dragons, bitches!

So the "Eragon" movie just came out, you know, the one based on the boy-and-his-dragon book written by Christopher "I-Write-Sins-Not-Tragedies" Paolini. Let's see if my hatred for this franchise is going to be validated.

Here's excerpts from the New York Times review.

"Directed by the wonderfully named Stefen Fangmeier, “Eragon” boasts the usual genre lineup: an evil king (John Malkovich), a whey-faced hero (Ed Speleers) and a serene warrior-maiden (Sienna Guillory), as well as the required rebel hordes and bucolic landscapes. A hint of the exotic is provided by a dreadlocked Djimon Hounsou — who seems to be phoning in his lines from a booth in the Bahamas — while the marvelous Scottish actor Robert Carlyle, playing a steadily decomposing wizard, hisses incantations from a mouth resembling a nicotine-stained graveyard.

The film’s few moments of hilarity are no less welcome for being completely unintended (the young hero’s heavy-breathing romp with a strapping male cousin could only have been envisioned by someone completely lacking in subtext radar), though “Into the sky, to win or die!” doesn’t have quite the same mythic flair as “One Ring to Rule Them All.” And if some of the characters won’t be returning for the sequel, no matter. In all likelihood, neither will the audience."

Here's more - not quite as civilized as the austere New York Times:
http://www.aznightbuzz.com/stories/160260.php
http://www.variety.com/review/VE1117932309.html?categoryid=31&cs=1
http://www.startribune.com/1553/story/875752.html
http://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/eragon/

Just to be even, though, here's one of the few positive reviews at rottentomatoes.com, from (surprise, surprise!) The Wall Street Journal, which we already know is wrong on important things like politics:

"magically and sumptuously detailed".

Greaaaat, Wall Street Journal. This apparently earned "Eragon" a "thumbs-up".

Boy, am I hateful.

The Greats

Not really a rant, or a review, but I felt like sharing some reviews of writers that I admire:

"In a longish first gear, the book has the feel of good genre fiction: seduction scenes, an honorable, bright and idealistic hero — the 30-something diplomat David Richards — and the political and sexual intrigues of the diplomatic community of a third-world kingdom of the 1980's, called Kutar, a long way from the headlines. But as the narrative plays out, the novel leaves genre country behind and moves into far more serious territory...

The change agent in Kutar is the book's villain, the embassy military attaché, Col. Allen B. Munn, "a squat bullet of a man, his slightly bulging eyes given added severity by his very close crew cut, and there was something in his appearance and the wear of his crisply starched Marine uniform — every button and seam was clearly under strain — that belied his laconic manner, that had the effect of lending import, even menace, to whatever he said." It is Munn, an ambitious Texan eager to make his reputation back in Washington, who stirs up the Kutaran army to send an expeditionary force into the northern mountains to deal with the fractious tribal warriors, who become, soon enough, the Kutaran People's Liberation Front. This folly becomes known as "Operation Chokechain," later to be replaced by "Operation Stalwart Friend" and then, as each operation fails, by other follies and other names. (Anderson is ruthless with the Pentagon's proclivity for operational labels that wind up as painful ironies.) Eventually, the Kutaran army is routed, its heavy artillery abandoned and captured by the rebels, who then occupy the heights above the capital and proceed with a daily, and brutal, shelling of the helpless city. Yes, it's Kutar, but if, from this description, your mind wanders to Sarajevo, you're probably not too far off.

And so Kutar descends into a real-world hell. And, of course, once the fighting starts and the American military advisers show up, "unsmiling, crew-cutted men with large duffel bags and aviator sunglasses," it's too late. In the words of the United States ambassador, "We're all just ornaments here now, David. The Pentagon has trumped State, and when that happens, a colonel trumps an ambassador, and there's not a ... thing we can do about it." "

From:
NY Times Review of Moonlight Hotel, by Scott Anderson


And:

"The line that separates dopiness from inspiration in horror fiction can, however, be a fine one. Tom Piccirilli, who last year unburdened himself of the turbulent, wackily eventful ghost novel NOVEMBER MOURNS (Bantam Spectra, paper, $5.99), traffics in extreme metaphors and narrative ploys that can seem fully as desperate and arbitrary as Nicholson's evil goats, and yet he has found a way to make a virtue out the apparent chaos of his morbid imagination. In his new book, HEADSTONE CITY (Bantam Spectra, paper, $5.99), Piccirilli tosses a bunch of restless ghosts and assorted extrasensory powers into a tale of Brooklyn mobsters in decline and emerges with a beautiful and perversely funny sort of crime novel: a hard-boiled hallucination. His hero, an ex-con named Johnny Danetello, is known by his nickname, Dane; and he, like so many ghost-story characters (including at least one other notable Dane), has returned home to take care of family business, solve ancient mysteries, settle old scores.

His father has been murdered, he thinks, and there's a contract on Dane's life, too, possibly ordered by his childhood friend, Vinny Monticelli — who seems, for obscure reasons, much less interested in killing him than in taunting him. Vinny has the ability to exist in three distinct temporal dimensions, which kind of gives him an edge. But Dane has some psychic firepower of his own: he's able to abstract people's souls from their bodies and interrogate them. It's exceptionally nutty stuff, but Piccirilli has chosen his setting well: if gangsters are not in fact plagued by ghosts, they certainly should be. And his specters tend to pop up without warning or elaborate preparation, as they will in guilty consciences.

Piccirilli takes a little getting used to. He has, however, the authentic surrealist's gift of blind trust in his imagination, and that enables him to throw off striking metaphors like sparks from a speeding train. There's a manic insouciance in his prose, along with a persistent, unaccountable melancholy. "Headstone City" gives you the distinctive shiver good horror writing — all good writing — provides: the certainty that the writer's own ghosts are in it."

From:
NY Times Review of Headstone City, by Tom Piccarilli