Ready Player One was a near perfect book for me. Ready Player Two, not so much. Ready Player One was filled with all the nerdy nonsense that I loved when I was growing up. It was set in a world much like our own, but a few years down the road. The tech that made the books’ virtual reality work, was not that far off from the tech of today. Virtual Reality has been popular in science fiction for some time. The real world stuff, the MetaVerse type stuff, has never lived up to the worlds imagined in stories like…
Tag: hero
Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close
The story of a boy who lost his farther on 9/11. But that isn’t tragic enough. The boy has to be autistic. His grandfather has to be a victim of post traumatic stress himself. And the images we see lead us to believe that the boy’s father was one of the jumpers-someone who chose to fall to their death rather than burn alive. 9/11 is the foundation of the story, but the real tale is how our young hero deals with the tragedy. Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close is a fragmented film with lots of flashbacks to both the good old…
Man of Steel
Superman is still an icon figure, but Man of Steel shows what happens after 80 years of random writers and artists taking their best and worst shots. Man of Steel is mix tape of Superman Greatest Hits with a little bit of everything tossed in for good measure. It wasn’t bad, but it was a little long winded on aspects of Clark Kent’s story that I have to believe anyone with a pulse is already familiar with. I really liked the look of Man of Steel, until he actually put on the cape and became Superman. Man of Steel feels most like a…
Driven by James Sallis
Clocking in at an amazingly short 147 pages, Driven is a breath of fresh air when compared to the books I have been reading lately. The writing is clean and simple. The sentences short and to the point. The vocabulary purely functional. I liked it. Driven finds our mysterious hero Driver alive and well and living in Phoenix. In the opening scene two men try to kill him. He kills them, but not before they kill his girlfriend. This leads to the Jeremiah Johnson plotline where random men crawl out of the woodwork and do mortal combat with Driver. Cars…
The Wounded Land
When the Second Chronicles of Thomas Covenant came out, I had already read the first Chronicles at least twice. I read The Wounded Land greedily and found it to be just as compelling as the first books. It was kind of tough having to wait years between books. The Wounded Land starts off with our real hero, Linden Avery. A doctor who has a lot of secrets and has burdens laid on top of her from the moment she arrives in town. The first three chapters or so take place in the real world and the Second Chronicles breaks the tradition…
Brave
Pixar makes good movies and Brave is a good movie. But like every successful studio they seem to be slipping into the George Lucas mindset of using more special effects and not worrying so much about the story. Brave was an amazing looking film, the hair and water were especially well done. In fact, much of the film had a hyper-real look that was at times at odds with the usual cartoony people who live in the Pixar universe. This has always been a major gripe of mine-Pixar can make water and hair more real than reality but all their…
Albert Nobbs
Glenn Close plays a woman pretending to be a man so that she could get a job and then just kind of never stopped pretending. Like Yentl, this is a story set in the bad old days when a woman couldn’t expect much out of life. And, also like Yentl, this was a film that didn’t make much sense. Our hero/heroine is a small man working as a waiter at a residence hotel in Dublin in around 1918 or so. This story was actually written in 1918, which makes me wonder, how common was this whole transvestite thing to get…
Dear Suzanne Collins
Are you a fan of The Matrix? I love The Matrix, it’s a near perfect film with it’s classic hero’s story. I loved the characters, I loved the story, and I loved the look of the film. Then the Wachowski Brothers were seduced by all the money that a successful movie gave them and they forgot the story and characters in favor of special effects. The next two films had so little in common with The Matrix that they might as well have been set in another universe. I love The Hunger Games. It was original and amazing and gave…
The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake
The story of an odd family told through the eyes of a young woman who can taste people’s emotions from the food they prepare. This kind of food mind reading is not fun and our hero tends to eat as many manufactured foodstuffs as she can. Machines have no bad feelings to impart on their food. Author Aimee Bender just drops us into the story and lets us discover along with the young woman what it is like to taste her mother’s sadness and the baker’s anger and the harvester’s disgruntlement. But the girl who can taste people is not…
Cycling Home From Siberia
Rob Lilwall is a middle school geography teacher who is, not surprisingly, bored with his life. He is 27 years old, has no significant other, and has no big plans for the future. So when he his old buddy Al emails Rob and asks him to ride with for the last leg of his round-the-world cycling trip, Rob says why not? So our hero hops a plane to the god forsaken Siberian town of Magadan. It’s on the Eastern side of Siberia and everyone he meets tells him he will soon die in the subfreezing cold. He is warned about…