jeff eaton

You know that something's gone horribly, horribly wrong when people talking about your movie say things like, "Well... It's no Dragonheart..." Nate and I saw Dragon Wars this evening, and I'm not sure I really have words. We knew it would be craptastic, but I don't think either of us were prepared for the profoundness of it.

The couple in front of us collapsed into giggling within minutes of the title screen. At the thirty minute mark, they staggered out of the theater, supporting each other, laughing audibly. They turned to us and started to apologize -- then just laughed again. An hour later, as giant lizards from feudal Japan fired missiles at tanks in downtown Los Angeles and a six-hundred-foot snake chased a pizza delivery car to Mexico, we would envy them.

The protagonist is an emo-surfer-boy star reporter from the Buck Cameron school of investigative reporting. He works for CGNN, and never files a story. His token black sidekick is thrown off an overpass by the Evil Warlord Named Jack in the middle of one fight and left for dead without a second thought -- only to show up at work the next day with a band-aid on his forehead. There are, at times, four nested layers of flashback active simultaneously. One of the flashbacks features a flash-forward. I'm really not accustomed to using reference counting to keep track of my place in the flashback stack, and I think it's a sign that something's gone terribly wrong.

Like a terrible high school relationship you just can't end, Dragon Wars is baffling, painful, yet filled with a scary kind of excitement. How intensely bad can it get? Very.

Very.

I haven't read much fantasy, to be honest. My few experiences with it were probably the kind of cliche stuff that causes real fantasy lovers to cringe and wince and start pulling out lists of the stuff that one should really read. The equivalent of over-wrought space opera in the scifi world.

Just as literary scifi is starting to gain traction, though, there seems to be a new wave in fantasy building up steam. Over the holidays I finished China Mieville's excellent Perdido Street Station, and enjoyed it quite a bit. The writing is fluid and evocative, with a curiously unfolding plot and complex characters. The book's heaviness, though, made it a bit of a slog at times. The writing and China's relentless creativity pulled me through, but I kept wanting to shy away from the grinding that his downtrodden characters had to endure. It's like eating four pounds of high quality sushi -- eventually, you have to walk away and take some time to recover.

That's why Looking for Jake, his collection of short stories, hits the sweet spot for me. Fourteen unique dishes, most top notch, and none so long that the flavor overpowers. Most skirt the edge of fantasy/horror, carefully ircling themes of otherness and disaster. Several are apocolypses -- tales of humanity's twilight as people vanish from the streets of London, or are conquered by creatures reaching through mirrors. That last story, The Tain, is one of the longest in the book. It's a perfect example of Mieville's writing: a fascinating premise that unfolds into an unsettling, horrific mystery. If it were any shorter, the story would be unsatisfying, but if it stretched out even a chapter or two longer, the nature of the story would be, well... really depressing.

It's good stuff, this book. I know I'll be foisting it on Benson and Jason in the near future, and I'm pretty sure others would like it as well.

So I'm playing Shadow of the Colossus, and it's everything I'd hoped. As the guys at Penny Arcade said, creating a game in which sixteen powerful 'boss' characters comprise the entire conflict is gutsy. Somehow, though, the action-focus of this sequel to Ico doesn't feel that much different than the first game. The beautiful landscapes, the subtle touches like the headstring tugs of your horse at its reigns, the misty fairy-dusty visuals, the strangely sad music...

Ico was a work of sublime genius. While this game is different, it's still part of the same family. I wonder if the third will be a RTS...

After the wedding, Catherine moved into my (our!) apartment and we set about reshuffling the layout and decor to suit a married couple and their foofy cat. Part of the reshuffling has involved moving both of our computers to a second bedroom and establishing a makeshift "work/writing/gaming room."

This is fine and good and working out well until we find a house to move into once the lease runs out. The only hitch is, well... the goldfinch.

There is, you see, a tiny yellow bird that flies, every day, to the window in our workroom. He clings to the screen and pecks desperately at the glass, ratta-tatta-tatta style, like a tiny confused woodpecker. Or... glasspecker? Something like that. Every morning, every afternoon -- he's there, desperately tapping out his SOS to the universe. Abby, our fluffy orange cat, has been adjusting well to apartment life and has now taken to sitting beneath the windowsill, staring intently up at the goldfinch's usual spot. When he arrives (tappatappatappa!) she stares -- really, really stares -- and mouths idly, drooling perhaps, or fantasizing about broiled or roasted goldfinch. The bird, obvlivious, taps on.

One of these days, I think I'm going to find Abby with a glass cutter and a bottle of catsup.

UPDATE: Catherine has decided to name the goldfinch Henry. I approve.