My own self

The world is no longer a romantic place. Some of its people still are however, and therein lies the promise. Don't let the world win, Ally McBeal.

- John Cage

Before the summer, I reviewed the first two seasons of Ally McBeal, and then took a break from the show. When I returned to it this autumn, however, I found that I'd missed it more than I realised. Something about this show just gets to me on an emotional level.

The acting is good - much of it downright great - and the heavy use of music is both engaging and obvious without feeling intrusive. As people who know me well will attest, I'm a sucker for a good musical, and a horde of episodes of this show are closet-musicals dying to be let out. The season three finale is even named Ally McBeal: The musical, Almost.

I'm sure this point alone threw a lot of you off, but don't worry, with the exception of that episode, people don't really burst into song here. There's the odd exception, sure, but for the most part, what they burst into is dancing. And good gods, I love their dancing. There is something so beautiful to this group of tight-knit friends who'll spontaneously start dancing to the song existing only in their minds. I'm not ashamed - though perhaps slightly embarrassed - to admit that many of these little dancing-scenes moved me to tears just from the sheer joy expressed on screen. There's something special about that.

The quote I opened with definitely describes the main character, but it also goes for the show - perhaps even more so. Those who've seen Kelley's Boston Legal knows he's an ace at combining the ridiculously silly with the heart-warmingly poignant and beautiful, and Ally McBeal is just as good at it. But where Boston Legal is a soap box for grand political statements, McBeal combines its warmth with personal stories. The little everyday neurosis, the tiny social dramas blown out of proportions, the soap without the box, if you would.

With all this emotion, it is perhaps no surprise the show is frequently hysterically funny - and frequently also rather sad. Reality is a constant threat hovering around the walls of the offices of Cage & Fish, and sometimes, even this crazy group of rich lawyers have to deal with tragedies pushed on them from the outside. Sometimes reality even catches up with them internally, and those are perhaps the saddest scenes of all.

While most characters on this show leave a mark, some must be mentioned by name. Flockhart's McBeal is an obvious start - the show is very much about her. You basically have to go watch House to find a show more clearly centered on its protagonist. And yet, as the show progresses, we get entire episodes were she basically doesn't even appear, symptomatic of what this really is - an ensemble show in disguise. I mentioned McBeal rather thoroughly in my previous post, however, and I also covered my other favourites - the characters of Ling, Nelle and more than anyone else the incredibly awesome John Cage and Richard Fish. I'll thus skip over them and mention some other characters that also left a mark.

Most missed, perhaps, of those who remain, is Robert Downey Jr.'s Larry Paul of season 4. [SKIP TO THE NEXT PARAGRAPH IF YOU'VE NEVER SEEN SEASON 4 OR 5] His departure from the show is still hurting both Ally and the viewer a full season later - that's a product of good writing, absolutely, but it also says something about how incredibly strong Downey Jr's performance was. Heck, I still walk around wishing there was just one more episode for him to potentially come back in, and the show's been over since 2002.

Also, Elaine Vassal. Frequently annoying, even more frequently amusing, and always, always sympathetic, she's the character I realise I most frequently under-appreciate when I talk about this show. She provides a grounding in reality and a broad highway straight into crazy at the same time, and in both cases, it is a much more simple, straightforward - in my eyes, admirable - view of life than the title character ever manages. Good going, Jane Krakowski.

Finally - ruthlessly skipping over all those who also deserve mention - Hayden Panettiere's appearance in the final season as a ten year old. Where did she throw these acting skills away before she started starring on Heroes? Someone should find them for her. Anyway, I rarely find child actors to be more than passable at best, and usually they're downright annoying. Not here. I wouldn't say I loved the character, but it was a character it would have been very easy to hate, and I didn't at all.

As usual, I've ended up talking mostly about characters - I guess it's clear what I care about in a show. But plots are hardly irrelevant. Without spoiling anything, what I said initially about reality is very much the case in all of these three seasons. Simplified, season three deals with reality's increasing grip on the internal mechanisms of the group. Season four looks at reality's hold on Ally herself, and both her and other central characters' personal lives, especially romantically. Season five finishes off with the final pounding of the barbarians of the real on the gates of Cage & Fish, and the eventual, unavoidable outcome.

Some of the classical weaknesses of Kelley's shows, such as the tendency to completely shift around the casts with little to no explanations between seasons, only really occurs between season 4 and 5, and even there, most of it is pretty minor and easily explained. The show is smart, it's funny, it's engaging, and it's going to stand proudly at the front of my DVD-shelf - alphabetical ordering really speaks in Ally's favour. Most importantly, this show, for all its crazy fantasies, obsessive characters, self-centred drama and soapy plot-points, this show is human. So very human. Maybe not like most human experience actually is, but by Jove, the way it should be.

With a song in your heart every single day; and a spontaneous group-dance in the unisex.

Looking backwards, many of the saddest times in my life turn out to be the happiest.

So I must be happy now. Yeah. This is gonna be good.

Why else would I be crying?

Inspired by a sheepish friend of mine, I've made a quiz to see if any of my indubitably geeky readers are geeky in the same exact ways I am.


Let the quizzage commence!


I'm obviously forgetting a whole horde of things I'm geeky about that I feel I should've added, but the format only allowed for ten questions. (If a surprising amount of people were to take it, I guess I could make a follow-up - a sequiz, if you would. You probably wouldn't.) Please comment and let me know how goes it, the two of you who'll bother to even go through it.

Dexter, out loud: Yeah, I wound up with some unexpected time on my hands.
Dexter, voice-over: Like twenty years to life.

Dexter season 2 keeps up the dry wit, the strong focus on a season plot, and the intensity of season 1, yet is in many ways very different. Where season 1 was the story of how Dexter started to doubt his purpose in life, how his past was dug up and blended into his present, season 2 is the story of how Dexter is changed by these experiences and how he learns to cope with them.

By its very nature, then, season 2 is much less dark than season 1. Dexter, for the first time since he was three years old in some form of touch with his emotions, is not anymore in denial or ignorance of how things are neither with his memories nor with his present life. However, without those he's also finding himself without the certainty of his behaviour and ice-cold and removed way of treating his life and the people in it. Season 2's Dexter is a Dexter in turmoil - a turmoil he still cannot afford to let the outside world see.

The loss of Brian's towering makes the season far less omnious still, and as the focus now isn't anymore on whether or not Dexter will lose the little threads of humanity in him, the focus becomes whether or not Dexter will be put to justice for his actions instead.

Thus, the viewer's position is shifted, from following Dexter's life with a sense of dread and mistrust in season 1, hoping he'll come through and be more human but fearing he won't, to something else entirely - to following his life while rooting for him. In season 2, the moral ambiguity is a rather sudden presence in Dexter's own head, and with that, the ambiguity is ironically slipping out of focus for the viewer. Watching this, we root for him, wish he'll pull through, and have unequivocally positive feelings for him. In season 1, Dexter balanced a protagonist between hero and monster. In season 2, the monster is gradually and effortlessly made acceptable to the audience, and the hero gets the spotlight as the Miami police department and an immensely capable FBI agent starts investigating who's dropped all these garbage bags of human body parts in the ocean.

This works, though. It's a gradual and subtle change, one I only realised had occurred in hindsight as I was writing this post. It lets the plot shift to something new and less horrifying without making it feel like a loss in tension and quality. When the plot is about Dexter being on the verge of capture, the audience necessarily needs to feel certain they want him to evade it.

The supporting cast is improved over the first season. Debra is going through quite the character arc since her trauma with Rudy, and at the end of the season she's a strong, independent person showing nothing of the erratic and uncertain behaviour of old. Doakes really get to shine in this season as his grudge against Dexter becomes an obsession. Angel, who I somehow failed to mention in my season 1 review, is still as amazingly thoroughly fantastically decent as ever, and is probably one of the most heartbreakingly lovable grown male characters I've ever encountered. That man has not a vicious bone in his body, and he truly gets to show it time and time again over the course of the second season.

Most important among the supporting cast, though, is none of these, but one out of two big additions to the rooster, the special agent, Frank Lundy. In an amazing piece of casting, they've in Keith Carradine found a man who looks a little bit like Harry Morgan, sounds very much like him (as, interestingly, does Dexter in his inner voiceovers) and is a law enforcement prodigy for Debra to look up to - and can act the hell out of any scene he's in as well. (And I thought I was impressed with his Wild Bill Hickok on Deadwood!) Obviously, with her gigantic father issues, she falls for him, head over heels, but their building and growing relationship is among the best things in the season, and by far the best thing they've done with Debra's character so far. Lundy was the character making up for Brian's disappearance from the show, and damn it all if he doesn't fill the hole almost exactly.

The other new character with a lot of screentime is Lila (played memorably by Jaime Murray who I know only from her character on Hustle), the English artist slash ex-addict who starts infringing on Rita's territory when she catches interest in Dexter - and he in her, as he realises she sees through his inner turmoil and helps him figuring out who he really is. The character is tailored to be unlikeable, and she really is, but she's an ominous and sort of veiled scary sort of unlikeable and plays a vital if somewhat obvious part in the season. Rita gets far less to do in this season than in season 1, but she continues to be one of the show's most interesting characters, and grows quite a lot over the course of the episodes.

Dexter season 2 is less intense and nerve-wrecking than season 1, but that suits me just fine. It's just as addictive, at least almost as interesting, and probably even a nudge more entertaining. It brought a lot of the supporting cast from season 1 out from the corners to play without shifting the focus from Dexter, by making his present and not his past the main thing about the season. His past was not ignored, though, and his uncovering of new and hidden elements in it is still a very present aspect to the show. Much less original and fresh-feeling than season 1, the reason season 2 works so well is more than anything because it builds on what has gone before. Dexter's inner turmoil is only interesting because of the events of season 1, he's only relatable because of how unrelatable he was before, and so you only root for him because you know what's happened previously. In a very clever way, the show gets away with doing a far more by-the-book story of a charismatic criminal trying to evade a manhunt because it builds on a story which was anything but orthodox. Interestingly, that might be why it works - doing something traditional with this character is rather fresh after season 1.

I'm really psyched for the third season. I have no idea which direction they're going to take this show now, having more or less exhausted his past in season 1, used most of the little frictions baked into his present in season 2, and having the character himself once again at peace - though a new and different peace - with who and what he is. But season 2 has convinced me that odds are they'll have yet another surprising twist of the show done so subtly I only notice once the season is over. I don't like this show more after season 2 than after season 1, it's about the same when it comes down to how much I enjoy it, but I trust it more and feel confident it won't let me down in the future either. Much like as the audience, I don't feel more interested in Dexter, he's still very engaging but not really more so than before, but I trust him more and feel more confident that as the audience, I'm doing the right thing by rooting for him.

Of course, they'll probably pull that second rug there out from under my feet before I knew what hit me.

"How long has he been dead?"
"Five hours."
"Question him."

This show was exactly as I expected: Well-made, intricate, cursed with an overabundance of standalone episodes, containing some quite interesting characters, and based on a main plot and premise that is unable to escape the feeling of "haven't I seen this ten times before?" Fringe is another attempt - this one by Lost's J. J. Abrams and two guys who used to work on Hercules and Xena - at the age old "let's do the sci-fi show as a cop-show as well, that'll make it more mainstream"-shtick that's been floating around since The X-files, and as such attempts to, it's pretty well done. That is, though, not saying too much.

To not focus on all the negative right away, I should mention that I absolutely love two of the characters; the brilliant but confused Dr. Walter Bishop and his prodigal jack-of-all-trades son Peter, who between them probably have an IQ higher than Lex Luthor. John Noble and Joshua Jackson bring these awesomely entertaining characters and their complex relationship with each other out and alive in quite impressive performances. They are lucky, though, as their characters are both well thought-out and well written. Some kudos should thus also be given to the three actors rounding out the main cast (Lance Reddick, Kirk Acevedo and Anna Torv), including the main character Olivia Dunham, because they at times actually seem interesting in spite of the writing passing them off as cliches and dreadful bores.

As I seem to have stumbled into the negative again, why don't we look at the structure of the show? Fringe's main problem in my eyes is its slow-paced standalone episode set up. While I understand the need for attracting new viewers through this formula, they endanger themselves of losing old ones. I know several people who stopped three or four episodes in, and had I myself not been a student with a summer vacation to fill, I probably would not have finished this show either. The only season plot of any real interest - predictably enough closely tied to both the Bishop's - was dreadfully apparent after only four episodes, and the hints just kept on flowing. Now, I'm all for foreshadowing, but when the summer finale's big reveal is the same plot-twist I figured out before Christmas, they're not doing it right. It's a very good plot-twist, having vast potential both for emotional character-stuff, and further plot-progression, and it should not have been wasted by spreading it out so slowly that by the time it happened, there was no shock-factor at all left.

The show's science-stuff is very variable. I'm a humanities type of guy, so when I spot obvious scientific impossibilities in the mumbo-jumbo they have Dr. Bishop spew out, that means they are too far-fetched. If you're going to explain everything with pseudo-science, honestly, you need better explanations than what Fringe often offers. However, sometimes it is not too obvious that their theories are all complete ridiculous bullshit, and those times, the show works splendidly - though it is still laughably ridiculous that anyone, regardless of intelligence, would have vast experience in as many thoroughly different fields as Walter Bishop repeatedly demonstrates. I can overlook that, though, in the interest of storytelling convenience. (Also, it makes Walter even more awesome).

All in all, Fringe is a well-made cop-show with a conspiracy-theory standing in for a main plot and science-fiction with a touch of explicit horror scenes standing in for regular criminals. If this sounds interesting, the show's definitely for you. If it doesn't - if, indeed, it sounds unoriginal and trite to the point of yawning, like it does to me - you might want to steer away but for one thing. It's main redeeming feature - and it is indeed very redeeming - is the dialogue, performance and dynamic of the two Bishop-characters, which consistently offers both emotion, drama and humour of high quality. And, by the end of the show, to a less extent the main character Dunham as well, who in all fairness did get some decent character development throughout. I will check out season 2, but unless it improves strongly, this is one show I will not be too sad to have to let go once I'm no longer a full-time student with scores of sparetime.

Well, that was a pleasant surprise.

"Your country needs you!"
"I'm Canadian."

I originally had low expectations to this movie - X-men 3's fault, that - as it looked like it'd just be another "Hugh Jackman on posters and tons and tons and TONS of unnecessary mutants with flashy powers and so many plots that none of them have time to set themselves up before the movie's done"-thing, only a prequel to add to the lame. The trailers lifted my spirits only marginally - it seemed like a decent action movie, but not much else, and honestly, trailers tend to make movies look way better than they are, so if that's what the trailer made it look like...

Then people started seeing it, and huh, impressions started getting back to me that it was "okay", "rather good", "fun" and "worth the ticket". Adjusting my expectations up to thinking it would be what the trailer promised - good easy action - I went off to the cinema. Which I would have done any way, I'm a sucker for a comic book movie franchise, but I went off with higher expectations than I, er, expected. Meaning it's-going-to-be-completely-okay ones.

Well, it met those, and even went a little beyond them. As I suspected, this tragically hurts the good old X-men 1, seeing as Wolverine makes their brutish, quiet, brainless Sabretooth completely out of sync with the oddly compelling performance Liev Schreiber gives in the part in the prequel. And I do mean oddly, because this is a guy who acts and moves like he's a bear-panther hybrid and should by all rights feel like a much more cheesy Wolverine-rip-off. But no, he's actually very interesting, and brings a strong presence to his every scene. Kudos, Mr. Schreiber.

As for Wolverine himself, suffice to say it's the one thing I can never agree with Scrubs' Dr. Cox on, as I quite like Hugh Jackman. This movie is no exception. He gets a lot more to do here than in X1 and 3, though - as one should obviously expect.

My fears of a jungle of excessive mutants... is oddly placated. They are there by the scores, but they never pretend to have bigger parts then they do (unlike X3), and they never get in the way of the main plot (again, unlike X3). So, yeah, they could've limited themselves a bit more, but honestly, they didn't need to. Surprising, but impressive.

Other than Sabretooth and Wolverine, the big show stealer here is surprisingly not Gambit, who Marvel finally manages to put up on the big screen, but Ryan Reynolds as Wade Wilson aka Deadpool. Which is odd, as his appearances in the movie are short indeed. I hear rumours that this movie's success might spawn two further spin-offs, and that one of them would centre on Deadpool. His few scenes in Wolverine makes me think that could very well work. (The other spin-off would be a Wolverine 2, set in his Japan-years. Sounds like fun too. Sadly, I'm hearing little of their long-planned Magneto-movie, which would be worth at least three Wolverine-movies in my book. Here's to hoping, though!)

Speaking of Gambit... I'm torn. Taylor Kitsch wasn't bad or anything, but... the roguish charm just didn't really register, and where is the delightful French accent? Mostly, I felt they wasted an opportunity to make the character shine and sparkle. Too bad. A Gambit-spin-off would've been lovely, but I doubt they'll be able to make one based on this. Wasn't at all bad, but wasn't at all memorable either.

The plots - again, compared to X3 - are awesome, because there is only one. Which helps, like, tons. It allows them to focus on it, pump it for emotion when they should and for action when they can, and even makes room for a little twist or two along the way. The plot also ties (mostly) neatly into the X2-plots concerning Stryker, Wolverine and Weapon X, which is of course a huge help considering X2 is awesome. It also really helps justifying the "X-men Origins"-piece of the title - this really does feel like a prequel to the franchise just as much as it does a standalone Wolverine-movie.

All in all, I'm very pleased. It was funny, it was exciting, and it even had a few pretty emotional character moments. When your main complaint is that it made a flat and boring character in X-men 1 look out of continuity because he is cool and engaging here, you know you're holding a bad hand of flaws to point out. There's even an in-universe sort-of explanation for that, as Sabretooth's mutation supposedly makes him more feral and beastlike with every passing year (as is even hinted at in the movie, considering how his character develops). Also, no offense to Danny Huston, he does a fine job, but doing William Stryker after (and at the same time before) Brian Cox is a tough job, and the character doesn't have quite the impact here he did in X2, despite his large role and presence. Still, he's more than adequately interesting. And my only other nitpicks would spoil too much of the movie, so those you won't hear 'cept if you ask in the comments.

This movie certainly isn't a Great movie, but it just as certainly is very good and very entertaining for anyone who's remotely interested in this type of superhero action and/or would like a pretty solid dive into Wolverine's past that doesn't clash much with the existing movies. Several times it even adds to them.

8/10

Who watches the Watchmen?

I did! I did! And I'd like to go again! May I go again, mom, pleeeeeease?


Yes, I've now seen Watchmen, the movie based off of Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons' twelve-issue comic from the mid-eighties. As much of what I've read of Moore's work, it is highly dystopian, and very intelligent. As, er, some of what I've read of Moore's work, it's also rather entertaining. It is certainly very challenging. Frequently referred to as the best graphic novel out there, I must admit that Watchmen is among the heavier reads I've encountered, and few "regular" novels can compete with it for complexity.

It is thus no small wonder that the task of making this into a movie has daunted people from doing so for a long, long while. It is also no small wonder that Mr. Moore is outspokenly negative to the mere idea of making a movie out of any of his work. Too bad for him. While I agree that League of Extraordinary Gentlemen was a rather heavy departure from the source material, V for Vendetta was among the better adaptations I've ever seen. I thus have no problem with the attempt of adaptation of his work in general, though I do believe that when the creator doesn't want you to, you shouldn't, rights or no rights. Even if the creator is a stuck-up elitist who seems to judge people's worth by their amount and IQ-points over 150 and anarchist sympathies.

Still, all that aside, I agreed, Watchmen couldn't be made into a satisfactory movie. I freely admit, I was wrong. This movie satisfied me. Did it cut out some complexities? Yes, of course. Did it change some details and executions to make it work better on screen? Absolutely. And why shouldn't it?

Before seeing it, the one thing I heard most of all from friends and reviewers was how this movie was alright but too enslaved by staying true to the original book to dare being its own thing and thus achieve greatness. My expectations, then, were neither high nor low.

This seems to have been the way to go, expectation-wise, as I greatly enjoyed it. Mind you, it's been years since I read the book. I could simply be forgetting all the little things that made Moore's work superior to this. But I in all honestly felt that the movie stayed true to the comic, whilst also working as a movie. The pacing, so close to the book's own, was a little off in a movie, sure, but they shifted the weight of the narrative just enough that the pacing wasn't too off. And yes, the regular humans in superhero outfits fight as if they're rather superpowered anyway, and yes, the fightscenes are more flashy than in the book. So what? I mean, the only thing this movie remotely fits into, marketing wise, is the superhero-movie staple. Without scenes like this, anyone seeing the movie without having read the book would be thoroughly disappointed, not getting what they expected at all.

My only real problem with the movie, in fact, other than that the pacing could have been slightly better, was its overly long sex-scenes. Particularly two of them got to the point where you're embarrased as the viewer. That's unfortunate, and hurts the pacing further as well. I'm no prude, I don't mind the nudity and the simulated sex on the screen in front of me. I just mind it when it goes on, and on, and on. Two people moaning is not the world's most interesting thing. Still, it's a minor quibble.

All in all, I really and thoroughly enjoyed this movie. Almost as much as I did V for Vendetta, in fact. V had the combined advantages of a smaller cast and a shorter running time, though, making it feel more intense and work better as a movie to begin with. Considering the much more difficult task set to the filmmaker's on this one, I think they did way better than I could ever have imagined when I heard they were finally making it. The visuals are superb, and even though Dr. Manhattan looks about as fake as I expected crappy special effects rarely bother me. The use of music is simply phenomenal. The plots, characters and dialogue are basically all lifted directly from the book, meaning that while the dialogue sometimes might sound slightly off, it always sounds rather awesome, too, and as for the plots and characters, well, if one didn't like it one wouldn't have liked the book. And I did, very much. What remains then, is the acting. I am a very poor judge of these things, but I thought it was rather well done on the whole. Especially the Comedian and Nite Owl seemed spot-on, but I honestly didn't have a problem with any of the characters.

Also, this movie has Roschach. There has ever been another movie that could make that claim.*


I thought it was nifty. And I want to see it again. The only reason I'm not getting this movie a 9 is because I believe it might get overlong on rewatches, and I need to do them before I award it its final 0.5. For now? A very strong 8.5/10



* (If someone comes running with the 300 Easter Egg now, I'll bite. Seriously. With my teeth.)

I think I was ten. Possibly eleven. The globalisation and centralisation and all that jazz that we people on the fringes of civilisation (i.e. "people who doesn't live in, or within an hour's drive from, cities") blame all our problems on hadn't gotten particularly far yet, and thus we still had a video rental shop in my hometown. (Technically we still do - there's one shelf of DVDs at the Narvesen and three at the local gas station - but I'm talking a proper one, with an entire shop filled with nothing but videos for rent) On a whim, I think, and probably because I loved the book, I had my dad check out the first VHS with episodes of an animated series simply marked as "The Jungle Book". It was Norwegian-dubbed - except for the opening credits, which were in English, and the title-text on screen, which was French. As I grew older and wiser and realised the animation-style was Japanese (but not so old we had The Mighty Internet to answer All Questions You Might Have About Anything) I remember this utter salad of languages and cultures peeking through confusing me a little.

Anyway, I obviously liked it. Why else would I be writing this post? And so, some nagging was applied, and my dad rented me the next installment next week. And so it went. It quickly turned into a contract of sorts - if I was good one week, I'd get to rent the next installment next week. I was usually good, seeing as I didn't have a backbone back then either, so I liked this arrangement.

All good things must come to an end. I don't recall if it was the shop running out of VHS'es or if they simply didn't translate more of them to Norwegian - or even if the shop went bankrupt already back then - but somewhere about halfway through the show, I ran out of videos to rent one way or another. Since then, I've been looking for them.

A couple of years later, I found one for sale somewhere. The second VHS-tape, annoyingly with three of the episodes I'd liked the least on it. I bought it, of course, it was better than nothing, and for that decision I will forever be grateful, because in hindsight, the main plot on that tape is probably among the best the show ever had. It didn't have Shere Khan, though, so twelve-year-old-me didn't particularly care for it...

It would take many years before I found the next one - yes, literally the next one, it was tape number three. I believe I might have been fifteen at the time. The shop, of course, also had tape number two, but no other ones. Gritting my teeth at the combined luck and misfortune, I bought it, only barely wrestling myself to not buy their copy of the second tape just to have a backup for my own - and joy! It was an awesome collection of three episodes among which two were among the favourites I could remember from when I was younger.

This was all I would have for almost a decade, despite looking for these tapes wherever I went. True, I did whilst still in my early teens stumble over some German-dubbed episodes I hadn't even seen before on some channel - possibly Nicelodeon - that my grandparents got on their satelite dish. But seeing as I didn't speak German, it only served to tease me further. Two years after high school, however, I was nearing twenty years of age and had just moved to Bergen some months before. A video rental right next to where I lived was finally paid a long-postponed visit - and lo! It had Jungle Book-VHS'es. Three of them.

Tapes 2, 3 and 4.

I mean, seriously, at this point I figured someone was having a costly laugh at my expense. At this rate, I'd find them all by my 254th birthday, at that point having re-found that blasted tape number two seventy-three-thousand times. Asking the guy behind the counter if they had any more and getting an expected no, I rented tape number four, and went home to watch it. It was nice and all, but hardly Awesome. Not comparable in quality to the two I already had, and that wasn't just my by then incredibly nostalgic committment to those two tapes talking - these were simply weaker episodes. Still, I was just so happy to have found ANYTHING. I considered re-renting it to bring it home to my parents where there'd be two VHS-players so I could copy it - anything to not lose the thing again. But then the video rental apparently finally realised that nobody had sold VHSes for four or five years, and put their stock of such out for sale.

Miracles do still occur, you see. They're slimy and hard to spot, but they do occur.


Joy upon joy, I now had three tapes. Of the, what, fifteen or so I remembered. I never stopped looking for them online, though, but couldn't find anything in either Norwegian or English. Finally, I found someone who'd put the very first two episodes with English dubs out on YouTube. But that was sadly it.

But then! Out of nowhere! Some silly shop in Italy, of all places, decided to start selling them with Italian AND English dubs on. I had to pay through the nose, but this last December, for my own 24th birthday, I got the entire show.

It's in English, and as all Norwegians my age with a pseudo-geeky bone in their bodies know, English dubbing is on the whole horribly, horribly inferior to Norwegian. They never dare to actually act their lines, these English voice actors, and the few times they do it's so overdone it just sounds out of place. So, sadly, it was not as enjoyable as the voices I grew up with would have been by far, rewatching this.

But that's one laugh I'll let the trickster gods of fate have, and happily. I got to rewatch the entire show this December. All the way to the end that I never saw before. Corny voice work can't take that away from me. (Even Fox can't take that away from me, and gods know they've probably tried.)

I seriously never thought I'd get to finish this show. While the Dream of finding them with Norwegian voice work will probably still go unrealised, this is as good a silver medal as it gets.

So, what did I think? It was alright. Some plotlines and characters are really deep, and the show does a surprisingly good job (just like I remembered!) at staying true to Kipling's original work whilst adding a score of characters and nuances, and removing some of the really dark stuff. The save-the-environment-vibe of the late eighties is impossible to escape in this show, though, and this is very annoying. Luckily, you don't notice it much in the episodes without humans in them, and those are by far the best ones anyway. The score, the drawings and the characters are the ones I grew up with, and that probably coloured my imagination more than any other single thing I've ever experienced. (That includes Disney and Tolkien. I know. Freaky.) The ending is thoroughly unsatisfactory, by the way, but that's just like Kipling's own ending. I get the whole journey-to-manhood-thing. But who can hear the story of Mowgli and not wish he'd stay in the jungle at the end? Bah.

I have it now. The only feeling of joyous nostalgic closure that's ever come remotely close to this was when Wesley chose the lie and Angel decided he kinda wanted to slay the dragon. And I only had to wait for that one for five years. This took almost fifteen.

Thank you, Italy.

I have it now.

It has been many years since I last read anything by Timothy Zahn. When I did, unsurprisingly it, too, was Star Wars books. Namely his Thrawn trilogy and its Hand of Thrawn duology sequel, both set a good while after Return of the Jedi, and both about as critically acclaimed as any Star Wars-books have ever gotten. I quite enjoyed those, some understandable minor continuity issues with the prequel trilogy aside. Especially the character of Thrawn stuck with me. There isn't anything remarkable about Thrawn as a villain, really. He's hyper-intelligent, civilised, well-mannered, and has motivations that give rather valid moral grounds for his evil actions - all these elements are the makings of a good and interesting villain, but they are hardly original. Three little things, though, lift Thrawn above the crowd. He's incredibly deductive and creative, showing not just the typical evil mastermind's ability to plan complex plots, but the ability to react and adapt to virtually any complication with stoic mastery and simple brilliance. Second, Zahn is very good at writing these things and coming up with things for Thrawn to do that actually are quite ingenious - meaning, we're not just told that Thrawn is incredibly brilliant, but we're shown. And third, while he might be the archetype of a hyper-intelligent, morally grey villain, he is a morally grey villain in the Star Wars-universe. Which is a pretty interesting change of pace from the movies.

Thus, while I remember little of the books from all those years back, I remember Thrawn very well. It was with cautious optimism, then, that I picked Outbound Flight from the shelf in the book shop, bought it, and went home to read it. The book is a relatively recent (original release was in 2005) book by Zahn set before the Clone Wars - i.e. between Episode I and II of the movie saga somewhere - and it sets up a lot of plot points and characters for his original trilogy, tying it neatly together with the continuity of the prequel era as established by the three newer movies. The book was a quick-paced and compelling read, which while it never really astounded me with any kind of immense greatness thoroughly entertained me, which is after all what I wanted from it. Moreover, it made me very, very interested in digging up my old books by Zahn and doing a re-read with this new information in the back of my head. And, by far most importantly, when Thrawn shows up in this book, he is just as brilliant as ever. Kudos to Mr. Zahn for coming up with all of the cleverness. The short-story, also by Zahn, that came with the paperback was set a few years later, by the end of the Clone Wars, and made for an awesome epilogue explaining how Thrawn was finally recruited by the Empire.

If you're at all interested in checking out any Star Wars-expanded universe novels, I'd recommend you read this, and then his original Thrawn-trilogy. I can only imagine they'll work very well together. Me, I'm going to get Zahn's Survivor's Quest - another recent book by him that succeeds the Hand of Thrawn-duology, reportedly making the entire sequence of books a seven-book series spanning almost fifty years in the Star Wars-universe, from four years after Episode I to eighteen years after Episode VI.

Never underestimate the capacity of other people to let you down.

Dexter Morgan, domesticated psycho- and sociopath, ended season 2 with a breaking of the leash: his adoptive father who taught him how to survive was in truth disgusted to witness it actually happening. If his father was disgusted by his own teachings, why should Dexter follow them? Dexter's conclusion in the second season finale was to follow the code - but under his own judgment now. Season 3 explores Dexter doing just this - seeing what he can do that wouldn't previously have been alright within the strict letter of the code, but without breaking the spirit of it.

I was skeptical to this season, I freely admit that, and I was right to be so. While season 1 has an immense intensity in the duality of a new, strange protagonist who killed people without mercy or guilt keeping the viewer on edge and this same protagonist's past coming back to haunt him in ways even more merciless and cruel, season 2 replaced this by having our by now viewer-accepted protagonist slash antihero be chased by his own friends. In other words, while somewhat eased off in comparison to the first one, there was plenty of intense stuff there as well. I saw no way for season 3 to keep this intensity going for a third year - and truly, it did not.

Don't get me wrong - in every single other aspect of the show it's still just as great. But what was the truly captivating part of Dexter to me was the edge-of-your-seat intensity, and this just isn't recaptured like one could wish. Having expected this, though, it wasn't much of a let-down, and the season as a whole has both entertained and engaged me.

The manifold ways Dexter's laxer (but in other ways still iron-hard) grip on his code is explored this season is very interesting indeed. Without spoiling what his decisions become, he's confronted with questions such as a mercy-kill, the morality of an accidental kill, and whether or not to kill someone truly depraved despite them not having really killed anyone themselves. And that's just on the who-to-kill-side of the code. Just as important is the part about not letting anyone in, because this is the season where someone tries to make a friend of Dexter, and Dexter is put in the difficult position of choosing whether to try to be a friend in turn.

This potential friend is the popular Assistant District Attorney, Miguel Prado, played brilliantly by Jimmy Smits. I can't praise this guy enough for this role. I had a pretty uninterested view of him after his relatively straightforward character on The West Wing and his low-profile part as Leia's adoptive father in the Star Wars-prequels, but he truly impressed me here, following neatly into the line of stellar Guest Star-spots after Christian Camargo in the first season and Keith Carradine in the second. This character, and his interactions with the still impressively portrayed Dexter, is what made this season for me.

The subplots about the supporting cast were for the most part interesting too, in particular I am always thrilled to see Angel get plotlines and Debra's new detective partner was actually both funny and interesting. Dexter's family life is also rather interesting this season, following up nicely the improvement this side of the show saw in season 2.

All in all, it's as good as I'd dared expect, but not as incredible as I'd hoped. I can honestly say, though, I think they did great with the situation they had to play from after last season's ending, and I'm looking just as much forward to season 4 as I was looking forward to this one last summer. Of still ongoing shows, I believe the only one I love more than this one is Battlestar Galactica, and this is saying a lot.

There are many opinions about most authors, but Terry Goodkind and his fantasy novel series The Sword of Truth is probably more divisive than most. Many love his books almost unconditionally, and many hate them outright. The reasons why are easy to see on both sides. (And there is no specific spoilers of anything major in this post, you can read on with relative safety)

You see, on the one hand, Goodkind has a deft ability to paint a rich, colourful universe where the fantasy archetypes are many and common but frequenting in versions distinctly Goodkind's own. There is something truly entoxicating about this for me as a reader - it is at once familiar and new, at once predictable and surprising, to explore his world and his characters. Add to his ability a capacity for plots that sometimes make quite interesting segues, an excellent ability to convey the beacons of hope still shining whilst pounding gruesome acts onto the narrative with horrific pathos, and a knack for writing quotable dialogue, one shouldn't have too much problems getting into the mindset of the stalwart Goodkind-fan.

Then you have the other hand, and I dare say, it's equally blemishing as the former is good. The following paragraph will thus be longer, because while what is good is easily described in a sentence, what's bad usually begs context and explanation to a much larger extent.

While Goodkind does indeed flesh out his world impressively, there is a spontaneity to it that sometimes makes it feel as though certain elements are thrown in haphazardly. This adds to the rich fairy-tale-like flavour of the world, but often get at a mood-wise odds with the increasingly logical and structured universe we're shown as the series progresses. This is a minor point, but it can be quite annoying at times to have a painter who can inexplicably make his drawings come to life in one book, and then have very strict rules about how to become a wizard and how wizards use their magic in another. The difference between the magic of a wizard, a sorceress and a war wizard is explained in complex detail, but the sorceror and the witch-woman is thrown in without further nuancing.
Another point in Goodkind's disfavour is the lack of originality to his main plots. Yes, the defender would as I did in the previous paragraph point out a quite excellent ability to make up for this with often quite well done twists, turns and variations along the way, but the fact remains that when you strip it down, Goodkind's plots are very, very simple and predictable. There is the hero, there is his old and wise yet amusing and quirky mentor, there is his bonny lass (who, whilst very much a capable protagonist in her own right, all too frequently gets in severe trouble which requires rescuing), and there is the big horrid villain. He's also been accused of copying Robert Jordan's Wheel of Time, and while some things are indeed of baffling similarities, it's always struck me as silly to claim he took them from someone else. Why would he? When you show the capability to construct and write thousand-page-narratives, why would you need to mimick the name of a prophecy or an organisation of female users of magic? Far more likely I find this to merely be a product of two authors writing at approximately the same time, in approximately the same style, in approximately the same genre. The conventions are clear, and they both use them thoroughly. When that happens, you will end up with similarities. But Jordan never copyrighted the magic sword or the powerful group of witches. (He might have copyrighted the concept that they should all have annoying personalities, though, I should look that up...)
The third, and by far greatest problem with Goodkind's writing is his very strong ideological and philosophical standpoints. It is his right as an author to place these in his work, and I see no issues with that. The problem enters when it obstructs the narrative. His earlier books didn't suffer from this - the messages were there, sometimes subtle, sometimes not, but they were still messages you read through and from what happened. In more recent years, likely due to increased popularity and thus laxer editing enforced by his publishers, Goodkind has slowly slipped more and more outright preaching into his stories. Speech-giving by characters only work so often, and after a while, it kills the pace of the story. For people who disagree strongly with the messages given, then, it also becomes harder to look past or interpret differently for those who would wish to do so. I'm sure that Goodkind's somewhat arrogant demeanor in interviews and ridiculous claims such as him not writing fantasy at all, but something somehow grander due to his political agenda, have only strengthened such negative reactions. Many people, then, quite intensely dislike Goodkind's series of books.

Me, I quite like them. At times, often in recent books, I find his preaching to be annoying, unnecessary and demeaning to his characters, but there is no denying that the sheer zeal Goodkind puts into his writing due to this opportunity for him to share his enthusiastic propaganda, that zeal sometimes puts a fire in the story that would probably not be there without it. Yes, it sometimes goes horribly wrong, and that's a shame and poor writing from his side. (More importantly, since they're usually things easily fixed, they're bad editing from whomever is supposed to keep his artistical whims a little under control) And yes, I agree with virtually nothing in Goodkind's hardcore individualistic view of the world. But no, I don't see this as purely a problem. The end of his sixth volme, Faith of the Fallen, is wonderously emotional for me to read, and this is exclusively due to the amount of idealism and outright propaganda for his own way of seeing the world Goodkind filled that story with. In other words, this is a valid point against much of his work, and certainly one of the strongest reasons he'll never be among my favourite authors. But it doesn't automatically remove the fact that behind it, there is often a surprising amount of quality - especially in the earlier books when the propaganda was still toned heavily down. To me, the good sides of Goodkind's books are stronger, bigger, better than the bad ones, and unless his writing degenerates completely, I will keep reading and looking forward to the new volumes for as long as I have time to read fiction. Not as my first, second or third priority. But somewhere down the list, well above the books I think that "well, one day, if I have time, I'll read those" when I glance at, there you'll find Goodkind, and he's not going anywhere.

So where am I going with all this? Well, ABC is out with a TV-series that is based off of these stories(for now, obviously, limited to the first book), and today I watched the double-episode pilot.

My expectations were rather low. Sam Raimi is listed as the creator, and while he might have spawned occasional brilliance in his day as well as being responsible for the awesome Spider-man 2, there is no denying this man has touched a lot of cheese as well over the years. In my head, Raimi's cheese combined with the controlling influence of Goodkind could go nowhere truly good.

Well, as of yet, it hasn't - but it hasn't gone anywhere bad either. Because there is virtually no cheese at all. Sure, there's cheese if you consider the mere fact that there is a main villain, a budding hero, a damsel in distress and a mysterious old wizard running around on screen, but if they hadn't had that, this would have been a horrid trip away from the source material that nobody in their right minds would have approved of. Just because something's been done so often that the mere thught of doing it again seems like such a clichè it gets called corny and cheesy from the get-go doesn't mean it can't be done well. I've seen nothing so far that makes me think these guys won't do it well. Thus, in my opinion, no cheese here, except for a few overly dramatical uses of the score and one special-effects-shot that was a little over the top. That's it, and in an hour and a half of televised high-budget fantasy, that's nothing to fret about at all.

Beyond the lack of cheese, as well as a (much more expected) lack of the obvious propaganda of Goodkind's later books, there was one additional pleasant surprise. Of course the plot would be changed to fit the new medium, but I expected (as one tends to do) all such changes to be exclusively bad. Most were. However, two of them were very good indeed. Allowing us to see Kahlan's sister in the beginning is an added incentive to care for Kahlan's character and mission that made the series start off at a better note than it otherwise would. The second one is bigger, and shapes the plots of both the first two episodes; one of Kahlan's hunters survives and becomes a tangible, human threat on the "safe" side of the border.

For each of these two good changes, there were a good dozen bad ones, some of them somewhat understandable, somewhat less so. Not to spoil anyone who have not read the books nor seen the pilot (it does surprise me that you still have the stamina to read this if this is the case, by the way) I will not go into detail on antyhing so changed that is plot-related. Suffice to say that I have no idea why the part of memorizing the book couldn't have been included, as it is probably the main clever twist to an otherwise straightforward narrative in the original. On the less plot-related changes, especially annoying was the inexplicable choice to have Darken Rahl's hair be black rather than light blonde (probably to avoid making Craig Parker look like he did as Haldir in the Lord of the Rings-movies, sigh), and his men from a seemingly quite dark, medieval society rather than the sandy, light country of the books. I chalk this up to somebody's decision that hey, people won't get that they're evil if they don't have dark hair and live in poorly lit castles.

The characters were well done, to a one, even if the plot moved far too quickly for any of them to ever have any particularly interesting or cool scenes. In lieu of this, I was pleasantly surprised to see how much screentime was given to characters such as Chase, Michael and George. Zedd, my favourite character, was well enough done, and by the fairly renowned actor Bruce Spence, but he was never given a chance to sparkle with the little things that makes his character awesome in the books. If things such as that is allowed to happen as the series progresses, it will gain a lot more favour in my eyes.

So far, so good. I'm not impressed, but considering my very low expectations, I must admit to a certain feeling of reassurance. This probably won't be an awesome TV-show, but it won't make the books look too bad, and it might even get pretty good in its own right as it gets a few more episodes to stand on. It also might not, but no reason not to stay positive has been shown me yet, so I prefer to give it the benefit of the doubt. After all, as a huge fan of the first book of this series, I'm a viewer highly prepared to pick apart every little weakness I think could have been avoided, and a viewer who at the same time knows the basic outline of every little bit of the plot before it happens. In other words; the good stuff is expected, the bad stuff not. Making a favourable impression on me should be pretty hard for these guys, and yet, I did not dislike it as the pilot came to an end. Some things bugged me greatly, of course, but nothing happened to make me outright angry or disappointed. I will be quite interested to now follow and see this show develop into something that will actually make an impact on me - either by disappointing the small hopes I'm now allowing myself to feel, or by satisfying them by becoming genuinely worth my while.

A very strong 6.5/10 with a clear potential to reach both a 4 and an 8 within few more episodes.

It's been alright but nothing stellar - much like I've come to expect from Heroes. Still, the tendency so far is that they have a lot of very good ideas and themes to put their cast through, but end up not always really hitting the targets on the actual execution. One of their better episodes lately just aired, however, and it was one of the better ones even if Mohinder, Claire, Peter and Hiro all acted like irrational morons and my second favourite character died.

Seriously, though - Hiro's always been an utter git making decisions and plans so infantile and stupid it makes the brain hurt to just think about them, but this season he's simply being so ridiculous that if he now was to actually get something right, I'd be outraged of how incredibly out of character that would be.


The weird thing is that Sylar, whom I've never liked, is flat out interesting this season. I find myself enjoying his scenes more than virtually any others. Making him so far the only character who the season has actually improved upon.

Yesterday was a big day! Why? Because I finally watched the one and only The Adventures of Sinbad-episode I missed back when Norwegian television-channel TV2 aired it in my early-and-still-able-to-take-even-the-super-corny-shows-for-awesome-as-long-as-they-were-fantasy-themed-teens! (Also, I didn't pay much attention to the actual English back then, apparently, because the show turns out to have been FILLED with deliciously horrid puns!) It was the season 1 finale, Rumina's Vengeance. I know for sure, because I taped every episode I watched and re-watched them at least twice each.

And oh-my-gods. It explained who this Scratch-guy was way better than his other two episodes. And much more importantly, it resurrected Torak! Torak! And then he survived the episode! And now I'm back in the horrid, horrid limbo-land of cancelled shows! All the litttle plot-threads they had going in season 1 that they largely ignored in season 2! Where did Rumina go, I used to wonder, blissfully ignorant I'd missed an episode until years later, and now suddenly I also have to ask where did Torak go?!

Still, huge day! Big childhood hole was filled. Wonderous. Too bad I couldn't see it back when I would've been able to look past all the corny stuff more easily and truly enjoy it. But still. Wow. Awesomeness by the bucketload, finally getting to see one such giant piece of an admittedly grossly unfinished puzzle.


Hooray!

Little in Television History has gotten more universal praise than HBO's miniseries Band of Brothers, chronicling the experiences of Easy Company of the United States Airborne during the Second World War. Having finally gotten around to watch it all from end to end, I figured I should put down a few words.

"Looks like you guys are going to be surrounded."
"We're paratroopers, Lieutenant. We're supposed to be surrounded."

The show is visually such a treat that I might just not have the vocabulary to express it well enough. No matter if it's showing us something horrifying or something beautiful, this series is overwhelmingly aesthetical. Really. When I notice this stuff, that means it's well beyond good.

The story-telling is in the form of an anthology of stories, each episode focusing on a new character/couple of characters with only a very few repeats, mainly in the character of Richard Winters, their highly talented officer, who is the closest the series gets to a single main character. This format, as an anthology, is both one of the show's main strenghts and one of its main weaknesses. Being an ensamble show set to show us the experiences of the entire company, not just a select few, but also being a show needing to dig into the characters' psyches, the anthology focusing on only one or two per episode but all of them during the series progression as a whole is the way to go. But this also hinders your ability to get really connected to the characters involved - just as you're feeling close to one, his episode has ended.

There's also the problem of constant war and hell not being that dramatically interesting. I found myself loving the first few episodes - their training, D-day, the first few weeks of fighting - and the last episodes, dealing with their trauma, finding the concentration camps and refinding peace. The ones in the middle, depicting the actual warfare, were on a whole less engaging, ironically enough. A big reason why was the anthology format, though I can hardly claim to know of a better way to have handled it.

The choice to include real interviews with the real people the characters are based upon at the beginning of each episode and factual information in the form of text at the end is a very effective and powerful way of grounding the show. That, together with the immensely overwhemling music used in both the opening credits and the score, truly makes you feel the punch of knowing that these horrors really happened, and less than seventy years ago at that.

All in all, I must say the show was a very rewarding watch. The middle part was a bit dreary, and the series are far from perfect, but I was despite this not disappointed in my high expectations. Band of Brothers is too short and too diverse in its focus on different characters to hook me and pull me into their world like the shows that end up being on my list of favourites have to do, but as a well-crafted story, and more importantly as a compelling demonstration of the outright tartaros that these people went through, this is still one of the finest pieces of television I've had the honour to watch.

There are some really, really talented fans out there.



Kristen Bell for Harley Quinn is sheer genius. This person had some other well done posters, too, but this was the one that impressed me.


Elsewhere on the web, these two rooting for Riddler's inclusion in the franchise are pretty awesome, too:

"It's a big serious world out there; nothing to laugh about. Not ever. You must teach the children to fear, teach them to tremble. Teach them to be cruel. Teach them to be the danger in the dark. Hide in the shadows, then pounce or spring or leap or drop, and always kill. You know what the true meaning of life is?"
"Um," said Fat Charlie. "Is it love one another?"

Sitting down to read a novel by Neil Gaiman is an odd experience for me. In one way, it feels like I've read a good bunch of his stuff, but on the other, I feel like I've only read one actual novel. I've read his Sandman-series, but that is after all graphic novels compiled of many shorter stories, and thus very different from a normal novel. I've read Good Omens, but that book is co-written by Terry Pratchett and Pratchett's familiar satirical style was far more apparent to me in the reading experience than the more versatile Gaiman. I've read Odd and the Frost Giants, but that's a children's novel, and a short one at that. I've seen Beowulf, but he only co-wrote the script on that, and it's additionally based off of an ancient poem as well as being a movie, not a novel. Though you get a good impression of his tastes, I can't really claim to feel that having watched Princes Mononoke where he penned the English-language script taught me that much of his own writing style either. The movie that is indeed based on his own work that I've seen and loved, Stardust, had a script written by someone else, and I haven't yet read Gaiman's original tale. I've read his short story Monarch of the Glen, but that is a short story, not a novel, and one about a character I know from a previous work of his on top of that. That previous work, American Gods, is the only "proper" novel I feel I've actually read, in the sense that it's the only one that I feel have given me a clear image of how the man writes when on his own, unimpaired by a selective audience, a source material or a studio, and uninfluenced by a co-author.

And American Gods is probably the best single-volume fantasy novel I've ever read.

Thus I started Anansi Boys, torn between too high expectations and little expectations at all. Well, I'll say this straight up: I was not disappointed.

Anansi Boys is not at all like American Gods despite being set in the same universe. It's about the sons of a secondary character from American Gods, and how they cope with meeting each other. Mostly it's about one of them, a dreadfully shy and naive man named Charlie. Anansi Boys is a comedy, and though it's a comedy that sometimes ventures into darker places than most, it's still a light-hearted and easy read that I finished in a week. (A mind-boggling pace for me and my reading-habits in recent years) It's a story about family, about the relationship between parents and children and grown siblings who might not quite like each other, and about how it's all just terribly embarrassing.

The book (pretty naturally) reminded me a good bit of Good Omens, the other silly but somewhat dark novel of Gaiman's I've read. Turns out that a lot of the humour I thought of as Pratchett'y is also there in Gaiman's writing, but more laid-back. The type of humour is often the same as in Good Omens, but most of the time it's underhanded and as-a-matter-of-fact-ly phrased, which in its own way adds to the charm. While big parts of the plot were pretty obvious and easy to figure out ahead of time, this only barely subtracted from my enjoyment of the story as the joy in reading Anansi Boys is in following the characters to their finish line, not guessing fruitlessly what the finish line will be.

In no way as brilliantly memorable as the vastly complex and often sombre American Gods, Anansi Boys never tries to be. It's a fun, heart-warming and entertaining story of two brothers, and it sucked me in to not let go until I was on the final page. And it once again verified that Neil Gaiman is a man who can write just about anything and do so well.

Now, if I could only get around to reading Neverwhere as well...

The chains were very strong.

- Joshua York


We're in America, by the Mississippi, close before the Civil War. We're taken there through the eyes of Abner Marsh, steamboat cap'n, a damned ugly man whose appetite is only dwarfed by his integrity, and Sour Billy, the skinny overseer of the slaves at the Julian Plantation who is as clever as he is mean. Both these men are formidable - or, as Marsh would fondly pronounce the word, for-mid-a-bul - and interesting in their own right, but what George R. R. Martin's fantasy novel Fevre Dream is showing us through their eyes is more for-mid-a-bul still.

Fevre Dream is the story of Abner Marsh's dream of owning and piloting a steamboat so beautiful and grand that it would beat out even the famous boat Eclipse in a race, and of his new, mysterious business partner Joshua York's dream of - well, that'd be spoiling the surprise wouldn't it? Suffice to say that he, too, has a fond desire to put something beautiful into the world, and that something is the magnificent sidewheeler steamboat Fevre Dream.

Everything seems bright and wondrous for Cap'n Marsh as his lifelong dream begins its maiden voyage along the Mississippi, but isn't it damned odd how the polite and likable Joshua York insists on keeping the strangest hours, never coming out in the day, and how Marsh had to promise asking no questions about his strange behaviour in return for the funding?

At the Julian plant, a couple of run-away slaves is brought back into the hands of Sour Billy by a slave-catcher and his son. The terrified slaves have told odd tales along the way, but slave-talk is not worth listening to, and Sour Billy agrees. Still, it's somewhat strange that there's no-one but Billy to see at the plantation, and that they'll have to wait until nightfall before the owner will arrive to pay them for the service.

George R. R. Martin is my hands-down favourite fantasy-author with his ever-ongoing A Song of Ice and Fire, but I have never taken the time to read anything he's written outside of his vast epic. Mostly, it seems, he's written outside the fantasy-genre, but this particular book is an exception to that. And Martin does certainly not disappoint.

While in my respects a history-buff, I will freely admit that the 1860's is too recent for my tastes, and steamboats has never really tickled my fancy. The closest I've ever gotten to care about steamboats in my life was while reading chapter two of Keno Don Rosa's graphic novel The Life and Times of $crooge McDuck, but even there in-between gorgeous illustrations and exciting characters did not the concept of the riverboat-captains of the mid-1800's and their steamboats come to life as much as here.

What intrigued me most about this book, I think, was the characterisations - several secondary characters stick almost as well to the memory as the more central ones, and the main villain was in many ways as charismatic and interesting as the nicer people of the story. This relatively short book, ending at well beneath 400 pages, opens up a wide new world for me as a reader, a world I'd be very interested in seeing more of. (Alas, not likely to happen.) The book holds tragedy, but it's also got great displays of loyalty, trust, and honour - and even at times a little comedy. Strength in defeat, weakness in triumph, pathetically valiant and admiringly greedy, there is a lot of these things to be seen in Fevre Dream, and while Martin has here written a story far more clearly distinguishing between good and evil than the morally grey areas-loving Ice and Fire he still shows us characteristically complex characters dealing with characteristically complex moral issues. All the while neatly covered in what on the surface would seem to be a straight-forward conflict between right and wrong.

I must say I truly enjoyed this book. While never as singularly awesome as A Song of Ice and Fire, Fevre Dream grabbed me from the very first page of it I read and kept me going eagerly. And when I got there, the end did not disappoint.

The follow-up to Marvel Animations' Ultimate Avengers-movie based off on Mark Millar's The Ultimates-comic is not based on Millar's work at all. As far as I gather, this decision was related to Millar's second arc on the comic not being done yet when the sequel was in production. Still, the movie shows several hints of developments in the The Ultimates 2-comic despite having vastly different premises and plots.

Less dark than the comic, the movie is still surprisingly willing to delve into darker themes. Where the second novel in the comic series made Thor's questionable divinity into a major plot-point, we're here as the viewer explicitly shown that Thor and the gods of Asgard are indeed real and that Thor is helping mankind against his father's will. (Odin states in this movie that mankind has abandoned their gods, so the gods have also abandoned them. Thor takes a different view to the latter half of the statement.) That's a daring choice in a movie otherwise fully focused on science-fiction, not fantasy, and I applaud the guts of it despite missing the arc of doubts surrounding Thor's claims to godhood.

The movie's plot is a far more direct follow-up to the first movie than the book did to the first book. Where the first Ultimate Avengers-movie was little more than a direct adaptation of the first Ultimates-book, this one sports an original plot that furthers the old one, which actually increased my interest as I was watching - I genuinely had no idea where the plot was headed.

As it turns out - nowhere particularly original. It was still a good ride there.

The characters are very well portrayed. Some characters are utterly redundant in the eyes of the plot - Bruce Banner, for instance, has only one plot-function that could easily be performed by any of the four other geniuses in the cast of characters (the Pyms, Betty Ross and, of course, Tony Stark) - but they are all a welcomed sight, and they're all done rather well. In fact, Bruce Banner has what are probably the by far most iconic scenes in the movie. Also, by keeping him around, you feel closer in touch with the first movie, as well as keeping a red thread going if they ever make a sequel.

Some things are lighter - like the Pyms marital difficulties - but they're still there, which impressed me. The villain is freaky and interesting (when in doubt, go Nazi), and the addition to the cast actually works well. The Black Panther is a good character who's made integral to this story in a very functional and smooth way. His introduction is charismatic and engaging, and you do not mind this character stealing screen-time from the old ones. However, at the end of the movie, I feel he's cut short, and we never really get a worthwhile payoff to his arc in my opinion. This is too bad. There's also the mysterious panther-power that's never explained - is this something primordial and magical like the powers of Thor?

The movie, like its predecessor, looks really good, and the animation is less static than in DC's effort of Superman: Doomsday or the classic Batman Animated Series-movies. It's nowhere near as fluid and alive as, say, a classic Disney-feature, but it's less rigid than the current DC counterparts I've seen who, while also pretty, can sometimes seem a tad too much like still pictures with moving mouths.

Nice, worthwhile entertainment that makes me hope they'll make a third one and bring some of the plotpoints from The Ultimates 2 into it now that it's readily available. A weak 7/10.

Ah, the much-awaited movie's somewhat less awaited anime-style animated prequel! They do flaunt some interesting names in the credits, though - Brian Azzarello, David S. Goyer, Bruce Timm, to name a few - so I had some expectations.

Batman: Gotham Knight is a miniseries of six short movies made in different animation-styles but with the same voice-actors for the same characters. The movies each have an individual structure, theme and plot, but they take place in the order they're put on the DVD, and they do tie together to form a bigger story bridging Batman's role in Gotham between Batman Begins and The Dark Knight.

Having Kevin Conroy voice Batman is a great pleasure and a privilege. To me, this is how Batman is supposed to sound. Of course, it does contain a certain feeling of loss, too, as it makes me wish for more of the original Batman the Animated Series instead of all this modern stuff... Hearing Conroy's Batman still sets one heck of a mood, though. And the darker style of these animations totally works with his scary Bat-voice.

The individual stories are better than the whole, I felt, and the focus seems indeed to be on the individual narratives rather than the big picture story. (For instance, animating Alfred into looking like he does in the comics in one episode, thin, balding and with a mustache, and having him look more like Michael Caine in the next, that takes you very much out of the feeling that this is one continuous story)

The first one, Have I Got A Story For You, is clearly inspired by the old Batman Animated-episode Legends of the Dark Knight - and indeed, I hear that episode is included among the bonus material on the two-disc version of this release. Like that one, it features some youngsters of Gotham meeting up to tell each other rather excitedly about their individual recent sightings of the Batman - and their wildly differing experiences of him. Well done story which very well sets the tone of this DVD: we are to see what impression Batman has been making on Gotham since Batman Begins - not follow his personal life. The DVD is about Batman as the Gotham Knight, not as the person. More than any story, this opening one clearly establishes that. Still, it's not that interesting, and probably holds the animation-style I liked the decidedly least of all the six as well. Interestingly, while this is one of the episodes featuring a Batman the furthest removed from the viewer's access, it's maybe the one where he by the end of it appears the most human.

The second one, Crossfire, shows us the look the Gotham police have grown to have on Batman, just like the first one shows how he's seen by the younger crowd among the civilians. Needless to say, this particular episode is thus much darker and grittier. Batman comes off as very impressive, but also as very, very dark and scary. The episode is probably my favourite of the entire DVD, and I have no problems admitting that that's a big reason why.

The third episode is called Field Test, and lets us far closer in on Batman than we have been so far on the DVD. We're actually seeing Bruce Wayne in this episode, and quite a lot, too, and where the first episode dealt with idolisation of Batman and the second of a combination of suspicion and begrudging respect, this episode in the end mainly deals with Batman's limits and ethics. Which is of course a theme closely tied to the first two, but seen more from Batman's own perspective than from the city's.

In Darkness Dwells is written by Goyer, who co-wrote Batman Begins, and it brings back Jonathan Crane as the Scarecrow. This episode features lieutenant Gordon rather heavily, and his uneasy co-operation with the Batman, underlining the odd combination of distrust and respect the two have for each other. It bridges very directly into Working Through Pain, where we finally get truly close to the Dark Knight, following his struggle to get out of the sewers despite his wounds and into safety while thinking back on his training by a rogue fakir in dealing with pain - both external and internal. The episode features his old trauma in relation to guns rather heavily, which neatly sets up the final piece of the DVD.

Deadshot is an interesting way to end the DVD. He's not one of the more famous Batman villains, neither to readers of the comic or more casual fans familiar with the character mainly through other media. He's still a rather interesting and engaging one, and, as portrayed here, rather eerily charming. I've personally not read his original arc in the Batman-comics, but I found myself wondering, as I was watching this, if Batman's gun-trauma was used as interestingly there or not. Because here is a man who is basically the DC universe's version of Marvel's Bullseye, the guy who can hit just about anything, but who unlike Bullseye prefers traditional guns in most situations. Batman has a very big and interesting rogue's gallery, but none so closely tied to the idea of the gun as Deadshot. A very good way to end the DVD, in my opinion, and featuring another of my favourite animations here.

All in all I'd say the disc is recommended for those interested enough to want to see it. However, if the concept of six short animated episodes set between the two major live-action movies sounds uninteresting to you, you'd probably not change your mind watching this. Still, it's done with style and care, and shows both affection for and interest in the character and the franchise on the creators' end. I wholeheartedly applaud the effort.