Blessed by the Potato

Fired Up! was actually, surprisingly… good!

I had really no hopes for the movie based on the previews, it just looked like a low-budget low-class teen sex and gross-out comedy. But for whatever reason, I gave it a shot, and it is genuinely funny. It actually has some warmth to it, and it’s hard not to like the characters. The gross-out stuff is kept to a minimum, and while lots of shenanigans are implied, the sex is kept off-camera too, so kids can actually watch it (though I don’t know about the unrated version I linked to above).

The basic premise is two jocks (and these are the skinniest football lugheads I’ve ever seen) who actually possess some wit and charm decide to ditch spending their summer sweating away at football camp, and go off to cheer camp instead to get girls. Along the way they get to know the girls and, while hilarity does ensue, they also grow up a bit.

Awwww.

It’s not a perfect movie, but it’s also not the annoying fart movie that I was expecting, so it’s well worth a watch if you haven’t seen it yet.

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Well, this was a very pleasantly cool summer. I didn’t spend nearly enough time outside enjoying it, and didn’t get all the summer reading I had hoped to done — boy do I miss the days of being a kid and having the summers off to do nothing but play video games and read. Here are the books I did get around to:

Warning, spoilers follow!

One Jump Ahead, Mark Van Name – this was a good military sci-fi read about a kidnapping, a nano-bot enhanced mercenary soldier, and his sarcastic sentient combat tank. It wasn’t particularly special, it’s not the sort of book you’ll be talking about with your friends years later, but it was very readable and enjoyable, well worth spending some alone time with on a sunny afternoon. I’m planning on picking up the next book in the series, Smiling Jack, if that adds any weight to the quasi-recommendation.

Bitterwood, James Maxey – this is mostly a fantasy tale about a dragon empire ruling over humanity, with a few sci-fi twists along the way. After losing his family to the dragon overlords, Bitterwood goes on a decades-long dragon-killing revenge quest… which unfortunately leads to him killing the king’s favourite son, which drives the dragon king to decide to exterminate humanity. Humans and sympathetic dragons must work together to stop the madness of the dragon king… Another good, quick read without much to complain about. I enjoyed the mis-mash of sci-fi and dragons and archers. Apparently there are two more books following this, but Bitterwood doesn’t look to have been written specifically for a trilogy, it stands pretty well on it’s own, and while it was fairly good, it didn’t leave me itching for more. Maybe next summer :)

Mistborn, Brandon Sanderson – This has been the best fantasy read of the summer for me. A very engrossing novel about an empire with an immortal emperor, who, as OSC puts it “if not evil, is nasty and arbitrary”. A slave rebellion seeks to overthrow the throne, lead by a powerful “allomancer”, one of the only ones in the slave caste’s ranks (in this world, powers are hereditary, and typically only nobles possess them). I found the system of magic that he’s created to be very engrossing — it’s magic, it’s powerful, but it’s also clearly limited, and possessing its own set of rules and trade-offs. The whole time I was reading about the magic system I was thinking of what a great RPG this world would make. It’s a real page-turner, and we’ve already picked up the rest of the trilogy: Well of Ascension and Hero of the Ages, but I can’t read them yet because Wayfare called dibs! Yes, the books are better than the titles. While I hadn’t heard of him before, Brandon Sanderson has been chosen to complete Robert Jordan’s Wheel of Time (which I also haven’t heard of). This is apparently a big deal. Whatever, I enjoyed the book and I’ll be sure to read through his other stuff!

Trade Pact Universe #1 Thousand Words For A Stranger, Julie Czerneda – I hadn’t heard about Julie Czerneda until she got a mention on John Scalzi’s Whatever, and that was unfortunate. She is a good writer (and Canadian), and I quite enjoyed the first book in her “Trade Pact Universe” series, about telepaths and space pirates. Some of her descriptions of telepathy (especially the “M’hir” — even reading silently, my mouth didn’t like trying to make sense of that “word”) rubbed me the wrong way, but the writing and dialogue is otherwise top-notch, and I’ve already picked up the second book in this series, as well as the first in another:

Species Imperative #1 Survival, Julie Czerneda – I liked this one a bit more from the “concept” side of sci-fi, but really didn’t fall in love with the plot or the characters — the main character seemed to just follow along without questioning what was happening to her enough, up to the point of running off to an alien world without ever getting a satisfactory answer to why a salmon researcher was so uniquely important to a galactic question. Maybe that’ll be answered in the next book of the series, but I started to get fatigued from the suspension of disbelief required to continue to not get pulled out of the story wondering why all the other characters were so worked up over the protagonist. Though from the concept side of things I did like her (brief) descriptions of the alien species, FTL travel, and a future earth where wilderness areas are rabidly protected. And there was an awful lot of duplicity on the part of the minor characters. It ends on a cliff-hanger, and even then I’m not sure I’m going to follow-up with the rest of the trilogy.

As you may have noticed, I’ve signed up as an Amazon affiliate, and the links above will take you directly to the Amazon page for each book. I don’t want that to influence whether or how you buy your books, and while all the books here were at least decent summer reads, I wouldn’t give a book a good review just to try to get an affiliate sale. However, if you are going to buy any of these, and if you might use Amazon, then might I suggest using the links here? The site gets a 4% kickback from any purchases made.

Douglas Adams has figured out how to possess mortals from beyond the grave and is residing in Neil Gaiman’s brain!!

Ok…

Let me back up a smidge. I like Neil Gaiman’s stuff, I’m rarely disappointed. Sandman and Death were good graphic novel fare, and though the only novel whose title I can remember is American Gods, I’ve enjoyed the 3 or 4 of those I’ve read, too (I thought the Graveyard Book could have been… thicker, but that didn’t stop me from enjoying what was there; indeed, wishing there was more of it is probably high praise). So it was a pretty safe bet that I’d enjoy Anansi Boys as well.

I did.

What I didn’t expect though was that about 3/4 of the way through the book he would suddenly start to channel Douglas Adams (especially that whole bit with the lime). I was laughing out loud (literally) at some points towards the end there. I don’t know if he started getting sleep deprived while writing, or what happened to make the last bit so much more light-hearted, whimsical, and random, but I enjoyed it.

We went to see Up yesterday at the movie theatre. It looks like it would be a fun movie, and has been getting very good reviews. Unfortunately when we showed up at the theatre, it turns out it was still in 3D (despite being out for a few weeks now), and I have zero interest in paying more to try to fit some flimsy plastic glasses over my prescription glasses and get a headache just so that some cheesy 3D effects can be thrown in.

So we saw Public Enemies instead, which looked like it might be a decent summer-time popcorn muncher from the previews.

It’s not. The movie is just not good. It’s full of weird camera angles, and just drags. There doesn’t seem to be any sort of character development, no backstory to anyone, and with one or two exceptions, the action scenes weren’t even any good.

I read the Wikipedia entry on John Dillinger, and there’s a lot of good stuff in there that they missed. Right at the beginning they mined the “crook with a heart” thing with the line “put that away, we’re here for the bank’s money, not yours.” But then that was sort of it for showing any charm during a robbery. Apparently later on, he robbed a bank without a shot by pretending to be a movie director making a bank heist scene — wouldn’t that have made for a good scene??

The movie was also lacking any sort of Depression-era feeling. Sure, the costumes and cars and tommy guns all looked great, but everything was shiny. We didn’t see the desperation and the unemployment and the crop failures that helped contribute to the massive crime wave that lead to the formation of the FBI. With these public enemies it wasn’t really desperation driving them to rob bank after bank, but it was still something I noticed was missing from the movie.

On the whole, the movie had the feel to it that we were supposed to have read the book first or something, since there wasn’t a lot of development or exposition.

Of course, part of my enjoyment of the movie could be due to the foul mood I was put in by the person beside me talking incessantly for the first ~20 minutes or so. Talking, not whispering. I actually turned around and told him to shut up, and rather rudely at that. It was annoying me so much — he was louder than the movie for a number of spots! — and anyone who knows me knows that’s never happened before… I’m actually still kind of shocked at my behaviour myself.

Sam Raimi’s Drag Me To Hell is a horror movie in fine form. It was genuinely scary (mostly startling with a decent level of suspense), accomplished almost entirely through music, camera angles, and facial expressions. The man knows his craft.

I don’t have too much to criticize one way or the other, except to say…

Spoiler warning!

…that the old gypsy woman was really over-used, especially once she was dead. Ok, the first time she showed up in the bed it was a dream so it was ok, but the next few visions of her (such as in the shed) while the girl was awake were just getting silly; I would have preferred at that point if the Ilyma spirit took over as the boogeyman at that point.