Movie Review—Iron Man 3

The first Iron Man movie was an unexpected surprise for me, because I had pretty much no expectations going in. The second one, as a result of how much I enjoyed the first one, was an unexpected disappointment, due to a combination of a mediocre script and my high expectations.

Both of these movies worked together to prime things perfectly for Iron Man 3. I didn't have particularly high expectations, and the movie wasn't nearly as good as the first one but it was better than the second one. The two best parts of the movie are Robert Downey Jr., who really means it when he says "I am Iron Man." He's pretty much perfection in the role. The other best part is Gwyneth Paltrow, who gives the movie a bit of class while also getting a chance to be a superheroine herself. Strike that; there are three good parts. The third one is Ben Kinglsey. But he's always fun to watch. Even if he's in the worst movie of the year. It's happened before. Let's hope it never does again.

Overall... a fun movie! But not for the special effects, really, as well-done as they are. It's a fun-to-watch action movie for the dialogue. Weird.

Of all the unexpected technologies in the movie, the fact that Tony Stark found a pay phone ranks up there pretty high.

Iron Man 3...

• ... has a stinger after the credits finish. It's not setting up anything new, as did all the pre-Avengers Marvel movies, but it's fun nonetheless.
• ... has a pretty crippling plot hole. If you've seen the movie, you know the ace in the sleeve that Iron Man reveals in the final act... an ace that he could have played at any time during the movie but he didn't because then the plot wouldn't work.
• ... has some great ties to Avengers. Nothing direct, but let's just say that even Tony Stark can't look in the eye of things that make deities frightened and not come out unscathed.
• ... makes a pretty significant change from the comics to a major character. I've never read the comics, but I was still looking forward to seeing this character on screen, and when said character ended up being pretty different I was a little disappointed. But in and of itself, within the movie on its own, it's a pretty cool plot twist.

 Grade: B

Monster #14—Parasites

I know, I know... Parasites are monsters already. Want proof? Go google images of bot flies, guinea worms, warbles, and... actually, don't google those at all. Trust me. You don't want to see that stuff.

This post isn't about real-world parasites. Those are too frightening. This post is about monster parasites from film and fiction. These critters are horrifying and disgusting and vile, but when the movie is over and the book is done, you can breathe easy, knowing it was all fiction. Right?

In fact, now that I think on it, my two favorite movies are about parasites. In Alien, you've got a creature that has a complex five or six stage life cycle that uses another living creature as a host to transition from its second and third parasitic stages into its fourth and most violent stage. And in John Carpenter's The Thing you have a creature who's every single cell is its own creature, a parasite that invades any living thing, feeds on it, and then becomes it.

Hmm. This is kinda suddenly exploding into a huge new category, the more I think about it. I mean... there were the freaky insectoid lice creatures that infested the body of the monster in Cloverfield, the supernatural demonic entity of the Rec movies, the slithery worms in Slither and the creepy worms in Night of the Creeps, the critter from Wrath of Khan, and of course the eponymous parasite of the movie Parasite (AKA Demi Moore's first movie). Which, as you can see below, has an incredibly awesome trailer.

At least it's not a guinea worm!

Actually... I'm gonna stop here and just start the reccomended viewing and reading lists. There's a lot. I'm sure I'll forget some. But the following should keep you squirming for a while.

Recommended Reading

•  We Live Inside You, by Jeremy Robert Johnson

Recommended Viewing

• Alien, dir. Ridley Scott
• Prometheus, dir. Ridley Scott
• The Thing, dir. John Carpenter
• Slither, dir. James Gunn
• [Rec]2, dir. Jaume Balagueró, Paco Plaza
• Night of the Creeps, dir. Fred Dekker
• Cloverfield, dir. Matt Reeves
• Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, dir. Nicholas Meyer
• The Puppet Masters, dir. Stuart Orme
• They Came From Within, dir. David Cronenberg
• Parasite, dir. Charles Band
• The Bay, dir. Barry Levinson
• Splinter, dir. Toby Wilkins
• The Thaw, dir. Mark A. Lewis
• The Mist, dir. Frank Darabont
• The Hidden, dir. Jack Sholder
• The Faculty, dir. Robert Rodriguez
• The Tingler, dir. William Castle
• Dark City, dir. Alex Proyas

 

Double Sized Book Review—We Live Inside You / Angel Dust Apocalypse

Know what's fun? Finding a new author who knocks you out of your seat with the raw power of his storytelling craft.

I stumbled across Jeremy Robert Johnson's We Live Inside You on Amazon.com by accident, but with a title like that I couldn't not investigate more closely. I bought the kindle version of the book while my intrigue was still running high, and less than a minute later was reading about a man who got infested with a creepy parasite hivemind that not only took over his body but, increasingly, took over his entire personality. Even the tone of the story shifted in tone as the narrator became more and more proud of the fact that he was no longer merely a meat body but thousands of bodies. His joy in being able to share this bliss with the rest of the world, starting with the occupants of a movie theater who unknowingly began breathing in his microscopic airborne larvae, was really really really unsettling.

There's actually several stories about creepy parasites in the book. My favorite, hands down, was not the aforementioned "When Sussurus Stirs" but in fact the incredible "Cathedral Mother," in which a woman, driven to the extremes of eco-terrorisim in her pursuit of preserving the old growth redwoods of Northern California, stumbles upon a parasitic danger high in the canopies of the very trees she's trying to save.

Not all the stories in We Live Inside You are about parasites, though. There's actually a wide range of stories in here—stories about the end of the world caused by a devastating chant, of ghostly vengeance from beyond the grave, of strange drugs and stranger cults, gritty noir dramas and CDC horror stories, patricide, dead kids, and so much more.

By the time I finished, I was eager for more, and so I zipped back online and a few moments later, Angel Dust Apocalypse was on my kindle. More parasite stories awaited within this book, much to my delight, along with stories about the apocalypse itself that were both sublmine and over the top. You've got a story about a man making a suit out of cockroaches in order to survive in a radioactive wasteland. Or a story about a society where body modification is more than just mainstream, it's the route to fame. Or a story about a bitter young man who hates having to take care of his mentally challenged younger brother. Or how one woman reacts to the news that her husband may have been decapitated in a car crash and she needs to drive north to ID the body by a tattoo. Or of a particularly horrific Native American curse. Or a story that starts off with: "You could bite Todd's nose off."

The stories are raw, visceral, grisly when needed, and powerful. Jeremy Robert Johnson's the type of author who can set you on edge merely with his titles—especially once you're familiar with his writing style. I had to pause in dread and anticipation before continuing the book once I got to the story called "Priapsim," for example...

We Live Inside You / Angel Dust Apocalypse...

• ... makes the show Monsters Inside Me feel like a Disney movie.
• ... has a lot of really interesting behind-the-scenes stuff by the author where he talks about his writing style and techniques.
• ... makes me glad I had a kindle, since if I hadn't, I might have not bothered buying the book.

Grade: A+ (We Live Inside You), A – (Angel Dust Apocalypse)

Book Review—The Twelve

One of the things that kind of bugs me is when I'm reading a novel that's part of a series, and I've read the previous installments of said series, but then the novelist spends too much time reminding you of what happened before, as if said novelist doesn't trust that you've read the previous stories.

That's certainly not a problem with Justin Cronin's The Twelve, the second book in his vampire apocalypse saga. I was VERY impressed with the first in the series, The Passage, and eagerly tore into this one. As with The Passage, the first significant portion of the book functions as a sort of prequel, detailing events during the events that brought about the end of the world, introducing us to several really cool characters as we follow their efforts to survive in a world where vampirisim is taking over.

The bulk of the novel, of course, takes place about 100 years after that, focusing on most of the same characters from the first novel. They're no longer naive young adults, now, though; they've had a harrowing time in their journey, and they're now pretty rough around the edges. And if anything, some of the things they go through in this one are among the more harrowing ordeals I've read recently... not because of the violent or horrifying nature of their ordeals so much as because by the time things really start going bad, you're really invested in the characters. Cronin does a great job making you care about the characters, and the way he almost casually reveals near the start of the novel that some of the previous novel's survivors have died in the time between the two novels, it's really unsettling and distressing.

And that brings me back to the start of the review. There's a spoiler-free Dramatis Personae at the back of the book... but it's SO spoiler-free that it kinda doesn't help. I really should have done what I do whenever a new Song of Ice and Fire book comes out—read up the Wikipedia pages for the previous books to get reminded about where things were at when last we left our heroes and villains behind.

The book itself, though? It's excellent. Cronin does a brilliant job at presenting the vampires as creatures of science but also creatures of supernatural mystery. In fact, the science is so prevalent near the first half of the book that as things that are more and more unexplainable by science happen, they really do feel spooky and frightening in a way they wouldn't had the vampires had blatantly supernatural powers from the very beginning.

Looking forward eagerly to the next in the series!

The Twelve...

• ... isn't afraid to kill off characters you've come to like, nor is it afraid to bring back characters you thought were killed off!
• ... faces the reader with some difficult truths, in that it casts sympathetic characters in the role of suicide bombers, and manages to make you understand why such tactics might be the only choice, which is kinda disturbing.
• ... has a somewhat frustrating habit of skipping some of the more exciting action scenes and revealing what happens only after the fact, but certainly doesn't skip away from the hard to read parts about some pretty vile stuff.
• ... raised some pretty interesting questions that I hope will be explored in the third and final book—not the least of which is what's going on beyond the USA 100 years in the future!

Grade: A –

Movie Review—Storage 24

Found footage movies aren't my only cinematic weakness. Another such vulnerability would be the good old-fashioned monster movie. These can run the gamut from incredibly excellent (such as The Host or Alien) to excellently terrible (C.H.U.D. anyone?).

Storage 24 is somewhere right down the middle. It's a pretty modest movie that starts with a bang. A serious one. I thought for a moment that I'd broken my speakers when the movie gets going! The movie itself is standard monster movie plot #1—a group of people are stranded in an enclosed location with a monster on the loose. In this case, the enclosed location is a vast storage unit facility, and the monster is a semi-humanoid semi-reptilian semi-insect all-brute creature that's actually really quite well-designed and realized on screen, with a fair amount of actual practical effects and puppetry at work. The monster even has a personality beyond RARRRRGH KILL THEM ALL and makes a few mistakes along the road to eating all humans. Or if not eating them, ripping out their hearts and then letting the poor victim watch while the monster crushes said heart in its big hand like it was an empty beer can. Can't fix that! You're done.

Not what you want to see when you open that mysterious storage locker!

Storage 24...

• ... is what happens when you mix Super-8, Alien, and Storage Wars up in a blender.
• ... has some REALLY refreshing developments along the lines of a certain obnoxious movie cliche. You know the one—the token minority is the first to die. Not so much the case in this movie. It's refreshing to see a horror movie avoid that cliche.
• ... is another one of those movies I actually kinda liked that got a lower than I'd expect rating on IMDB.
• ... makes me wonder how many people actually DO live inside their storage units.
• ... has the standard "our cell phones don't have a signal and so we're cut off from help!" element... but there's a pretty dang good reason for it!

Grade: B+

Movie Review—The Frankenstein Theory

It always kinda weirds me out when I see a movie that I actually quite enjoy, then head on over to IMDB for my post-viewing "would you like to know more" surfing, and then see that the movie's gotten terrible reviews. That happened recently with The Frankenstein Theory.

Now, granted, it's a found footage movie, and that means that it's super-effective against me. And on top of that... some of the acting is a bit dodgy. But some of the acting is really quite good (particularly Timothy V. Murphy as rugged local guide Karl), and the landscapes of the deep wild of northern Canada are never anything less than beautiful.

The movie itself has a pretty interesting plot—what if Frankenstein, the original story, wasn't fiction... what if it was based on a series of real-world experiments, and what if the real monster was really created and is still up there, lurking in the arctic wastes? It's a pretty cool concept. The movie even flirts with shifting from found footage over to mockumentary (an equally compelling style of movie making), but never quite decides to make that shift entirely.

In the end, there IS a lot of people walking around in the dark or the wilds continuing to film things even as they fall apart. People who don't like found footage will certainly find no shortage of things to be annoyed by in the movie. But if you like the genre, and you like movies about isolation and arctic survival, check it out!

I'll catch your Frankenstein for ya!

The Frankenstein Theory...

• ... isn't nearly as bad as the internet thinks it is.
• ...would have been better had it embraced the mockumentary angle instead of the found footage angle, I think.
• ... would also have been better had Karl been in the entire movie from the start.
• ... kinda spoils the end of the movie in the trailer, so be warned if you watch the following link! Or if you DO watch and want to avoid the spoiler, stop watching at about 1 minute and 20 seconds in. You'll get the idea for the movie by then anyway.

Grade: B –

Movie Review—Oblivion

Whew... been a busy month! With the Gen Con crunch taking over pretty much everything over the past several weeks, I've not really had a chance to see many movies or read much aside from what's gonna be published by Paizo between now and August. And then there was a week of recovery.

That said, I did see a few movies and read a few books, so I'm gonna post pretty short reviews of them so I can get all caught up!

First off? Oblivion!

This was never a boring movie to look at; the effects and the cinematography and the art design was really excellent. It doesn't hurt that I'm a sucker for postapocalyptic movies, of course... but what DID hurt were all the logic flaws and plot holes in the script (for example... if a thing can control the atmosphere in an enclosed area, why does it need to wait for flying robots to come kill intruders... why can't said thing simply turn the atmosphere back off to deal with the pesky human interlopers?), and even worse, the fact that the best parts of the movie... in fact... MOST parts of the movie... were more or less lifted from other movies.

If you've never seen a science fiction movie before, you might be blown away by Oblivion.

Huh... you're right! I can see like 11 other movies from here!

Oblivion...

• ... has obviously seen The Matrix, 2001, Planet of the Apes, Wall-E, Star Wars, I Am Legend, A.I., Independance Day, Lifeforce, Inception, War of the Worlds, and more. It hopes YOU haven't seen them, though!
• ... has also obviously HEARD Inception. I wonder what movie trailers would sound like today without having had Inception's awesome and easily mimicked low bass thrums?
• ... has some unsettling undercurrents of misogyny.
• ... has laser weaponry that turns bit actors into ashes but only makes main characters apparently lose their breath.
• ... is nonetheless never honestly dull, but neither is it a movie one ever needs to see more than once.
• ... is a MUCH better video game than it is a movie.

Grade: C+