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Year: 2011

You Don’t Need to See Cars 2 to Watch the Brave Trailer

You Don’t Need to See Cars 2 to Watch the Brave Trailer

Pixar has maintained such an amazing line of success with their mixture of intelligent adult themes and child-pleasing action and characters in their CGI films, that the studio’s turn toward sequels hit me in the face with the great massive gauntlet of disappointment. I did enjoy Toy Story 3, but it was nowhere near the level of brilliance of my trifecta of Pixar favorites: The Incredibles, WALL·E, and Up. And when I found out that the follow-up for Toy Story 3 would be a sequel to Cars, easily my least favorite Pixar film so far, the massive gauntlet of disappointed almost pounded me head-first down into the soil.

Cars 2 is the first Pixar film ever to have critics turn against it. The Rotten Tomatoes review aggregator has given the movie a “Rotten” rating, currently holding at a morose 33% positive, a sad first in Pixar’s history. It seems the best I’ve heard about the movie from viewers is, “Eh, my kids liked it.” Considering the steep prices for the 3D screenings — which are the only screenings available at my local theater — this may end up being the first Pixar movie I skip in theaters, and wait for the Blu-ray.

There is one temptation, the trailer for Pixar’s next films, a non-sequel heroic fantasy set in Scotland: Brave.

But now the trailer is on line, so never mind. This looks not only like a return to form for the company, but a step into territory they’ve never explored. In particular, this is the fairy tale and fantasy world that we often associate with the classic Disney films of the Golden Age. But Pixar’s take looks sharper and harder than that, although I only have this trailer, plus posters and artwork to go on. But the mystic and Celtic, adult fantasy feel of this trailer is breathtaking — I can hardly wait to see what the company does with this setting and its fiery red-haired heroine. There will be comedy, but as director Mark Andrews told Entertainment Weekly, expect something fitting the bold declaration of its title: “What we want to get across is that this story has some darker elements. Not to frighten off our Pixar fans — we’ll still have all the comedy and the great characters. But we get a little bit more intense here.”

And it does appear intense. That final bow-shot to the camera? Sign me up!

If you want something else to hold you over, Entertainment Weekly has some beautiful concept art.

Also behold the thrilling teaser one-sheet (full sized!):

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Behind the Plague of Shadows

Behind the Plague of Shadows

Pathfinder Tales: Plague of Shadows, by Howard Andrew Jones. Coming February 2011Over at Flames Rising, Black Gate Managing Editor Howard Andrew Jones talks about the genesis of his Pathfinder novel Plague of Shadows:

I pitched [editor James Sutter] “Jirel of Joiry crossed with Unforgiven.” I wasn’t planning to lift the character or the plot, but I hoped to evoke a similar feel… I’d never written anything with orcs or dwarves, and while I’d scripted an evil sorcerer or two, they’d never been Pathfinder magic users. Writing deals in a lot of archetypes, and fantasy gaming fiction tends to wear those archetypes proudly on its sleeves — the elven archer, the surly half-orc, the mysterious wizard. I embraced those archetypes and tweaked them, as any gamer would when designing a character for play. I planned out scenes that would put the characters in conflict so I could get a better handle on who they were and what was important to them.

I started writing within a day or two of getting my outline approved, and pretty quickly I realized that I needed to stat out my main characters. I’ve been gaming regularly with a variety of systems since I was about 9, but in all that time, I’d never rolled up story characters prior to writing about them… I kept the rule book handy so that my spell descriptions would match, as closely as possible, the spiffy descriptions drafted by the Paizo maestros.

You can learn more about Plague of Shadows here, and the complete conversation with Howard is at Flames Rising.

The Dream-World of Lud-in-the-Mist

The Dream-World of Lud-in-the-Mist

Lud-in-the-MistHope Mirrlees’ stunning 1926 novel Lud-in-the-Mist begins with the following epigraph:

The Sirens stand, as it would seem, to the ancient and the modern, for the impulses in life as yet immoralised, imperious longings, ecstasies, whether of love or art, or philosophy, magical voices calling to a man from his “Land of Heart’s Desire,” and to which if he hearken it may be that he will return no more — voices, too, which, whether a man sail by or stay to hearken, still sing on.

It’s a quote from the classical scholar Jane Harrison, who was Mirrlees’ close companion at the time Mirrlees was working on Lud-in-the-Mist. It’s a perfectly chosen introduction to the book. It sets out the themes, and to an extent the method, which Mirrlees used: the conflict between instinctive desires and the conscious will, that tries to repress those desires and establish a social harmony — all symbolically realised through the imagery of myth and fantasy.

The sirens sang to Odysseus, who had himself lashed to his mast to hear their song while his crew went about their duties with their ears stopped up with wax. Apollonius of Rhodes says that they also sang to the Argonauts, but that their song was overcome by Orpheus, and the sirens threw themselves into the sea and became rocks. And I will note here, for reasons that should become clear later, that Apollonius also says that only a little later the Argonauts came to the garden of the Hesperides, in the far west, where the golden apples of Gaea had been kept, a marriage gift for Hera, until Hercules had took them as part of his labours.

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Andrew Zimmerman Jones Reviews The Authorized Ender Companion

Andrew Zimmerman Jones Reviews The Authorized Ender Companion

the-authorized-ender-companionThe Authorized Ender Companion
Jake Black
Tor (432 pp, $27.99, November 2009)
Reviewed by Andrew Zimmerman Jones

One of my most prized possessions is a signed hardcover copy of Orson Scott Card’s Hugo and Nebula award winning Ender’s Game. Before the signature, Card inscribed “A survival guide for geniuses.” This is a wonderful tagline for Ender’s Game, which has spoken to a full generation of science fiction fans. Now, Jake Black has written a complete and authorized companion to the set of nine (so far) novels and assorted short stories – the Enderverse, as it is known to fans.

The bulk of The Authorized Ender Companion is taken up by the 315-page “Ender Encyclopedia,” which lists every individual, place, or thing that shows up anywhere in the Enderverse. This ranges from the detailed (a 15-page entry on Bean and 20-page entry on Ender) to the passing (such as the one-line entry that reminds us all what a “barkdancer” is). Probably one of the best entries is the 3-page lexicon of Battle School Slang.
The end of the Encyclopedia lists all of the sources, which is very helpful for those of us who haven’t yet read all of the short stories, followed by a couple of pages of “Ender’s Time Line” which, while interesting, is in print that is so small you may need a magnifying glass. (Note: I read an advanced review copy, so hopefully some sane editor will decided that this must be enlarged for the final edition.) Beyond the Encyclopedia, however, are some of the more substantive aspects of this book and the ones that fans should really be looking forward to.

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Pulp RPG Action with Dicey Tales

Pulp RPG Action with Dicey Tales

dicey-tales-1Anyone whose been reading the Black Gate game review column knows how much I loved Jeff Mejia’s Legends of Steel, in a large part due to his love for (and obvious knowledge of) the sword-and-sorcery genre. Jeff knew how to present the game material, provide atmospheric and plotting suggestions, and in general wrote a book so useful to sword-and-sorcery gaming that it should be picked up even by those GMs working with fantasy adventure who have no interest in the game system itself.

Now Jeff has turned to the pulps — two-fisted action featuring jungle men, rocket-pack heroes, roving archeologists, Nazis and gangsters, daredevil pilots, and more — and wrought the same kind of magic. Dicey Tales uses the acclaimed (and excellent) Barbarians of Lemuria role-playing system to provide the same kind of loving detail to one of the best eras for high-flying adventure. The e-magazine includes two action-packed scenarios, a character generation system, rules for bringing the pulp era to life, strange powers employed by pulp heroes, and more goodies. Apparently I’m not the only one who thinks Jeff has knocked another product out of the park, for Dicey Tales is already rocketing to the top of the RPGnow download list. Check it out!

Why John Clute Cracks Me Up…

Why John Clute Cracks Me Up…

sh_headThe June 20th edition of John Clute’s Scores column is a case study in vocabulary intensive prose that, albeit sometimes with a little bit of work on the reader’s part, is as evocative of strange worlds as the material he is reviewing. Here’s the set up for a piece ostensibly about the Jonathan Strahan edited Engineering Infinity anthology:

A few weeks ago I left London and entered the future again. I was about to fly in an oldish plane from one old airport in England to another old airport in Norway, in order to give a talk about the world city in the twenty-first century. I felt I was as entitled to talk about the world I lived in as any of the rest of us: that larger half of the world’s sum of homo sapiens who have become treeless in this century, veldtless, farmless, parkless, legless; but who have become, necessarily, just streetwise enough to know where the nearest just-in-time cloaca disgorges pellets of the fungibles we ingest like battery hens; and who breathe the poison gas of Pax Aeronautica when we travel. So I left London on the Gatwick Express and began the process of becoming “John Clute”: which is to say becoming a readable portion of the original entity indistinguishable (to all purposes) from the barcode that tracked its transit to come. And so the “John Clute” packet arrived at Oslo Airport, and began to breathe life into itself again. I felt repurposed. It crossed my mind that transiting the aeropolis worldnet was a bit like experiencing matter transmission in SF; and I had a quick flash memory of A J Budrys’s blackly proleptic Rogue Moon (1960), a book which in retrospect seemed like a description of the way we lose ourselves in travel in 2011. I walked with my fellow recovering barcodes to luggage reclaim, where the system had jammed, leaving most of our worldly gear stuck somewhere in the bowels. There was dead silence in the vast space. Two things came to mind. One: that when a zero-redundancy just-in-time system seizes up, the part of the world machine that has been affected by the dysfunction ages instantly, like an abandoned shopping mall, or some matrix-world when the electricity is turned off. Mourning becomes entropy. Two: that the emotion felt by passenger units, when their codings have been defaced by a failure of the world-machine, is shame.

It takes a few readings to figure out exactly what the hell he’s talking about, but eventually it occurs to you that there is something genuinely profound about this.  As to what he thinks about the Strahan book, well, that’s largely besides the point. And I still don’t get why missing luggage in the machine should evoke shame.  Anger or frustration or resignation, I get.  But shame?  What am I missing here?

Blogging Marvel’s The Tomb of Dracula, Part Seven

Blogging Marvel’s The Tomb of Dracula, Part Seven

tod-33tod-34The Tomb of Dracula #33, “Blood On My Hands” starts off with aged, blind wheelchair-bound Quincy Harker facing his greatest dilemma: if he lets Dracula die as the vampire deserves, then he forfeits the life of Rachel Van Helsing, held captive across town by Dracula’s brides. Quincy is tormented by the memory of his daughter Edith. He thinks back thirty years to the night Dracula abducted his wife and flung Quincy from his balcony seat at the opera leaving him crippled by the fall. Quincy’s wife survived another decade after Dracula’s attack, but never fully recovered. Faced with the tragedy of his life, Quincy spares Dracula to save Rachel. In gratitude, Dracula grasps the urn containing Edith’s remains and scatters them across the room, literally throwing her ashes in her father’s face. Leaving the reader feeling nothing but contempt for Dracula at his cruelest, writer Marv Wolfman shifts the setting to India where Taj Nital and his wife stand by their son’s grave. The pain of two grieving parents has reunited them. The issue rapidly picks up speed again as Dracula realizes Dr. Sun is the person who must have poisoned him and sets out to find him. Meantime, Inspector Chelm is on Dracula’s tail while the reader learns that the mysterious white-haired vampire sought by both Blade and Hannibal King is also seeking Dracula. Gene Colan’s artwork maintains the high level readers had come to expect as he and Marv Wolfman deliver another excellent issue that keeps the suspense raised as the storylines appear to be headed toward another major development.

Issue #34, “Showdown of Blood” sees the action shift to Brazil where Guest Star Brother Voodoo saves Frank Drake from the zombies. While in London, Inspector Chelm and his men bungle their attempt to slay Dracula. The reader learns that the mysterious white-haired vampire has been stalking Dracula for some time. A final interlude in India sees Taj make a bittersweet departure from the series as he writes a letter to Rachel Van Helsing explaining he will not return to London. Rachel rejoins Quincy, eager to hunt Dracula down. Wolfman then introduces us to embittered fashion designer, Daphne Von Wilkinson who encounters a weakened Dracula and begins providing him with the fresh blood he needs in the form of her enemies.

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First Official Photos of The Hobbit released

First Official Photos of The Hobbit released

ew-hobbit-bilbo

From Entertainment Weekly.

So far so good, though I can’t say I’m surprised, given the precedent set by the wonderful scenery and set-pieces of The Lord of the Rings films. Martin Freeman couldn’t have been a better casting choice, visually, for the part of Bilbo (though I picture Mr. Baggins as slightly more rotund).

As I’m sure it was for many others The Hobbit was my gateway to fantasy and, largely, to reading in general. As such I have very high expectations for this film (or more accurately, films). I have little doubt The Hobbit is going to look great, but my hopes and fears are pinned to the faithfulness of the script. And the amount of screen time allotted to Beorn kicking ass at the Battle of Five Armies.

Kelly Link’s Some Zombie Contingency Plans

Kelly Link’s Some Zombie Contingency Plans

pretty-monstersSo I’ve been listening to Podcastle episodes while processing my usual insurmountable citadel of books here at Top Shelf.

Podcasts are cool. Especially Podcastle podcasts, because, hey, FANTASY!

They’re usually 30-50 minutes, entertaining, with experienced narrators and great introductions and afterwords by Dave Thompson or Anna Schwind. Since I don’t read as many short stories as I’d like to, when I listen in on these things, I feel like I’m also learning something from my fantasy writing peers (and superiors). Something about structure. Something about character. Something about plot and dialogue and pacing. Lots of somethings, in fact!

Today, I listened to Kelly Link’s Some Zombie Contingency Plans. Now, whatever you think when you read that title, I have to tell you, you can’t possible predict what this story is actually about. Whoa.

And since I’m still feeling shocked and queasy (and astonished at the craft that went into this story, although I don’t know why I should be astonished, because it’s not like I don’t know who Kelly Link is or how highly she’s thought of) after listening to this story, I thought I’d hop on over here and tell you, tell you…

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Goth Chick News: Colin Farrell Can Bite Me

Goth Chick News: Colin Farrell Can Bite Me

image0022If you’re looking for a sparkly vampire who marries humans rather than eats them, check back in around November when I can promise you there will be no mention of such atrocities here.

No way.

Here at Goth Chick News we do not condone the colorization of black and white movies, the censoring of controversial reading material or, blasphemy of blasphemies, the wussification of folklore monsters. Here, the Wolfman is not “misunderstood,” Frankenstein is the name of the doctor, not the monster and vampires are ruthless killers without the slightest bit of angst.

In other words; Colin Farrell.

If unlike me, you don’t have a widget countdown clock on your computer screen checking off the minutes until August 19th then let me remind you that is the release date for Fright Night.

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