American Gods

After suffering through the untold misery bound inside a paperback novel that was "Atlas Shrugged", I decided that I don't want to read bad books anymore.  This realization probably should have hit me earlier, I admit.  But since that fateful moment where I finally excised terrible literature from my life, I have to say I've been considerably happier.  Not euphoric, but measurably more content.  Maybe I should cut out bad games from my life too...  Its worth considering at least.  Anyway, to christen my new Ayn Rand-free existence*, I decided to read "American Gods" by Neil Gaiman.

"American Gods" is a novel with a great premise, which is good.  Because novels that don't have great premises are usually bad.  (See how that works?)  That premise is:  what if the Gods we humans worshipped thousands of year ago were still walking around amongst us?  What if they were aged, forgotten beings desperate for the love and sacrifices they once received.  They are as much immigrants in the New World as the peoples who once worshiped them.  Now they work in butchery shops, run funeral homes, or just bum around the country looking for people to rip-off.  Of course, there are new Gods in America, the iron gods of the railroad, the teenage nerdy gods of the Internet, and Media itself.  What happens when Old Gods meet New Gods?  What else?  They go to war.

The main character of "American Gods" is Shadow - just Shadow.  He's a freed convict with a penchant for coin magic tricks with a wife and a best friend waiting for him at home.  Oh wait, he doesn't have those things because they both died in a car accident while she was making his penis happy with her tongue.  Now Shadow is recruited by Wednesday, a crooked con-artist who is actually the American avatar of Odin, and brought into the bizarre world of Gods, magic, and undead zombie wives following you around.  ...This is a weird book.  Shadow himself is a pretty vague dull-minded protagonist, as per his name, something that often annoys everybody around him.  He kinda takes everything that's happening to him with a weird kind of acceptance.  You'd think that hanging around with the All-Father, Lord of Asgard might make a man a bit disturbed, but not Shadow.  He joins with the Old Gods in their war only because it seems they're his only job prospect.

X-Men: First Class

A good Superhero movie for once?  Am I hallucinating?  Is this some kind of wild fever dream?  Did the utter and complete blandness of "Kung Fu Panda 2" break my soul so badly as to crush my limited grip on reality?

I guess its not much of a surprise that among the seemingly endless super hero movies this year, "X-Men" would represent the lone decent title.  "X-Men 1" and "X-Men 2" are actually not bad movies, this is universally agreed upon.  Of course, this is almost entirely thanks to Hugh Jackman's badass charisma as Wolverine, but even his talent couldn't save "X-Men 3" or "X-Men Origins".  The second one is probably the highest bar for this series - not a great movie, but certainly worth seeing.  You got the Patrick Stewart, you got the Ian McKellen, you got Mystique, and Nightcrawler, and Rogue - all great roles in a movie that just brought it all together.  What I really like about "X-Men" films in general is that they don't need to deal with all the Superhero movie cliches:  no origin stories, no one puts on a mask, and no rescuing a damsel in distress off a falling building.  Its about the characters primarily, not the Superhero persona, and it usually works.   Of course, "X-Men Origins" is probably the biggest mess of a movie I've ever seen - such a titantic failure that I could spend hours complaining about that one subject alone*.  And I have.  Trust me, I seriously have.

"X-Men First Class" is something of a do-over for "X-Men Origins" attempting to create a prequel to the first three movies that isn't a titanic lumbering ball of failure.  Instead of the side-characters being  zero-dimensional set pieces that exist only for empty fanservice ("wow, Blob is in this movie!"), actually have depth and meaning.  The film manages to get a large enough scale to give major characters arcs, complex relationships that have emotional depth.  "Thor" just had a girl giggling at him, the intricate dynamic between Magneto and Professor and Mystique makes for a far better movie.  It isn't a string of action scenes connected with a pathetic excuse for a plot - its a movie.  That's why "X-Men First Class" is a really good film.

Bleach Recaps: Ep. 209, Hollowsaurus

Last week's episode was fairly decent.  This week's episode is good too.  The difference is plot movement.  Because the Turn Back the Pendulum Arc is a self-contained story, single episodes can actually cause major twists in the narrative.  This is unlike the main "Bleach" storyline, where individual episodes usually boil down to "hero #18" is fighting "villain #34".  Because of how huge the scale that "Bleach" has reached at this point, it is almost impossible for any one thing to really matter in the long run.  In a mini arc, a new threat can be revealed and actually create dramatic weight.  Episode 209 introduces the first real threat to the Visored characters we've met, and so its pretty okay.  Thumbs up.

Last week ended with a bunch of dudes screaming.  We now find out they're actually melting or something, and they spit up some up weird gravity-defying vomit.  This effect looks far too much like that completely forgettable horror movie "The Haunting in Connecticut", a movie which bet its entire fortune on the idea that puking upsidedown would scare the living Jesus out of me.  (Hint:  it didn't.  Virginia Madsen deserves better than this.)  Well, it turns out that these random dudes have puked so much that they exploded... somehow.  Two evil people - obviously Aizen and Gin - have an umbrella open to block the gore.  Aizen is very happy.  Then he jizzes all over the title card.  Fucking gross, man!

Obviously the rest of this episode is going to deal with finding out why these people exploded, who exploded them, and all that assorted stuff.  Or a monster of some kind will attack.  Works either way.  But first, we must get some character banter between our Soul Society characters from 101 years ago.  Sadly Yoruichi is nowhere to be found, but we do have Shinji, Urahara, and Hiyori.  Which means the inevitable logical conclusion - somebody is going to get hurt.

Kung Fu Panda 2

The hardest reviews to write by far are ones for movies that generate no particular opinion in me of any kind.  I was left so uninspired by "Hanna" recently that even after two hours of work, I was completely unable to write a review longer than "its okay".  It was awhile ago that I realized that I have a much easier time writing negative reviews than positive ones - this is because I'm an evil person who may or may not be able to experience joy.  But writing a review that is neither positive or negative, just "meh".  Now that is a task so difficult as to tear the joy right out of being a film blogger... person.  You got respect real film critics for what they do, because 99% of the movies they see must give them nothing to work with.  So if they sound bitter and sarcastic a lot, its only because you either go negative or you have no review at all.  Of course, that doesn't excuse professional critics for being aggressive and hateful towards movies that really did not deserve the bad reputation, like say... "Battle: Los Angeles" which is a fun movie through every perspective other than the cynical "seen-it" eyes of a middle-aged critic with back issues.

Luckily I can completely pick and choose what films I actually review.  So when "Hanna" turned out to be really forgettable, even in how amongst forgettable movies it was only moderately forgettable, I just didn't write a review.  But I think I'll write a review of "Kung Fu Panda 2" anyway, even though it didn't inspire all that much thought in me.  The first one really wasn't all that impressive either, though far above the standard of normal DreamWorks films.  I mean, the movie was okay, not as great as say, "How to Train Your Dragon".  A pile of kung fu cliches rolled together into a decent enough script that managed to make Jack Black not suck for once.  But it managed to work.  And now there's a sequel, so there you go.  Hollywood never just lets good stories lie, they have to try to double their money.  Then they almost always lose it all - the Sequel Casino is the most rigged game out there.

"Kung Fu Panda 2" is notable to me at least, for being the very first movie I ever took my baby brother to.  He's three-years-old, and somehow or another, has never been to the movies.  Not once.  This was of course a huge embarrassment for me, since I own a largely ignored blog that chiefly does movie reviews.  I mean, I always win games of "Seen It".  I've watched the movie "Secret of Kells", I'm hardcore with my movies.  No brother of mine is not going to see a movie!  And now that that's been fixed, I have a review.

Bleach Recaps: Ep 208, The Ministry of Love

For the first time in weeks, honestly all year, I actually missed an episode of "Bleach".  I'm busy this week, posts are going to be hard to work out.  Once upon a time, that would mean that I was screwed and would have to wait for a rerun to see the episode I missed.  But now that we live in the great prosperity that is the Future, I can just go on the Internet, play the episode on one of the dozens of possibly illegal sites that upload full "Bleach" episodes.  And they're also the sites that I steal screenshots from.  The Future is awesome.

Last episode Lt. Hiyori, perhaps furious over the failure of the plot to move at all, kept kicking people in the face over and over again.  Now things start to happen a bit.  We're going to the Maggot's Nest, a scary-sounding place of some kind of another.  Urahara spends about five minutes explaining various bits and pieces about Soul Society politics.  The Soul Society Ninja Force are under the control of Yoruichi and Squad 2 (which we knew already).  The Maggot's Nest is a secret prison hidden underground in the Squad 2 barracks, which Urahara used to run before becoming Captain*.  This is the place where they hold disgruntled Soul Reapers who wanted to quit.  Apparently you cannot ever quit the Gotei 13, and if you try to retire, you're locked away in prison forever.  Also, if you're the guy who runs the Maggot's Nest, you get to arrest potential troublemakers, before they ever commit a single crime.  Um... am I the only one noticing a problem with all this?

So as it turns out, the Soul Society is a vicious dictatorship with a secret prison filled with people who have committed no crime at all.  And remember, the Soul Reapers are the good guys.  Also, it appears to me that Urahara could have arrested anybody he wanted back when he was Warden, even Yamamoto himself.  No trials, no appeals, no chance for release, nobody even knows where you are, you're just put in a hole and forgotten about.  Enjoy your stay in the Ministry of Love.  Did you know that North Korea's justice system is based off of the Soul Society?