Smiley Christmas

Happy Holidays!

Here's your latest page of Untrue Tales:

Keep Smiling page 4

So I ran right out and saw James Cameron's Avatar this weekend.



















Pretty disappointing, sorry to say. I'd seen the 20 minute preview a few months ago and left that feeling fairly unimpressed, but I'd been heartened by the overwhelmingly great reviews it got upon release. i really don't know that the reviewers were thinking. Sure, it's real pretty to look at, but I really had the feeling that I'd seen it all before. The plot is lifted wholesale from Dances With Wolves. You can see every plot point coming from a mile away. There's a cool chase where the hero flees from nasty CGI creatures, each one, bigger and more fearsome than the one before. But then I already saw that in Star Trek. There's a cool battle sequence with robot armor. But I already saw that in District 9. As a bonus, there's an incredibly heavy-handed Iraq-war analogy that is so groaningly obvious it loses any impact it might have had. The sci-fi metaphor thing was handled with far more subtlety in, again, District 9. The 3D was cool, but I didn't really get a sense of it being a great leap forward from Beowulf. I will say that the Navi animation was really well done, and their faces were incredibly expressive, but it doesn't really do much for me when the characters themselves are all cardboard cutouts in service of a dusty second-hand plot. Steven Lang has a nice turn as the villainous Military commander though. And Sigourney Weaver seems to have somehow stopped aging. Anyways, it was kind of a bummer. A technological achievement, I'm sure, but somewhere along the way Cameron forgot to come up with a compelling story to go along with all his cool CGI creatures. Oh well.

Read another two-dollar street-seller special this week, The Friends of Eddie Coyle by George V. Higgins.



















I'd read recommendations of the movie based on the novel from both George Pelecanos and Ed Brubaker, a couple of writers whom I adore, so when I saw the book on the street I snatched it right up. It's a cool, fast read. Great dialogue and a nasty little plot about gun dealers and bank robbers. Not an ounce of fat on it, just lean mean and right to the point. Worth picking up if you come across a copy. Now I'll have to track down the film.

Here's a merry xmasshole for ya:

























That's it for me. Hope everybody has a good ol' holiday and a happy new year!

Keeping on Keeping Smiling

It's snowing in Oslo and another page of Untrue Tales is up:

Keep Smiling page 3

This week I read Stephen King's latest - Under The Dome.
























This is good stuff. King's best in a long while. King is my favorite author and almost never fails to be massively entertaining (except maybe for Gerald's Game, that one never really did it for me), but with Under the Dome he's working near his peak. This one's probably in my top ten favorites of King's books, up there with Desperation and The Shining although not quite scaling the delirious heights of IT, The Talisman or The Stand (my favorite book of all time). Of his recent stuff, I really liked Cell and Duma Key but Lisey's Story was a bit of a letdown as it seemed like King was treading old ground with that one. Interstingly (to me at least), I thought Lisey's Story would have been a better book if King had actually excised all the supernatural stuff which just seemed like another riff on Rose Madder (which I liked).

But back to Under the Dome; the title is right on the nose - the plot concerns a small town in Maine that is suddenly and inexplicably encased in a transparent forcefield that follows all the town's borders, cutting it off from the outside world. What follows is a spin on Lord of the Flies as the town's second selectman Big Jim Rennie manipulates the fears of the populace to conslidate power. Rennie is a great villain, truly a guy you love to hate. Terrible things happen, most of which can be laid squarely at Big Jim's feet. King does a masterful job of setting up the situation and characters like a big apocalyptic chess board and I found myself writhing on the couch in horrid anticipation as inevitable doom mvoes inexorably foreward. Lots of good folks to root for and plenty of bad guys to fear in this one. And King sure isn't getting sentimental in his later years. A lot of very bad things happen to a lot of good people here, and as per usual King makes you really care about his characters before he ruthlessly cuts them down. A really great, entertaining book.

On the movie front, against my better judgment I went ahead and saw 2012, the latest disaster spectacle from Roland Emmerich.
























As it turns out, I was pleasantly surprised. Yes, it is magnificently stupid, but since I was expecting that going in, the ridiculousness of John Cusack outracing earthquakes and volcanoes in various limousines, buses and small planes was more entertaining than annoying. And the effects are truly spectacular. The destruction of Los Angeles was particularly breathtaking. Cusack is a pretty reliable actor and makes an engaging hero here. I'd actually say this might be Emmerich's best film as it manages to stay generally entertaining throughout the running time. Usually I find that his film's have a great set-up (the first hour of Independence Day is terrific) but collapse under massive stupidity and cliche in the second half (again Indepence Day). 2012 is pure stupid right from the beginning, so as long as you check your brain at the door and have a taste for spectacular end of the world destruction it's a grand old time at the movies.

Finally, here's a sketch from a little something I'm kicking around these days:



















Have a good one!

December Smile

Ah, December. The last month of the year. Last month of the decade even. Dang, but that time do fly....

Here's the latest page of Untrue Tales for ya:

Keep Smiling page 2

This week I read The Brief and Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Diaz.























This one won the pulitzer prize not too long ago which is generally a pretty good indicator of quality. And I'd say this is a quality book, although not one that had a tremendous emotional impact on me. The title character is a grossly overweight, role-playing, sci-fi reading and writing nerd from New Jersey by way of the Dominican republic. It starts off as a story about Oscar's fruitless quest to lose his virginity but morphs into a tale of his tragic family history and their roots in the Dominican Republic under the oppressive regime of the dictator Trujillo. The stuff about life under Trujillo in the DR is pretty interesting (and pretty horrible) and Diaz has an engaging writer's voice - very casual with constant references to Marvel Comics, Tolkien and sci-fi trivia. But when it comes down to it, Oscar himself isn't all that engaging and his life ends up being something less than wondrous. I was a bit disappointed. This never really grabbed me in the same way as, say, The Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, or Middlesex, or A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius. It's worth a read though, just for the insight into a place and people that I hadn't heard much about before.

On the movie front, I finally saw Synecdoche, New York, Charlie Kaufman's directorial debut with Phillip Seymour Hoffman as a theatre director whose life falls apart while he documents it in an ever expanding play.























This is seriously strange, deep and heavy stuff about life and the choices one makes and where they lead. Here they lead to a lot of depressing shit. Now I generally love me some Charlie Kaufmann. Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind is one of my all-time favorites along with Being John Malkovich and Adaptation. Groovy, mind-bending films that are unlike anything else out there. This one is in the same wheelhouse, but it's much heavier and much darker and requires a lot more from the audience. More than I've got to give, really. The gist of things is, Hoffman is having problems with his wife who doesn't have much respect for him as an artist, so he decides to put on an autobiographical play about the human condition with himself and everyone he knows as characters - a cast list that constantly expands. He has a guy that plays him in the play and an actress that he has an affair with that plays herself and an assistant that he has another affair with that he then casts with another actress while the assistant has an affair with the guy that's playing Hoffman in the play. Then Hoffman gets burned out so he hires Dianne Weist to play him directing the play so he can take a break and play the cleaning woman. Also, one character gets a great deal on the house because it's on fire a little bit and lives there for years while the house burns. It's that kind of movie. I found the whole thing extremely interesting and kind of boring at the same time. I had the constant feeling that I was missing something. That big ideas were going over my head. I'm the kind of guy that mostly skates on the surface of things. I'm not all that deep and I don't really like to think too hard. After watching the movie, I had to go read a bunch of reviews to see what other people thought was going on. The reviews were pretty much equally divided into two camps - those that thought it was a brilliant masterpiece and those that thought it was a pretentious pile of shit. I can sympathize with both sides. I didn't really get the movie, but I don't think Kaufmann is just being a blowhard and disappearing up his own ass. I just think his ideas might be a bit too deep and heavy for the average bear. Me included. It just didn't work on the level I like to be entertained on. Can't really recommend this one except for serious Kaufmann aficionados who're looking for a challenge. It's a long slog and will likely make you depressed as fuck. My girl gave up after about 45 minutes. It'll be interesting to see what he comes up with next.

On a lighter note, I just read the latest Jack of Fables trade in the bath - The Big Book of War.
























I love this series. It's a fun, lightweight companion to Fables and the writers do a great job of keeping Jack likable despite the fact that he's pretty much a gigantic, self-absorbed asshat in every way. Big fun for Fables fans. If you're not reading either of these series, you're missing out. Start with Fables, and once you're hooked, move on over to Jack.

Sketchy:
























Bye for now!