The Evil Eyebrow

Category: Fiction

  • As You Like It

    We attended the Georgia Shakespeare performace of As You Like It, by William Shakespeare. It was fine.

    Cast of As You Like It. Image by Bill DeLoach, http://www.gashakespeare.org

    As you can see from the image, the play was set with a groovy 70’s fashion statement. The first act wasn’t so 70’s as to be overwhelming, but the second act felt like Austin Powers. Alas.

    Still, the performance was good, even if they (I think) edited it down enough that it was confusing in places. That may just be how the play is put together. I understand that this is not one of Shakespeare’s most critically acclaimed plays.

    Georgia Shakespeare is always fun, even if they play is “ehh” because we picnic beforehand. We’re looking forward to the next play, The Merchant of Venice.

  • Random TV Shoutout -or- One of the Best TV Show Episodes Ever

    Whoah Nelly! This post has been sitting around since January. Time to get it out the door. Parts are less timely, because Doctor Who season 3 is nearly over, but the meat of the post is still relevant.

    If you read my blog, you probably don’t need me to tell you that the latest edition of Doctor Who is in its third season (in the US). I’ve been liking the show, although I think season three is much better than the other two (yet I miss Christopher Eccelston from season one). I haven’t been making it a habit to watch each show. More or less I watch it if Jenn is watching it, which means I’ve caught about a third of them.

    This has changed since I watched last week’s Doctor Who episode entitled “Blink” and was totally blown away. It was a suspenseful episode which gave me the same creepy-eerie feeling I had when I saw the original “Fly” from the 50’s. It was spectacularly well blocked and shot, and this has been recognized by the Hugo Nomination Process because “Blink” is one of the nominees for Best Dramatic Presentation, Short Form.

    It deserves it. Even if you don’t know like Doctor Who, you’ll probably like this episode.

  • Indiana Jones IV: Sucking to New Limits

    There are no direct spoilers in this review but if you don’t want to know anything about the movie before you see it, don’t read

    The short and sweet of this review: “Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull” is the worst movie you’ll see this summer. If it’s not, God help Hollywood.

    These people are insane. These links are all glowing reviews of Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. They apparently did not see the same movie as I. Either that or they were shot up with an awesome amount of smack before they let Steven Spielberg ruin their summer. What’s really crazy about the reviews is that they talk about all of the things that made the movie so bad as if they were good things. When did having superflous scenes which end up being entirely throwaway turn out to be a bonus?

    Even Rotten Tomatoes currently thinks the movie is good (78) but I’m willing to bet that the score will drop as the people who didn’t go to see it opening weekend start filing in. This is the only review that will admit an unclothed emperor and call it like it is: An action-packed flop that if it didn’t say “Indian Jones” in the title would probably not have broken $30M at the box office before being yanked.

    Why am I down on this movie so much? Am I only lashing out because a favored franchise has been violated?

    No. Not even close. This movie sucks entirely on its own merits. In fact, the film would probably have been better without Harrison Ford or all of the franchise trappings and throwaway jokes because Spielberg wouldn’t have been tempted to use them. This would have made people try to have a good movie instead of pulling scenes from the old movies and trusting them to do the job.1

    When I first heard that Indiana Jones 4 was being made I moaned and shook my head. I figured that they were going to make another “Last Crusade” and deliberately did not get my hopes up because I knew that I would be disappointed. It was too bad that I retained any expectation of a tight film because IJ4 is not it. The entire opening scene is a throwaway. Not a throwaway in the same sense that the openers of the first 3 movies were because they introduced us to important characters or plot devices. No, the entire first scene could have been cut and it wouldn’t have effected the movie. That was my first clue to the ultimate terribleness. The second clue to the ultimate terribleness was our being asked during the first conflict to suspend our disbelief not once, or twice, or even three times, but four times for different plot elements. That’s pushing it a bit far for me and that wasn’t the end of things we were expected to swallow.

    Oh my God! I’m so worked up I can’t even finish this posting. It sucked! Don’t see it! I’m so glad that Sex and the City kicked its ass this weekend.

    1 They even, to my utter horror, pulled a line straight from Han Solo. Even if they didn’t deliberately do that, they should have seen it and changed the line.

    -Ironically in the USA Today review I linked to above, they say the movie has “enough snap to satisfy” and end on an upbeat tone, but they only give it 2.5 stars. Huh? Shouldn’t that mean that the movie is mediocre?

    -At least the review from Cinematical admitted that this movie wasn’t as good as “Raiders” but they still compare it favorably with “Temple of Doom” and “Last Crusade”, something which I entirely disagree with.

  • Hugo Short Stories

    The 5 short stories nominated for the Hugo Award are available to be read, for free, and they’re conveniently linked by SF Signal. They are all, with the exception of “Last Contact” by Stephen Baxter, going to be on Escape Pod, too, in the next few weeks (“Tideline” was last week).

    My calls:

    “Last Contact” by Stephen Baxter: Good story. Nice Dialogue. Depressing as hell.
    “Tideline” by Elizabeth Bear: Good Story. Traditional. Predictable. Happy. I liked this one well enough.
    “Who’s Afraid of Wolf 359?” by Ken MacLeod: I loved this story. A bit campy, but I still loved it. It’s my favorite of the five. I asked Steve Eley if I could read it for Escape Pod, but it didn’t work out due to scheduling. [sigh]
    “Distant Replay” by Mike Resnick: Weird love story. No idea what it really meant. Not my kind of story, but others may like it.
    “A Small Room in Koboldtown” by Michael Swanwick: Good story in the vein of a hard-boiled detective short set in a fantasy setting. I liked it.

    So, if I were a member of WorldCon, I’d vote for “Who’s Afraid of Wolf 359”. One of these days, I’ll go to that con.

  • Science Fiction is Love

    Do you like science fiction? I like science fiction. I like science fiction because so much of science fiction is fucking hilarious.

    For example. John Scalzi. I’ve read this story several times, but I read it again today and I’m sitting here, at my desk, at work, trying not to advertise the fact that my guts are quaking with suppressed glee.

    “…INEXPLICABLY ENCASED IN AN ENORMOUS BLOCK OF UNFLAVORED GELATIN.”

    That’s funny.

  • We're Doomed!

    Scifi Disaster flicks are a staple of the industry. Good Scifi disaster flicks are the minority. It looks like there will be soon a new miniseries to add to the other category.

    Budgeted at $13 million, the effects-heavy “Impact” chronicles the aftermath of a meteor shower during which a piece of a dwarf star lodges itself in the moon. That triggers a series of anomalies on Earth, including cell phone service interruption, exaggerated tides and the occurrence of sporadic weightlessness.

    Astrophysicist Alex Kinter (Elliott), with a help of a female astronomer, discover that the moon has been dislodged from its orbit and is on a collision course with Earth.

    Oh, sigh. “Sporadic weightless ness”? “Piece of a dwarf star”? I’m not getting my hopes up. This sounds to be as poor as the Scifi channel movie “Earthstorm” which was so bad that I had to stop watching after 15 minutes it hurt me so.

  • "Sweeney Todd"

    We watched Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street last night. When we turned it on, the advance warnings came up and one was the movie rating: R for “Graphic Bloody Violence”.

    Oh my god, they were right. If I wanted to see so many throats bloodily slit…never mind. I didn’t want to see that many throats bloodily slit.

    I had thought the movie just sort of implied the vicious murders of (non-returning) customers of the barber, who were then dumped into the downstairs pie shop for conversion to the staple eats of Fleet Street but no, it was extremely violent and bloody. I could have done without it.

    Thumb down.

  • "Don't Bore Me" -or- Why I'm not Finishing this Book

    I read Kate Elliot’s Manifesto this morning and it has pushed me over the edge to a decision I’ve been edging toward for the past few days. I will not finish Verner Vinge’s A Fire upon the Deep, despite being halfway through. Why? Because it’s boring me to death. I’m finding it to be work to read the next chapter.

    What’s funny is the concepts in this book are interesting. Vernor Vinge is one of the oft-cited Singularity authors, and this book contains some interesting twists on the slower-than-light and faster-than-light travel dichotomy. It’s still boring though, which disappoints me. It really disappoints me because this book is a Hugo award-winner and I just can’t finish it. I’ve got other books on my stack that are calling to me.

    If anyone has any Vernor Vinge recommendations, keeping in mind that this book won’t be completed, feel free to pass them along.

  • The Idiot Plot and Other Things

    This man says many things I agree with concerning my reading of novels. No idot plots. Less Deux ex Machina. As I get older, I find myself less and less inclined to read stuff that I used to like. I guess this is me maturing as a critical reader; I demand more out of my escapism.

  • Happy Down with Sauron Day!

    Today is the anniversary of the culmination of Frodo and Sam’s journey to the Crack of Doom and the downfall of Sauron and the end of the third age. All hail the age of Men!