Category: Media

This is a container category for media reviews and related drivel.

  • The Count Of Monte Cristo

    I enjoy a fair number of what might be called “guilty pleasures” by those of higher brow than myself. Among these are anime, sword-and-sorcery programming, music by aging rock and roll bands, and swashbuckling period pieces. Monte Cristo is, of course, an example of that last category. The good news is that it actually is a pleasure and not merely guilty.

    The best way I can describe this film is that it’s a straightforward tale of good guy, bad guy and lady fair. Betrayal, hardship, revenge, true love and even some light humor are all well-balanced elements in this film. There aren’t many surprises, not even for someone who hasn’t read the novels, since most of the elements that may or may not have been original in Alexandre Dumas’ original work have been used and abused in countless books and films since.

    You know what? It doesn’t matter. This movie is fun, it’s good to look at, it’s pleasant to hear, and the funniest parts are the sly parts where the audience is let in on the joke that nobody else is meant to see or hear.

    There’s nothing outstanding in the acting, the swordplay, the cinematography, the music or any of it, really. It’s not really meant to be a groundbreaking film, after all. It’s a throwback to the good old days of swashbuckling epics, and that is a blessing for the most part.

    One thing about this movie, however, is so offensive to me that I docked an entire mark from the score on account of only a few seconds of film. When the final climactic swordfight begins, the movie suddenly rips you back into reality by pointedly reminding you that it was made during the Computer Age. Yes, that’s right, suddenly we get about 30 seconds of hyper-speed jump-cut digital editing! What the hell? The rest of the movie behaves so well, so gracefully, so like a movie that could have been made at any other time in the history of film… only to squander that grace with a lame, offensive, poorly-done attempt at heightening the intensity of the action at the last.

    Nearly two hours I spent drawn cheerfully into the world of the film, only to be reminded, unpleasantly so, that I was in fact sitting in a modern movie theater. Grr. It’s a good thing that the rest of the movie is so damned good that I can almost… almost… forgive the filmmakers for that one major gaffe.

    Overall, if you like period-piece swashbuckling melodrama, see Monte Cristo. If you’re into Matrix-style cyberpunk wire-fu, see something else.

  • Links LS 1999

    I’ll have to preface this review, the first I’ve done of any software package, by pointing out that I’ve been playing golf on PCs and game consoles for years. Not all the time, perhaps, and I’ll go months without swinging a virtual club, but I keep coming back to the digitized-golf genre again and again.

    It’s kind of sad, really.

    About five years ago, give or take, I won a website design contest put on by Microsoft. To be more accurate, I was one of a number of winners. The prize was, oddly enough, $100 worth of Microsoft products. I picked up Windows 95, a Sidewinder Pro joystick, Fury^3 and Golf 3.0 out of that deal. The Sidewinder Pro won’t work with machines that have 100MHz-and-up bus speeds, Fury^3 is a lame rehash of Terminal Velocity, and I’ve long since given up Win95 for Win98SE and Win2K.

    Golf 3.0, however, still gets a spin on our machines. It’s sadly dated, of course, as the graphics quality is so-so in its best moments. Putting is pretty easy, and you only get two courses so after a while the only challenge is in not screwing up the swing. (When you get right down to it, that’s probably the main challenge in any golf game, digital or otherwise.)

    So we’re at the outlet mall yesterday, stopping in at the Kay-Bee Toys outlet for a laugh, when I notice a copy of Links LS 1999 in the software dumpster. “Hmm,” I say to myself, “What have we here?” A few minutes later we leave the store with a brand-new $7.99 copy of the game.

    What did I get for my money? Vastly improved graphics. Four courses. The ability to conjure a variety of view windows in which I can aim my shot. Instant-replay that actually looks good and is useful. Much, much more realistic physics. A wide variety of gameplay “modes,” mainly consisting of fun rules/winnings changes.

    If you’re a golf-gaming nut, you’ll obviously have better software than this on your PC. If you’re a much more casual digi-golfer like me, then go out and find a copy of Links LS 1999 for a few measly bucks and be happy. I certainly am.

    (Final note: Access Software was purchased by Microsoft, and the next version of this game is Links LS 2000, a virtual re-release that only adds some courses and the ability to connect to Microsoft’s gaming zone. Yay. For my money, stick with the cheaper and identical product and duck the Microsoft empire once again.)

  • The Redemption Of Althalus

    A few years ago I picked up a little paperback titled Pawn of Prophecy. I enjoyed the characterization, I liked the handling of what could have been an overdone plot (the quest for the powerful bauble), and I loved the dialog. Many books later, I cherish the Belgariad and Malloreon series as some of my favorite light fantasy reading. I also enjoy the Elenium and Tamuli trilogies, though at a lesser degree and for different reasons.

    It was with a certain amount of trepidation that I approached the reading of The Redemption Of Althalus, a one-off fantasy work representing the latest efforts by the Eddings pair. So how is Althalus, you ask? In a word, underwhelming. If you want more words, I’d simply say, “Go read the Tamuli instead.” Or even better, “Go read the Belgariad instead.”

    Here’s the book summary: Wisecracking thief pairs up with sensual overbearing goddess, collects motley crew of lesser heroes to handily defeat ill-defined enemy forces, continually engaging in occasionally-witty banter and unsurprising character revelations. Oh yeah, they have nearly total freedom to move in time and space. And the climax of the story is a kind of insane Mobius strip finale that wraps up so very tidily that you wonder what the hell all the fuss was about in the first place.

    If you’ve read previous Eddings material, you’ll recognize almost everything in this book, and you’ll actually resent what little has been added. It’s as though they deliberately took the weakest parts of the earlier works and melded them with a truly offensive Plot Device. Okay, so the interpersonal stuff is at least as fun to read as anything else they’ve done, but it simply cannot carry an otherwise lifeless story.

    I suppose we should all be thankful that they only wrote one book in this new world. I’d have been truly angry to have finished a trilogy full of this nonsense.

  • The Skies Of Pern

    If you’ve read my review of Nimisha’s Ship, you’re probably aware of my distaste for the direction Anne McCaffrey has taken in some of her more recent novels. I approached the reading of Skies with a certain amount of trepidation.

    I’m pleased to say that this book does not suffer from many of the problems that have plagued her other recent works. The things that happen, even if they are a bit “out there,” do make sense within the bounds of the known world of Pern. In fact, almost everything in the novel is built upon various elements of earlier Pern novels like All The Weyrs, Dolphins and even the mostly-damnable Masterharper. It seems as though Pern really is her native element, and she moves as beautifully through it now as she has at her best moments in years past.

    The key romance in the novel is telegraphed from the get-go, but if you’re a regular McCaffrey reader you know that this has always been her style. The primary conflicts are more or less based on previous events, so having read the full series is generally a good idea. What’s interesting is that it isn’t actually necessary, since background data is presented in such a way that it makes sense even to non-fans, but it also does a wonderful job of evoking the relevant part of the previous work in just the right way. I was often pleasantly surprised at how well one reference or another was handled.

    Overall, I recommend this novel to anyone, long-time fan or no, who likes a pleasant mixture of adventure, science, fantasy and romance. It obviously helps to be somewhat familiar with at least the original Dragonriders series, if not fully versed in the series entire. I think that a non-fan could get the gist of the story and enjoy it on its own merits, however.

    It’s out in paperback now, so pick it up and give it a read.

  • Nimisha’s Ship

    (Note: This is a reposting from my previous journal database.)

    It’s my first media review, and I have to pick on one of my all-time favorite authors. This woman helped convince me that the written word is one of the most inspiring and wonderful tools humans have ever created. When I start having delusions of adequacy, when I begin again to dream of being An Author… she is among my key inspirations.

    She, being one Anne McCaffrey, is also getting on in years. No, I’m not being ageist, but it’s the only explanation I have for the gradual shift in her writing. She used to have more grit and fire in her plots and characterizations. She used not to be so afraid to punish the bad guys. My wife and I both noticed this in the last couple of Talents novels (“Pegasus In Space” and “The Tower And The Hive”), and the kid gloves are still firmly tied in place for “Nimisha’s Ship.”

    Lest you think I didn’t like the book, please allow me to say that it’s a pleasant read. It’s nearly a whole new continuity, unless you happen to have stumbled across “The Coelura” some time back. There are some slightly different things she’s trying to accomplish in this novel. Some of them succeed admirably, others are just kind of silly. So long as you’re willing to check your cynicism at the door, you should get a kick out of this novel.

    Sadly, that’s my biggest problem. At some point in the story, the Big Bad Villain And Company are completely written out. Echoes of “The Tower And The Hive” haunt these pages… A Villain whose name starts with the letter V is introduced, sort of, allowed to thrash around a bit in random paragraphs, and then is simply discarded in a bit of ancillary dialog later on. “Oh, him? He got his. Now, moving right along…”

    There’s another key part of the later novel that readers of the “Rowan” series of books will probably recognize, but I won’t give away here. You’ll either love it or groan in misery. I did both.

    All told, it’s nice light reading for all that it skips lightly through years’ worth of events in the lives of a handful of people we don’t really get to know all that well. Everything’s tidied up in a neat package at the end, aww gee isn’t that nice?

    In the end, if you like the romantic happy side of McCaffrey’s work you should adore “Nimisha’s Ship.” If you were hoping for something with a little more meat on its bones, I don’t really know what to suggest other than maybe to go borrow some of her earlier books from the library. Ye gods, I sure hope that “Skies Of Pern” doesn’t disappoint me the way that the last Pegasus and Rowan books did, and the way this one did as well.

    (Note: Yes, “Skies” is out but I have to wait for the paperback. You can’t really be in that big of a hurry for me to write another Media review, can you? Maybe you should seek professional help.)