Blindness

What a powerful film on several levels! The theme is, of course, blindness… but the writers and director have a variety of ways of ’seeing’ what that would mean.  To people who are suddenly become blind. To those who were blind before and find themselves surrounded by the suddenly blind. To the authorities.  To the one person who doesn’t go blind. The acting is top notch, with excellent performances by Danny Glover, Mark Ruffalo, Maury Chaykin and outstanding work by Julianne Moore. But this is not an easy film to watch and certainly not for young children. Beside the effects of nearly a whole world of humans going blind in the space of days (car crashes, airplanes crashing, panic, etc) it is interesting to think what would happen to society if this really happened. It’s hard to imagine a more definitive way of cutting us off from our technological props and begin counting the days until the food and water runs out.
I can’t recommend this one highly enough but I’d be careful who you watch it with. I would agree, with the review on IMDB, that you may want to watch it solo.
A little bonus I didn’t notice until I looked it up on IMDB: at least part of it was filled in Guelph. The next time I watch it I’m going to want to look for familiar landmarks!

More Kazu Kibuishi

My posting about graphic novels in January mentioned some of Kazu Kibuishi’s work as did my review of The Amulet. I borrowed Flight Volume 2 and purchased Book 2 of the Amulet since.

Flight Volume 2
Kazu Kibuishi is the editor, of the Graphic Novel potpourri that is Flight. But readers are still lucky enough to be treated to his excellent work too. Kibuishi’s The Orange Grove is wonderfully touching; its uncluttered and clear style draws you in.
My favourite story, though, is Ghost Trolley by Rod Sechrist. Eerie artwork and an interesting story.
I also enjoyed Destiny Express by Jen Wang and Monster Slayers by Khang Le.
I’ve read three volumes of this series and have enjoyed them all. Recommended!

The Amulet Book 2
The Stonekeeper’s Curse (Book 2) is an excellent and exciting sequel to The Stonekeeper (Book 1). The story is a compelling young adult story (that’s still good enough for adults too) with a complex cast of characters and intricate plot. All that and it still manages to enthrall. I especially liked the talking trees! I will likely buy the entire series.
Very highly recommended.

Coyote

Allen Steele’s novel Coyote is an excellent, hard science fiction novel about the colonization of a new world. It combines politics, adventure and science into a pleasant reading experience. There are some minor discrepancies in the writing (like the river delta described in the trip down to the Equatorial ‘River’ being on the wrong side according to the map) but these are picky things and easily ignored.
The Coyote series was mentioned in two of the sessions I attended at Worldcon 2009, particularly Lots of Planets have a North. Steele was also one of the authors participating in the Atlanta Nights hoax novel I golbed about earlier.
I recommend it and would like to read the rest of the series!

The Diamond Age

This has been the first Neal Stephenson novel I finished but it won’t be the last. I tried to read Stephenson’s Snow Crash previously but I wasn’t able to get into it before I had to return it.  Now that I’ve read The Diamond Age I certainly want to give it another try. This is an excellent read about a girl and her primer in a future where diamond windows and airships made lighter than air with nano vacuum suspension are easily created. Where nano engineers can design almost anything imaginable and make them available, at a cost, through matter compilers fed by pure streams of molecules. The new economy is based on ideas and where old national lines (although they still try to rear themselves up) are a thing of the past. So without countries what defines which team you’re in? Stephenson suggests that phyles are formed based on common economic goals and principles. The Neo-Victorians, controlling the largest sources for the matter compilers and having some of the best nano engineers is at the top of the stack. In this story, Stephenson chooses to focus on the Vickys as well as their interactions with other phyles.
A Vicky engineer (John Percival Hackworth is one of the best) is commissioned to create a primer for a girl. This book bonds to its reader and transforms itself into the best learning device for her. It is designed to not only pass on knowledge but also to ensure that the reader has ‘an interesting life’. But Hackworth’s desire for his own daughter to have the same opportunity in life, leads him to create an illegal copy of the primer. This copy falls into the hands of the main character Nell, a young, poor and innocent thete (someone without a phyle). The story then revolves around the chain of events this unanticipated act causes.
This book was nearly impossible for me to put down. The ideas were very interesting and the main characters, especially Nell, were incredibly engaging.
This is not an easy book to get through but great works of art often incur a price. This art is very highly recommended and worth it.

Halo, Assassin’s Creed and Modern Warfare 2

I prefer a video game with a story: otherwise what carries you through? To achieve a certain skill level? Bragging rights? Not all that interested. But games with a good story are just so addicting!
So we have purchased all of the Halo series over time but in the past week or so I actually went through the entire campaigns for 1, 2, 3 and ODST at the normal level. One night I stayed up past 4 finishing off the last. The online games can be fun (especially Halo 1 on the PC and ODST Firefight) but I’m not as drawn to these as much as to the storied campaign. I really like the history of the Forerunners, the Covenant and Master Chief/Cortana: it’s engaging and interesting with lots of twists. One day you’re fighting the Covenant and then the Flood and then you are allied with the Covenant against Prophets or the Flood or both. And in ODST there’s a lot of back and forth movement in the time line which grew on me, even though I was annoyed by it at first.
Again, it’s the story in Assassin’s Creed that drew me in. It is fascinating and involves both the future and the past in an interesting way. I like the fact that it’s a Canadian game and that it merges in real history as part of the experience. I also love the climbing and leap of faith abilities of Altaïr. I haven’t tried the newly released sequel yet but I’ve still got to finish the first one.
Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 is quite a different animal. Although I have tried other COD titles they haven’t proved to be as interesting to me as the Halo series. What can I say, I’m a sci-fi fan and writer. In this case it was the hype that attracted me even though I haven’t tried Modern Warfare 1 (I didn’t even know the story line carries on from it until after). I’ll admit I was interested in what was drawing so much interest.  Activision has created an interesting game though and it is quite different in that your characters actually die in the game. I don’t mean they die because your skill and luck failed and you were killed, I mean that the characters in the story line who you have assumed actually die. And by betrayal. It left quite a cold taste in my mouth. I don’t like all the violence in shoot ‘em up games like these normally but Modern Warfare 2 really brings it over the top. In the end I find it, surprisingly, an anti-war game. The graphics are so realistic, stunning and blah blah blah that I felt dirtied by the act of playing. But the story made it even more so. After this game I find it even more amazing that mankind has been addicted to war for so long.  I’m glad I went through with the experience of doing the Modern Warfare 2 campaign but I’d rather be playing Halo or Assassin’s Creed.
In the end of this marathon of playing these games I am glad to get it out of my system. I’ll stay play, occasionally, but I need to get more done of a creative nature!

Intangible Asset Number 82

This documentary is Australian jazz giant Simon Barker’s journey to discover the influences of a Korean drummer/Shaman named Kim Seok-Chul. Director Emma Franz takes us, sensitively, along. Simon is not allowed by his contact, Kim Dong-Won, to see Seok-Chul right away. There is a lot of resistance there although Simon doesn’t know, at first, why. Is the master drummer, who is regarded as such a national treasure by his country that he is Intangible Asset Number 82, being protected from the foreigner? Is he not worthy?
The truth was that Kim Seok-Chul was very ill and in hospital but also that Dong-Won wasn’t sure it would be right to present Simon to him. Would the Australian drummer actually understand the honour? Would he be worthy? So, as a process, Dong-Won goes on a trip with Simon to visit other musical Shamen. The singer Bae Il-Dong is one. This is a singer who lived in the wilderness in a hut he built beside a waterfall for seven years, singing up to 18 hours a day. Learning to out-sing the noise of the falls. Il-Dong considers the mountain as yin and the valley as yang with the waterfall the holy place where yin and yang meet. His is a powerful, raw voice that seems too big and too much noise for the Western ear. But he sings pure nature and without fear or ego. I would love to hear him in concert.
Simon also learns about drumming with his entire body. To begin throwing himself down on the ground as if in mourning to learn to let go and relax into the music. And to listen to his own heart for true rhythm.
Near the end, Seok-Chul has left the hospital and Simon does get the chance to visit with the master three days before he dies. We, as voyeuristic companions, get a rare glimpse into some of the final hours of a man revered by his family and society. It is impressive and touching.
I learned, in the end, a great deal about South Korea and music in this wonderful and powerful documentary. I whole-heartedly recommend it to anyone!
This was the first of the five documentaries I saw during the 2009 Guelph Festival of Moving Media.

Ender’s Game

I have finally read Orson Scott Card’s brilliant novel Ender’s Game which is the first book in the Ender’s series.  This was originally a shorter novelette but was reworked into a full length novel by Card.  It is about a young boy named Ender who is a long hoped for military genius on a future Earth.  He is force trained to become the tool that will save mankind from an alien menace.  But Ender is, in the end, his own man or boy.  A product of his handlers but not them; the book has an incredibly surprising finish. 
I enjoyed it very much. It is intensely psychological and, like many of the best examples of fiction writers, Card dwells strongly in the territory of human relationships. That’s what makes Ender so interesting. In the end, Ender is more important than even Earth leaders think. The fate of more than just human’s is involved.
I definitely want to read more in the series.
Highly recommended.

The Outlander

This film starring Jim Kaviezel (Kainan) was a pleasant surprise. Although it involves Earth’s past, Vikings, an alien, his space craft, and a pissed off alien dragon it isn’t as ridiculous as it sounds.  The writer explains these so well that they didn’t remind me overly much of the rash of Beowulf movies lately. The back story (that humans had been seeded on Earth by Kainan’s people) and that Kainan crash landed with an imprisoned alien dragon was an explanation for his human appearance. It certainly seemed reasonable as I watched, anyway.  I liked the special effects for the Moorwen or dragon. It is a good adventure film and, I think, worth a couple of hours of precious time if you like good action sci-fi films.

The Night Wanderer

Drew Hayden Taylor’s 2007 novel, The night wanderer (Annick Press Ltd.), is about a 350 year old Anishinaabeg (Ojibway) Vampire meeting a modern Ojibway (Anishinaabeg) teenage girl.
It has the subtitle ‘A Native Gothic Novel’ but I beg to differ with that categorization, ‘gothic’ implies something else to me. A dictionary defines it as:

A novel in a style emphasizing the grotesque, mysterious, and desolate.

To me, a better and less limiting summation would be ‘A Native Vampire Story’. While one of the two main characters, Pierre L’Errant, is certainly mysterious and has been, at times, desolate, he is never grotesque to me. Definitely not a typical vampire. And although Tiffany, the 16-year-old other main character, is frightened and helpless at times she has untapped inner strength. I see her as neither a gothic heroine nor could she afford to look like or be a goth. Taylor has created two very unique characters who inevitably clash with interesting and, IMHO, satisfying results. What I found most fascinating was Pierre’s view of the contrasts between his former culture and the current native culture found in Tiffany. I wanted more of that actually. Tiffany’s grandmother provides a sympathetic bridge between the old and the new as someone who yearns to hear Anishinabe language being spoken but lives patiently in the here and now.
All in all, a quick and highly recommended read!

Gene Luen Yang

I found two graphic novels by Gene Luen Yang at my local library and thoroughly enjoyed them both. They were:

• American Born Chinese, 2006 First Second, New York, NY
• The Eternal Smile by Yang and Derek Kirk Kim, 2009 First Second, New York, NY

American Born Chinese is really two stories intertwined in a coming of age tale. The first is that of adolescent Jin Wang growing up in America and, the second, the cultural story of Monkey King and Wong Lai-Tsao. As the title indicates, there is a meeting of America and China in these pages.

The Eternal Smile is three stories assembled together:

1. Duncan’s Kingdom is about Duncan and his struggle to extricate himself from fantasy.
2. Elias McFadden’s Gran’Pa Greenbax and The Eternal Smile is an intriguing moral and ecological tale. It reminded me of Scrooge McDuck stories. It was sad what happened to poor Filbert and the twins Polly and Molly were interesting characters.
3. Urgent Request is quite a different tale involving Nigerian Prince Henry and the resilient Janet. I just wish I could have seen something bad happen to Mr. Hoffman.

Both books are quick reads and recommended, especially the first!