mysterious, full of power but also danger, and Irontown as a new settlement has the nostalgic feel from stories of settlers in far-flung reaches of the world. Both primary settings are treated with a combination of heightened reality and down-to-earth empathy, meaning as the audience we don't want to see either of them destroyed.

Again, this is in contrast to the modern, American western where the colonists are always automatically seen as an unsightly blot on the landscape and the forest is depicted as blameless and nice.

Princess Mononoke is, additionally, an example of Studio Ghibli and Hayao Miyazaki in their prime, and one of the few cinematic fantasy/western films that is spoken of in the same breath as Star Wars. Everything about it is absorbing and strange, combining wondrous movie magic with thoughtful commentary on humanity's relationship with the natural environment. The only possible complaint I might have is that, from a perspective as a Christian, there is little-to-no discussion of the creator of this natural environment.

Hopefully this has given some insight into why I want more movies to be like the four I have picked to be my "favourites". Next time, we'll discuss what I think might be the greatest action movie of all time, Terminator 2: Judgement Day. What's that? I think Die Hard is trying to bash down my door, better go sort this out ...

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1 For instance, Once Upon a Time in China is an exciting and well-told movie from a certain point of view, but the music is far from the best that Chinese or Hong Kong films have offered.

Mini Review: Out From Boneville

Having already said a lot about this book, this will not be an in-depth book review; however, I think it behoves me in the course of writing about the Bone series that I offer some broader thoughts on this, the first volume.

First thing's first:
The story and art of Out from Boneville really held up under examination -- my comment at the start invoking The Lord of the Rings may have appeared overblown (and it is true that in a holistic sense, you cannot directly compare anything to Tolkien's work) but from an entertainment value perspective I find such an invocation as meaningful here as it would be for Star Wars, Avatar: TLA or any other well-loved fantasy adventure. After Out from Boneville tees you up in the same way that Book 1 of the Fellowship of the Ring does, you cannot help but want to continue to see the journey through.

Generosity and anticipation
You know, I just love the way that Phoney has this pronounced jaw that lets him frown easily, while Fone Bone practically has no chin. It's a little thing that could go unnoticed, but I wanted to point it out as a demonstration of the artistic decisions in Bone. There are so many of these little things, some of which I've already pointed out in the recaps and some I will probably address in later reviews. All in all, it fosters the gratitude of the audience when reading a well-crafted adventure story -- the writer/artist Jeff Smith is so gosh darned generous.

Along the same lines. the hints as to what will come next and the plot threads left hanging at the end of the book are more than enough to bring someone back for volume 2. If you look at the actual plot of Out from Boneville, it is not that complex (at least, from the perspective of Fone, our "mainest" main character). Around 10 major plot points and a summary that could fit into a medium-sized paragraph. The actual plot density is not important -- it's more important that we are introduced to the Valley, the characters and an intriguing mystery. This is more than enough to make the audience anticipate the adventure to come.

All of this and the six previous recaps has been in pursuit of the best and well crafted techniques and features of Out from Boneville. I could probably write as much again about these if I wanted to; there is that much to talk about. In the end, though, I'd rather continue into The Great Cow Race.

Until the next review, enjoy your comics!