Tag: fantasy

Backrooms – The Most Accessible Horror?

On By E. A. SolinasIn random, recommendations, ruminationsLeave a comment

So, I saw the Backrooms movie on the second day of its release, at about eleven in the morning (which is a weird time to be watching a horror movie). I’m usually a few years behind Internet things that people are into, so it’s pleasant to be there before the Backrooms becomes a mainstream thing.

And it probably will, because… this movie is a hit. A huge hit. As I write this, it has been out five days and has amassed $118 million, which is a pretty good showing for any movie, but is phenomenal for a movie that only cost ten million to make, by a first-time director who isn’t even old enough to drink. It’s so massive a success that McDonald’s just rolled out a Backrooms commercial as the movie premiered, which is kind of a gamble, since nobody knew if this would be successful.

I know that a ten-million-dollar movie isn’t the biggest gamble you can find in Hollywood – that would probably have been something like the original Lord of the Rings trilogy. But it is a gamble in the sense that this is a movie that isn’t based on a TV show, book or video game, but on a series of short videos posted on Youtube full of esoteric details, mystery and cryptic clues… based on a creepypasta. And it isn’t an adaptation so much as an addition to the preexisting webseries. To my knowledge, this doesn’t really have a precedent in the movie industry, so I was genuinely very interested in seeing if this very 21st-century phenomenon would turn out well.

I was especially interested in seeing how it would turn out because Kane Pixels/Parsons, the originator of the Backrooms videos, was directing the movie. Hollywood hasn’t done well with creepypastas and Internet lore before this, as seen by the Slenderman movie. If you haven’t seen it, it was just a standard horror movie with nothing distinctly Slenderman about the title character except his appearance, and was clearly made by people who neither knew nor cared about the preexisting lore.

But back to the Backrooms. Honestly, I wonder if the webseries is part of the reason that the movie is doing as well as it is. Specifically, the fact that it’s so accessible to everyone who has a phone or a computer.

I mean, the bar is so low to getting involved in the Backrooms lore and figuring out whether you will want to see the movie or not. All you have to do is go onto Youtube and type in “Backrooms,” and you’ll immediately find Kane Pixels’ channel. No money is needed, and it isn’t hard to access. All you need to do is watch, and you’ll have a pretty solid idea of whether the movie’s brand of eerie dreamlike horror is something that you’d enjoy watching for a whole feature film.

And likewise, understanding the lore is easy as well. If you try to get into the Backrooms lore and are confused, there are countless videos dissecting Kane Pixels’ videos frame by frame, and exploring all the subtle clues, details, messages and timeline of the Backrooms and A-Sync. Once again, all you have to do is go onto Youtube and check out a Wendigoon video or two – long videos, I should add – and you’ll find that most of the legwork has been done for you. It’s practically the easiest thing to get involved in.

Whatever the reason, it’s fantastic that the Backrooms have become a bona fide hit in movie theaters – not just indie horror, but horror that accurately captures the esoteric nature of the material, and which brings a little of the strangeness and darkness of the Internet into the sanitized, mass-produced realm of Hollywood movies.

Have a nice day, and don’t no-clip through any walls.

Recommendation: The Grandmaster Of Demonic Cultivation (Mo Dao Zu Shi)

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Despite the general government disapproval of same-sex relationships, China does have some media focusing on such characters. Boys’ love content in China is known as “danmei,” and don’t ask me what that literally means because I know about ten words in Mandarin, and half of them are numbers.

And the most famous example of the breed is probably Mo Dao Zu Shi or The Grandmaster of Demonic Cultivation (alternate unofficial title: “The Founder of Diabolism). This webnovel has an animated adaptation, a live-action adaptation in the form of The Untamed, an audio drama, a stage play, a manhua, and a currently-ongoing manga in Japan. I can testify that all of them are very good (except the stage play, which I haven’t seen), although some of them are censored. The Untamed, for instance, is unable to openly depict the main characters as being romantically involved with one another, so the actors just gaze lovingly at each other a lot.

The story is about Wei Wuxian, who died thirteen years before the events of the series. He was basically considered a supervillain by his entire society, who used a necromantic form of cultivation to control the dead, including a sapient superzombie named Wen Ning. In the present, he’s brought back to life in the body of a mentally ill young man who wants Wei Wuxian to kill his relatives, and after some craziness and several deaths, Wei Wuxian ends up being captured by Lan Wangji, a very morally upright and noble cultivator that he knew in his old life, who seems weirdly determined to keep Wei Wuxian close to him at all times.

The two of them go on a road trip to find the dismembered body parts of a fierce corpse (zombie) that has been scattered across many different cities, which are also the key to finding out who the dead person was and how he died. Without spoiling too much, they get entangled in a conspiracy of political murder and really unpleasant secrets. And at the same time, Wei Wuxian starts discovering that he has romantic feelings for Lan Wangji, but after spending the better part of fifteen years being called a monster, he subconsciously doesn’t believe that they could possibly be returned. He’s a little clueless, because readers will probably have figured out some stuff about Lan Wangji that Wei Wuxian hasn’t.

I’m summing up a lot – there’s a decent-sized cast, some side-plots and a lot of flashbacks spanning several years and a whole war – but that is the basic description of the webnovel. The author, Mo Xiang Tong Xiu (known as MXTX), has written three webnovels and all of them have been really popular. MDZS is arguably the most plot-heavy of the three, and honestly, that is the way I like this sort of story: a heavy dose of plot, with the romance sort of wound through it.

The romance is very much an opposites-attract kind of story – Wei Wuxian is this sort of brilliant, erratic little gremlin who loves to cause trouble, and Lan Wangji is this almost superhumanly cool, elegant and silent figure that only loses his composure around Wei Wuxian. But at the core, they do have a lot in common, like wanting to protect innocent people and doing the right thing even if the world is against them. And the slow burn of them getting together is complicated by a series of misunderstandings, lost memories and the fact that Lan Wangji doesn’t really know how to express his emotions outwardly.

And yes, it’s a slow-burn – things only really coalesce in the climactic (literally, in some cases) part of the story, at which time the stories get much more sexual. Let’s just say that the fandom’s catchphrase “Every day means every day” is earned.

It also earns a lot of attention for the secondary characters, all of whom are pretty vivid… including the dead ones, both animate and not. There’s Wei Wuxian’s estranged martial brother Jiang Cheng, who’s crabby, violent and very emotionally stunted; Lan Xichen, Lan Wangji’s too-agreeable older brother; Wen Qing, a courageous and rather terse doctor that Wei Wuxian befriends; Xue Yang, a charming psychopath who traps the characters in a haunted city; Nie Huaisang, the dweeby ex-classmate Wei Wuxian runs into; and a bunch of lovably naive teenagers who tend to follow the main characters around wherever they go.

So if you’re looking for a romance with a lot of plot and misunderstandings (so many misunderstandings), this one might be something you’d like.

The Crow 2024: Where Are The Good People?

On By E. A. SolinasIn random, ruminationsLeave a comment

So, I just watched The Crow. Not the original Brandon Lee movie, a searingly raw, beautiful tragedy of love, revenge and sorrow that sadly led to the death of its lead actor. I watched the 2024 remake… if you can call it a remake when it has very little connective tissue to the previous movie or its graphic novel origin.

And it is bad.

Now, there are many, many reasons that it’s bad. I could go on for hours about the sucky aspects of it. The acting (FKA Twigs is excruciatingly bad). The writing… so much cringe Tumblr dialogue. The entire romance takes place over the course of a week or so, so it has no feeling of real weight, as opposed to the impending wedding of the original Eric and Shelly. And of course, the change from a purely mortal psychopath and his minions to a… soul-peddling Satanic billionaire in a suit.

But I think the change/development that bothers me the most is that there are no good people in the story.

See, in the original movie, a large part of the tragedy of Eric and Shelly’s deaths was that they were, in fact, good people. Not stereotypical ones – they were both pretty alternative, and they were a little edgy – but good people who tried to help others and protect innocents. Their deaths hurt us because they were senseless horrors that happened to people who didn’t deserve it, people whose hearts were pure. And even though we only see little snippets of their lives in flashback, we believe that their love was real because they were good people.

And they were not the only people. There’s also the little girl they helped care for, with the drug-addicted mother. And there is Ernie Hudson’s cop character, who helps Eric take down the bad guys and process his grief and loss and pain. This is a world that is cruel and sad and brutal, but it has little glimmers of light and love that make it all worth it.

The remake… does not have those things. There is not a single character in it who is a good person. Nobody to admire. Nobody to like. Nobody who isn’t at the very least a selfish a-hole.

This is especially egregious when it comes to Eric and Shelly, because… as I said, the tragedy of their deaths was that they died senselessly, and that it was a bad thing that happened to good people who didn’t deserve it. That was the entire impetus behind the story of the Crow. The story was inspired by the senseless death of the author’s fiancee, and his struggle to deal with the eternal fact that bad things happen to good people, and a lot of the time, it isn’t for any greater reason or consequence.

2024 Eric and Shelly? Well, their deaths are a direct consequence of Shelly being an edgy rebel and hanging out with the aforementioned billionaire, and even doing bad stuff on his behalf. She’s no longer an innocent party, and their deaths somehow feel less tragic because of it.

And even if she hadn’t, both Eric and Shelly have lost the innocent passion that you felt in the original. In this iteration, they’re a pair of self-indulgent drug addicts who make the entire movie feel strangely sleazy and shallow. Their “love” is not a deep passionate romance that is about to culminate in marriage – it’s a post-rehab weekend fling between two junkies who are calling whatever they feel “true love.” And the movie expects us to agree with them, even though there’s nothing to indicate anything deeper than lust or bonding over pills.

I think part of the problem is that the people making the movie do not know the difference between a protagonist and a good person. A lot of bad writers have this problem. We’re expected to like, admire and relate to the main character because they ARE the main character, not because they’re a person who deserves those things. Sadly, this works with some people, as evidenced by the many people who think of Rick Deckard as a good guy instead of, you know, an assassin.

(Note: I am not saying Blade Runner is an example of bad writing. It’s not. I am simply pointing out that many people do not think critically about the protagonists of the media they consume and assume that the main character is a good person who’s in the right, and Rick Deckard is a good example)

Another part of it is… I think the people making this either don’t believe that good people exist, or they literally do not know what a good person is. The former seems supported by the fact that there is nobody in this movie that is actually good; there’s no little girl or Ernie Hudson cop to serve as a counterpoint to the corruption. Even Shelly’s mom is in league with the villains and doesn’t care about her daughter. The latter is supported by the fact that they apparently think that we’re going to be inspired by the “love” of two oppressively cringe, immature addicts who say stuff like, “If I’m ever hard to love, try to love me harder” and actively contribute to their own deaths.

Anyway, I may rant and rave more about the many, many, many ways this movie sucks and how inferior it is to the original, but that is one of my major pet peeves.

Elio Vs. KPop Demon Hunters – What’s In A Name?

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So right now, two animated original stories have recently been released. One is Elio, a Pixar movie about a kid who gets abducted by aliens and… well, the plot doesn’t seem to have much more than that. The other is K-Pop Demon Hunters, which… is about K-pop stars who are also secretly demon hunters.

Now, I cannot speak to the quality of these two movies, since I haven’t seen either in full, except to say that the reception I’ve seen to Elio has been very mixed. Some people think it’s great, some people think it sucks. K-Pop Demon Hunters seems to have gotten overall a much more positive reaction despite a very silly premise, and as far as I can tell, that’s due to two things. One, it’s a well-written movie, from the clips I’ve seen. Two, it’s a genuine movie made out of someone’s culture and passions, not a soulless corporate product.

But I think one big contributor to the downfall of Elio and the rise of K-Pop Demon Hunters is the titles.

KPDH has a title that tells you, upfront and openly, what it’s about. It’s a movie about K-pop and demon-hunting. The premise is silly, like I said, but it doesn’t care how silly it sounds. You will probably know right out of the gate if this is a movie you are interested in. Furthermore, the title is eye-catching. It’s bold, it’s brash, it’s unapologetically different from every other title out there – and that makes it both memorable and attractive. It makes you want to know more.

On the other hand… what does “Elio” tell you?

Honestly, to me it sounds like the name of an indie dramedy about an older man (I keep imagining Tom Hanks) whose wife died and he’s been depressed ever since, but then he adopts a stray dog and it teaches him how to live again or something sappy like that. That dramedy would ultimately be trying to get an Oscar, but everybody would have forgotten about it by the time Oscar season rolls around.

That is what the title Elio says to me. It doesn’t say “wacky children’s space adventures with slug aliens.” It doesn’t say ANYTHING about the movie it’s attached to, or what to expect, or WHY you should see the movie. It’s just… a name. The movie could just as easily be called “Wally” or “Sean” or “Jake” or “Mike.” It tells you nothing except that it has a character named “Elio” in it, and that’s… not enough to really attract attention and interest.

And yes, I know that there are some very successful movies that are just the characters’ names – John Wick comes to mind. But there are also ones that definitely weren’t done any favors by their titles, like Salt.

I’m not saying that Pixar has to go full out K-pop Demon Hunters in their titles. But they really need to stop with the really bland, nondescript titles that are either names (like this and Luca), or they show a minimum of effort (like Soul). Their movies have been struggling for the past few years, for varying reasons, but the titles certainly don’t help.

Oh, and ditch the current art style too. The bean-mouth thing is tired.

Recommendation: Unpublished Brandon Sanderson

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Every author has a trail of half-finished outlines, ideas or books that just didn’t work out. Books in embryo, which may or may not eventually be finished and released to the public. And apparently Brandon Sanderson is no different… he’s got whole novels that just aren’t published.

I’ve been reading them lately, and honestly, it’s a shame that these books weren’t published and canon to the Cosmere, because they’re pretty good overall. Although I understand why, obviously, Way of Kings Prime isn’t – it’s basically an earlier draft of a now-published novel that is drastically different in form now. It’s interesting as a look into the evolution of the novel we eventually got.

But the other two books are different. One was revised and released as a graphic novel, with some significant changes (such as a supporting character’s gender and family life) and the other just hasn’t been published officially in any form, although as I understand it, the worldbuilding is canon. White Sand takes place on a tidally-locked planet where half of it is in darkness and half in light, and the main character is a very weak sand mage who ends up accidentally becoming the leader of his order. And also they’re on the verge of being disbanded, and most of them have been murdered, and he has to somehow fight with sand-magic without being able to do more than a small amount of it.

The other is Aether of Night, kind of a cross between a Shakespearean comedy and a high-stakes high fantasy. It follows a prince/priest who ends up becoming king when his identical twin brother, who was the actual heir, is killed by mysterious shadow creatures, along with their father and a lot of other people. And those mysterious creatures are constantly invading their country and trying to overwhelm the populace, and they’re associated with a pair of feuding gods.

… and at the same time, there is also this comedic aspect, in that the former-priest-turned-king has to also select a wife from several candidates. They’re from different countries, religions and cultures, with different attitudes towards getting the prize, and some of them have their own agendas, and there are diplomatic repercussions to his choice. So as much as I enjoyed the book, I can see why Sanderson wasn’t really satisfied with the combination of high-fantasy potential apocalypse/Shakespearean comedy. You’re like, the world is potentially ending and over half the population is gonna die… so why are we hearing about some guy trying to figure out which girl he’ll marry?

And I just found out that he has another unpublished book called Dragonsteel, which I do not know anything about and which I now have to read. So stay tuned.

It’s bad to be an advanced reader?

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So, watch the above video before reading more. Be sure to see other videos by KrimsonRogue – he’s one of the few Booktubers I follow religiously, and watch every video he makes.

I am not entirely sure what this man he’s talking about is on. I have personal experience in this, because – not to boast – I was a pretty advanced reader as a young child. In first grade, I read The Hobbit. The next year, I read The Lord of the Rings. I read so quickly and at such a level that my teacher effectively stopped expecting me to read the books supplied by the school for a book club, because I blew through them too fast. Then she tried to hold me back from surpassing my peers, but that’s a tale for another day.

And then there was the library. I went there at least twice a week, and over the next years, I was able to find plenty of books that were appropriate for kids, but advanced enough for my reading skills. Just in the kids’ section, there were the Chronicles of Prydain, the Dark is Rising Sequence, Diana Wynne-Jones, the Riddlemaster trilogy, the Green Sky trilogy, the Earthsea books, and so on.

And I did not restrict myself to the adult section – I prowled through the teen section and the adult sections as well, and picked up a number of authors that I still read – stuff like Arthur C. Clarke. Not just in fantasy and sci-fi either. I developed a love for murder mysteries then, thanks to Agatha Christie, Ngaio Marsh, Elizabeth Peters, etc. I also checked out biographies of various people who sounded interesting. And, of course, I checked the new arrivals religiously, in case there was something there that I might be interested in.

And the options for reading for kids were far, far more limited back then. There was no Rick Riordan, no Five Nights at Freddy’s, no Shannon Messenger, no Marissa Meyer, Garth Nix was early in his career, etc.

I’m sorry, but I don’t buy for a second that there’s some sort of shortage of books for children who read at a more advanced level. It doesn’t make sense logically, because a child who can read above their grade is capable of reading books for older readers… AND FOR KIDS. The pool of available books is not diminished, it’s INCREASED. I was capable of reading books like Lord of the Rings, sure, but I still read plenty of high-quality, intelligent, challenging books aimed at kids.

I can think of a number of books for younger readers that are as complex and well-written, if not more so, than many adult works I’ve read. Take Marissa Meyer’s Lunar Chronicles – I would have eagerly devoured a series about a cyborg Cinderella. Such books are usually aimed at young adults and kids not because they lack the qualities supposedly required by adult fiction, but because their protagonists are young.

Evidently this guy didn’t learn the lesson that the Harry Potter franchise supposedly taught us – that you’re not locked into a particular age group’s reading material. Adults can read kids’ books, and kids can (if properly screened) read books for older readers. I read books for 9-12-year-olds, young adults AND adults – and I do not have a dearth of books to read these days. Even though a lot of the new releases don’t appeal to me, I still have a to-read pile that is dauntingly huge.

And yet, with countless people telling him how wrong he is, that kids are not doomed to have nothing to read if they’re more advanced readers… he still is willing to die on this hill. Insisting that having kids who are academically advanced – especially in reading – is bad for them and is only inflicted on them by borderline-abusive parents. Considering that the American school system is a global joke that regularly churns out illiterate adults with no skills or relevant knowledge, we could use a lot more kids who are not just learning, but learning beyond what could be expected of them.

And as KrimsonRogue points out, the professed cost of constantly obtaining books is easily offset with a library card. Fun fact: library cards are free. So is checking out anything with them. For a bookish child, there’s nothing more delightful.

Despite protestations to the contrary, I have to wonder if he truly has kids who are ahead of their grade, or whether they’re dead average… and that bothers him, so he insists that it’s actually better for kids to NOT be smart and advanced to offset his discomfort. Maybe I’m wrong. But he seems very insistent that this is the case, and not willing to listen to anyone else’s perspective.

Review: “Dragon Rider” by Taran Matharu

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Disclaimer: I received a free copy of this book from Netgalley in exchange for an honest review.

If I could succinctly describe Taran Matharu’s new book, it would simply be: “Eragon” if it were written for adults, by an adult.

Which is to say, “Dragon Rider” is a high fantasy with a lot of cultural richness and depth rather than Star Wars/Lord of the Rings tropes. It’s set in a world reminiscent of our own, but with soul-bindings to fantastical creatures like gryphons, dragons, chamroshes and various prehistoric beasts, and gives us a suitably underdog hero with the odds against him – and a baby dragon to help him bounce back.

As the third, least important son to the dead king of the Steppefolk, Jai is kept as a hostage in the Sabine Empire’s court. Specifically, as the personal attendant to the elderly, neglected ex-emperor Leonid. It gives him a front row seat to the dynamics of the new emperor’s court, but no respect – and a lot of hostility from the crown prince Titus and his friends, who see the Steppefolk as their barbarian inferiors. When Jai catches wind of a conspiracy against the visiting Dansk king, whose daughter is to marry Titus, he does his best to stop anyone from dying… only to lose everyone important to him.

And soon he finds himself lost in a freezing wilderness, surrounded by corpses… and most unexpectedly with a dragon egg. Without meaning to, he ends up soulbinding to the white infant dragon – and also ends up running into a prickly Dansk handmaiden named Frida, who knows something about being bound to a dragon. To save himself and his hatchling, Jai needs to get back to the Steppefolk, but staying alive in Sabine territory is the bigger immediate problem.

Taran Matharu’s fantasy world is reminiscent of our own in a lot of ways, mostly culturally: the Dansk (Northern European), the Steppefolk (Central Asians), the Sabines (Southern Europeans) and hints of other cultures like the Phoenix Empire (East Asia). It lends a lot of richness and depth to a fantasy story that is basically about becoming the spiritually-bonded partner of a mythical creature, and Matharu manages to evoke the feeling of a lot of history and complexity behind his tale.

It’s also distinctive because it takes some cues from Chinese cultivation fiction; it’s not a precise copying of its tropes, but the general ideas are there and integrated into the idea of soulbinding. The person in question learns how to acquire and store magical energy in a physical core, becoming stronger, physically purer and in possession of magical abilities. But it doesn’t make them all-powerful, and having a dragon doesn’t really keep Jai from being in constant danger (especially since she’s so small). So there’s plenty of suspense, action, grit, gore and dramatic confrontations.

Jai himself is a good underdog hero – not particularly exceptional, but he starts off as an ordinary kid that nobody expects anything from, relegated to a role nobody wants (which involves wiping an old man’s butt). He first starts to flower when he deduces that a conspiracy might be afoot, and tries to do the right thing – only for everything to implode in front of him. His relationships with other characters are pretty well-developed and enjoyable – his potentially romantic, slightly prickly connection with Frida, his immediate loving bond with Winter, and the quasi-father/son relationship he has with Leonid (who, to complicate things, personally executed Jai’s actual father). And then there’s Rufus, the mysterious old warrior with his own motives and complex history.

“Dragon Rider” takes a little time to get to any serious draconic action, but the destination is well-worth the journey. Well-rounded, vibrant and gritty, with plenty of room to flower in the future.

Review: The Boy And The Heron

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Hayao Miyazaki is one of those artists that needs no introduction, a brilliant storyteller whose characters and richly-developed stories include tales of flying pigs and walking castles, forest gods and floating cities, preschooler mermaids and fantastical bathhouses. So even when nobody really knew what the plot was, “The Boy And The Heron” was already an alluring prospect.

And while perhaps not his most accessible film, it’s nevertheless a gripping piece of work – half semi-autobiographical tale of a young Japanese boy during World War II, half fantasy story about a strange fantastical world of long-forgotten family secrets. It often feels like Miyazaki is musing on the exquisite yet flawed process of creating a fantasy world, the unique minds that nurture them, and the creativity that future generations should have.

During World War II, a young boy named Mahito Maki (Luca Padovan) loses his beloved mother in a terrible hospital fire. A year or so later, his father Shoichi (Christian Bale) marries his late wife’s sister Natsuko (Gemma Chan). Mahito isn’t pleased by this – including the fact that his aunt/stepmother is pregnant – and he definitely isn’t happy to be moving to her remote country estate. His schoolmates are hostile, and the only company in the house is the bickering elderly servants.

But he soon finds himself fascinated by a strange grey heron living in a pond nearby, and a strange stone tower that everyone warns him away from. When Natsuko wanders off and disappears, Mahito is drawn into the tower by the heron (actually a little man in a magic suit), who lures him with the promise of finding his mother again.

Instead, he finds himself in a strange fantasy world dominated by oceans and stone monuments, of blobby little spirits and a pyrokinetic girl named Lady Himi, who fends off hordes of talking pelicans. With the heron-man as his companion, he finds that his stepmother has fallen into the clutches of a civilization of talking, meat-eating parakeets – and to help her, he may have to take on responsibility for the entire world.

“The Boy And The Heron” is not Hayao Miyazaki’s most accessible film in many ways. It’s one of those films that may be a little confusing on your first viewing, but which increases in richness with subsequent watchings. It’s also one of those stories that lends itself to multiple symbolic interpretations, the most obvious – in my view, anyway – being that the existence of the other world is symbolic of a creative mind constructing its own universe in the process of storytelling, its flaws, and the need for younger creatives to take up the mantle.

And those mysteries and schemes are coiled around a hauntingly melancholy fantasy story – the world Mahito encounters is oddly empty despite its beauty and strangeness, like a vast cathedral with no people in it. It has an edge of wrongness and danger that always makes you feel like the hero is balancing on a knife’s edge, even from things that seem like they should be ridiculous (the man-eating parakeets are surprisingly unnerving). But even in that, Miyazaki works in some fun moments as well, such as Shoichi thinking Mahito has turned into a parakeet, or when Mahito has to deal with the heron-man.

And because this is Hayao Miyazaki, the entire story is lusciously animated – this is 2-D animation at its peak, distinctively Studio Ghibli in style, and detailed to the point where you can practically feel the frogs, the mossy stones, the feathers, the creaking wood. Miyazaki crafts visuals that are hauntingly beautiful and dreamlike, allowing Mahito to drift through strange, sometimes ethereal landscapes populated by strange creatures.

Mahito is a slightly weak spot in an otherwise lovely movie, simply because he’s much less expressive than many of Miyazaki’s other heroes. We know that he desperately misses his mother and isn’t happy about his father’s marriage, but it’s hard to tell what his exact emotions are much of the time, or how they will naturally lead to actions like constructing a bow-and-arrow. Fortunately he opens up more once he travels into the other world, especially when interacting with the exuberant Lady Himi (whose true identity is pretty easy to guess), the tomboyish Kiriko, or the heron-man (whose weird, slightly sinister and sometimes pathetic personality is a good contrast to Mahito’s more restrained one).

The English voice acting is uniformly good in this film, with actors such as Christian Bale, Dave Bautista, Gemma Chan, Mark Hamill and Willem Dafoe all giving excellent performances. Special shout-out to Robert Pattinson, who immediately earns his voice-acting cred by giving an excellent performance in a creaky, slightly sinister voice that sounds completely unlike his usual voice – watching the movie, you completely forget who’s performing the role, and just lose yourself in the voice-acting.

“The Boy And The Heron” has a few rough spots, but it’s still a strikingly lovely, symbolically-rich fantasy adventure that leaves you feeling melancholy yet hopeful. May Miyazaki give us more worlds to explore.

Review: Prince Lestat and the Realms of Atlantis by Anne Rice

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Many years ago, I remember seeing news items about Anne Rice writing a new book about immortals living in Atlantis. But after that, the book seemed to be forgotten.

I can only assume that Anne Rice submitted the book, was rejected, and then reworked and repackaged it as a Vampire Chronicle, because there is no other explanation for a book like “Prince Lestat and the Realms of Atlantis.” Aside from the hilariously pulpy title, this cascade of baffling failure feels less like an elegant, history-spanning tale of vampires… and more like the bizarre, New-Agey love child of “Highlander 2” and the “Super Mario Bros” movie.

Now the host to the ancient spirit Amel, Lestat has been having strange dreams of an advanced city being destroyed and swallowed up by the sea. Guess what it is. At the same time, the malevolent Rhoshamandes has captured a strange, not-quite-human person named Derek, and held him captive to exploit what he knows. One thing Derek does know is that he is not the only one of his kind on this world. And he needs to find Amel.

As the vampire community becomes aware of the others — and terrified of them — Lestat attempts to unravel the secret origins of Amel and how exactly he has a connection to Atlantis (or Atalantaya, as Rice calls it). But the story of the mysterious immortals will not only explain the origins of Amel (and thus of vampires), but explain the origins of human civilization.

I can only conclude that Anne Rice has been watching a lot of “Ancient Aliens” and old sci-fi movies, and reading some of the weirder New Age books out there. Otherwise, there is little explanation for why she would turn her established mythology inside-out. The supernatural is sacrificed for pseudo-science (frequently less plausible), and the murky mythic origins of the vampires and civilization itself are given a whole new explanation.

Want to know what the new explanation is?

Really?

Really, really want to know?

Okay, the explanation is that Atlantis was run by immortal aliens called Replimoids — yes, really — sent to unleash a plague on the world so that all mammal life would die, because the Replimoids’ makers believe that the only dominant life that should evolve is reptilian life… because mammals have too many feels. But in a nauseatingly humanistic twist, the Replimoids become infatuated with how wonderful human beings are, because we have love and community and “fairness.”

Yes, it does sound like a spectacularly bad B-movie from the 1950s, and Rice handles it just as well — her visions of Atalantaya are painfully pedestrian (a pastel-colored Manhattan, full of floaty-clothed hippies and New-Agey futuristic tech) and bizarrely preachy (more bigotry against Christianity, which she claims was made up by the evil reptile aliens). And the science-fictiony things she makes up are almost ludicrous enough to be written by L. Ron Hubbard (the Replimoids are a combo of all species on Earth!).

The first half of the book is not much better — it’s mostly various vampires hanging around and discussing things together, including an interminable talk between Lestat and various ghosts and spirits. It has the occasional grotesquely memorable scene (a bizarre scene where a severed hand grows a face and starts BREASTFEEDING from a man), but mostly Rice focuses on luxury porn and vampires chatting. It really feels like padding to expand the central story of Atalantaya to the full length of a book.

As for Lestat, he’s become almost a parody of himself — he loafs around, declaring his love for every person he encounters and contemplating how boring it is to be a ruler. The only one of the Replimoids to be developed is Derek, a wilting weeping woobie; everyone else is either a vampire cameo or an undeveloped shell. The only character who ended up interesting me was Amel, mainly because he is snarky, cynical and irritable — a pleasant antidote to the love-obsessed vampires and drippy aliens.

It is quite literally difficult to believe that the woman who wrote “Interview with the Vampire” and “Queen of the Damned” could destroy her own legacy quite so effectively. And yet, there is “Prince Lestat and the Realms of Atlantis.” Q. E. D.

Review: Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland & Through the Looking-Glass by Lewis Carroll

On By E. A. SolinasIn reviewsLeave a comment

Wonderland. The Cheshire Cat. Down the rabbit hole. Mad as a hatter. Curiouser and curiouser. Tweedledum and Tweedledee. OFF WITH THEIR HEADS!

Even if you have never read “Alice in Wonderland” or its equally oddball sequel “Through the Looking Glass,” some part of its charmingly nonsensical stories has probably slipped into your head over the years. Lewis Carroll’s classic fantasy stories are dreamlike adventures that breezily eschews plot, character development and any kind of logic… and between his cleverly nonsensical writing (“I daresay it’s a French mouse, come over with William the Conqueror”) and surrealist adventures, it is absolutely perfect that way. How many books can say that?

A bored young girl named Alice is by a riverbank when a White Rabbit runs by, fretting, “Oh dear! Oh dear! I shall be late!” and checking the watch from his waistcoat. Unsurprisingly, Alice pursues the rabbit down a rabbit-hole… and ends up floating down a deep tunnel to a strange place full of locked doors. There’s also a cake and a little bottle with labels instructing you to eat or drink them, which cause Alice to either shrink or grow exponentially.

As she continues pursuing the rabbit (who seems to think she’s someone named Mary Ann), Alice quickly discovers that Wonderland is a place where logic and reason have very, very little influence — talking animals in a Caucus-race, a hookah-smoking Caterpillar, even more bizarre growth potions, a grinning cat, the Duchess and her indestructible pig-baby, eternal tea-time with the March Hare and the Mad Hatter (plus the Dormouse), and finally the court of the Queen and King of Hearts.

And in the sequel, Alice steps through a mirror over the fireplace into a strange other world, where she encounters living chess pieces — including the Red Queen, who offers to make Alice a queen if she can make her way across the board in a chess match. As she makes her way across the chessboard, Alice encounters yet more strange people — the annoying yet philosophical twins Tweedledee and Tweedledum, the flaky White Queen, Humpty-Dumpty, and the clumsy White Knight.

“Alice in Wonderland” and “Through the Looking Glass” are two of those rare books that actually are more enjoyable and readable because they are pure nonsense, without more than a shred of plot or even proper narrative structure. The entire story is essentially Alice wandering from one wacky scenario to another, meeting more violently weird people with every stop and finding herself entangled in all sorts of surreal situations. It doesn’t really lead anywhere, or come from anywhere.

And yet, this works perfectly — it’s all about internally-logical nonsense, and a coherent plot or developed characters would get in the way of that. Never has such a perfect depiction of a weird dream been turned into fiction, especially since Alice regards everything that happens with a sort of perplexed detachment. Even though NOTHING in Wonderland makes sense (vanishing cats, sentient chess pieces, arguing playing-cards painting roses, the Hatter convinced that it is six o’clock all day every day, the Tweedles questioning her reality), she addresses everything with a sense of bemused internal logic (“I’ve had nothing yet, so I can’t take more”).

And Carroll festoons this wacky little tale with puns (“We called his Tortoise because he taught us”), odd snatches of mutilated poetry (the magnificently weird Jabberwocky poem) and tangled snarls of eccentric logic that only works if you’re technically insane (so… flamingoes are like mustard?). This keeps the plotless story as sparkling and swift-moving as a mountain stream laced with LSD, so the mind never has a chance to get bored by Alice simply wandering around, growing and shrinking, and engaged in a string of conversations with loopy people.

“Alice in Wonderland” and “Through the Looking Glass” are a mad, mad, mad, mad experience — and between Carroll’s sparkling dialogue and enchantingly surreal story, it’s also a lot of fun. Never a dull moment.