The Born QueenWe’ve both finished reading The Born Queen, the conclusion to Greg Keyes’ The Kingdoms of Thorn and Bone. Yesterday we spent the day reading in tandem on the couch: I read book 3, Katie read book 4, and finished within an hour of each other. Determined to catch up, I read 100 pages last night and spent this morning and afternoon reading the final book.

It was well worth the wait.

The series is set two millennia after humans, led by Virginia Dare (explaining where the lost Roanoke colonists went), overthrew the demonic race that had kept them as slaves for generations. Virginia had discovered how to harness the sedos power, essentially magic. The last of humanity’s oppressors warned them that the sedos would eventually destroy their world. Of course, no one believed him.

2200 years later, this corner of the world is not unlike Europe in the early Renaissance. Except that the church is based on the sedos, in the person of saints, and its priests walk the paths to harness the sedos powers.

The world is also beginning to rot. Things of nature are dying, human alliances are crumbling, and terrible creatures thought to be myth are walking the earth. There are several factions who claim that they want to save it, but their true goals are suspect, and their methods differ greatly. The various viewpoint characters are thrust into the middle of things without any real sense of what’s going on: a holter, a princess, a novice priest, a knight, a swordsman, a composer and a queen.

One of the things I find so fascinating about this series (as I mentioned when I first read The Blood Knight) is the fact that everyone is acting on partial information. This makes them screw up, sometimes mildly, sometimes horrifically. And there’s a curveball that comes about 1/3 of the way into The Born Queen that turns everything on its head.

I don’t think it’ll give too much away to say that one of the key struggles in this book is for control of the sedos. Even 100 pages from the end, I wasn’t sure which faction would give the world a better chance of surviving.

Music also figures importantly, starting with the second book, where it’s learned that certain combinations of sound can have a profound effect on the human psyche. I found myself wondering whether Keyes had someone set any of the songs to music.

By the end of The Born Queen, most of the major questions about what’s really going on have been answered. Of course, they’re answered in pieces, by different characters with different agendas. The major characters’ arcs reach (mostly) satisfying conclusions, with some finding what they want, some finding what they need, some doing what needs to be done, and some getting what they deserve.

It’s weird to finally be done with the series, which started around the same time as this blog. The first post that I made that wasn’t “Hey, look! I have a blog!” was a review of The Waterborn and The Blackgod, Greg Keyes’ first novel and its sequel. In it, I mentioned looking forward to The Briar King when it came out.

Justice League New Frontier DVD.One of the highlights of WonderCon this weekend was the premiere of Justice League: The New Frontier. I really liked Darwyn Cooke’s original mini-series, DC: The New Frontier, and I’d been looking forward to the animated adaptation. Overall, I’d say the film succeeds.

The story links the dawn of the Silver Age of comics, and the formation of the Justice League of America, with the dawn of the Space Age, set against the political background of the Red Scare. It focuses most heavily on Green Lantern-to-be Hal Jordan and on the Martian Manhunter, but touches on Superman, Wonder Woman, Batman and the Flash as well.

What Works

Cooke’s drawing style and the 1950s retro look to the artwork both translate well to the screen. Continue reading

Beowulf carries a torchWent out and saw Beowulf yesterday. The IMAX 3D* showing was packed.

The computer animation managed to avoid the uncanny valley most of the time. The previews at Comic-Con looked very strange, but either the presentation helped immensely, or they’ve been refining it since they put those clips together. Movements are dead-on (it’s all motion-capture) and even facial expressions have gotten really impressive. (There’s a sequence at the end which is entirely two characters looking at each other, and it’s all expressions). And when it did slip into characters not quite looking human, the story was usually engaging enough to keep it from being too distracting.

They clearly had a 3D presentation in mind when blocking out shots, because they took great delight in tossing spears, arrows, and the occasional hapless Dane at the audience.

I found myself comparing it to Lord of the Rings in a few places, which isn’t surprising, since Tolkien was quite familiar with Beowulf. I’m pretty sure the Denmark of this period is the source culture for the Rohirrim, as well (both in the books and in the Peter Jackson films), so it’s appropriate that Heorot gives off a vibe of Edoras gone horribly wrong.

The monsters are impressive. Grendel is about as disgusting as can be, his mother literally radiant, and the dragon is a majestic gold, looking more like raw metal than scales. The designs of Grendel and the dragon are used well to reflect the contrast between Hrothgar and Beowulf: one decadent and slimy, one still heroic even in his old age. The initial attack by Grendel gets confusing pretty quickly, and the later confrontation devolves a bit into virtual wire-fu, but the battle with the dragon is suitably sweeping (though I had a few problems with the dragon’s heart).

Cardboard IMAX Shield (Think Big!)

I liked that they used Old English in a few places (Grendel’s dialog, and later, the play in which actors recount the tale of Beowulf’s encounter with Grendel), though I’m not familiar enough** with the original to know whether they kept lines verbatim.

Someone at the theater had made a whole bunch of these cardboard shields and set them along the hallway to the IMAX theater.

Edit: I did finally see 300 last month. I liked Beowulf better. I think the main thing is that 300 was positioned as a historical epic, so when it went over the top (“This is SPARTAAAAA!!!!!”) it seemed really over the top, while Beowulf is set in the epic fantasy mode: monsters, giant sea serpents, demons, dragons, etc., and the movie is in part about the nature of heroic tales and how they get embellished over time. So when the hero splits a sea serpent’s neck all the way down with his sword while falling, or boasts that “I am BEOWULF!!!” it fits.

*The theater gives what can only be described as a sales pitch for how great the IMAX presentation is going to be, which is kind of strange since by the time they give it, you’ve already bought your tickets and sat down inside. It reminded me of the Weird Al song, “Frank’s 2000″ TV” (though if my calculations are right, it’s only 1077 inches) and when they started bragging talking about how many thousands of watts of sound they had, we both started giggling.

**I took a class on Old English in college, which focused on vocabulary and shorter works. Unfortunately I didn’t have time to take the second quarter, which was entirely Beowulf. I did eventually pick up a book that presents the original and translation side-by-side, but I have to admit I haven’t gotten around to reading it.

I finally got out to see Transformers today. Yes, I grew up with the cartoons, the toys and the comics. Yes, I even collected every comic book from the original Marvel series through the Generation 2 series (including the prologue in G.I. Joe) through the first round from DreamWave. But somewhere along the line I just lost interest, and ultimately sold off my entire collection. (On eBay, actually.)

But still, there’s some sort of primal thrill—at least for anyone who grew up as a boy in 1980s America—in seeing giant robots fighting each other. So I finally decided to catch it while it was still in theaters.

It was better constructed than I expected. They had a plausible reason for the Autobots and Decepticons to be on Earth, and they were very good about following up on exposition. Every gun that appeared on the wall was eventually fired, down to Sam’s eBay auctions, with one exception: I really expected them to blow up Hoover Dam.

Which brings me to the biggest gap in logic. SPOILERS follow, for anyone who, like me, has been living in a cave. Continue reading

Stardust PosterWent out to see Stardust with a group of friends, and we all enjoyed it. People have been comparing it to The Princess Bride, and it’s an apt comparison: both are light-hearted fantasy adventures with a love story at the heart. Stardust takes itself a bit more seriously, though there’s plenty of humor.

The concept: Three groups of people pursue a fallen star (in this world, a woman). Tristran wants to bring the star back to impress a girl. The cruel princes of Stormhold are seeking the necklace she wears; the one who claims the gem claims the throne. The witch Lamia wants to cut out her heart to restore her own youth for another 400 years. Tristran gets there first, but has to bring her back without the more malicious seekers reaching her.

There’s swordplay, magic, betrayal, comedy, and romance. Michelle Pfeiffer throws herself gleefully into her role as the witch Lamia. Prince Septimus oozes slime as a cross between Prince Humperdink and Professor Snape. And Robert De Niro’s Captain Shakespeare is… indescribable. Charlie Cox as Tristran and Claire Danes as Yvaine (the star) manage to hold their own with the impressive cast of villains and supporting characters.

I was the only one of the four who had read the original novel by Neil Gaiman and Charles Vess, but for the most part I didn’t mind the changes. I did think the climactic battle got a bit overblown after a while, and I really missed one aspect of Una’s character which is revealed near the end of the book.

On a related note, it seems that in the last 3 weeks, the movie “adaptation” (and I use the term loosely) of The Dark Is Rising has been retitled as The Seeker: The Dark Is Rising, probably reflecting how far it seems to have strayed from the source material.

Stardust does it right: change the details, or even the structure if you have to, to make it work in a different medium. But stay true to the heart and spirit of the book.