Category Archives: Cool Things

Cool enough to be a category and a tag.

Cool Things: Plunder of Souls

Posted by natechen on

Ethan Kaille has a rough life. He’s one of only two thieftakers in Boston and the other hates his guts, there’s a cholera outbreak in town and tensions between the British troops and the British townfolk are growing ever higher. And someone’s desecrating graves and Ethan’s been hired to find out who and bring them to justice.

So it’s Tuesday.

No, actually one thing that’s interesting about D.B. Jackson’s titular thieftaker is that his adventures don’t tumble one after the other in rapid succession. There’s actually been about a year between this adventure and Ethan’s last, no doubt so that interesting events of history can line up with fictional events. While the author obviously has that goal in mind it also allows the world some time to pass around the characters which really makes things feel more realistic.

Another nice touch about this story is that Ethan is not investigating a death under unusual circumstances this time. As I said at the beginning he’s been called in to figure out why graves are being desecrated and to bring the perpetrator to justice. Now if you haven’t read my previous recommendation of the Thieftaker Chronicles you need to know that Ethan is a conjuror, a kind of wizard who has to balance his need to make money with his need not to get burned at the stake as a witch. While Ethan has a kind of truce with the authorities in Boston that lets him do his job mostly in peace he is going to have other things to deal with.

For one thing, while conjurors can protect themselves from disease for a little while the materials they need to do it are very hard to find and very expensive and the cholera outbreak isn’t going anywhere. Plus Kaille opens the book by showing up his rival thieftaker Sephira Pryce and she’s not happy about it. While Ethan has conjuring to back him up Sephira has hired muscle and now a hired conjuror of her own and their rivalry is coming to a serious head. But worst of all something is interfering with Ethan’s ability to conjure. And not just Ethan’s, but the abilities of every conjuror in the city.

The best thing about the story in A Plunder of Souls is the development of the characters. While Ethan is a very well established character the supporting characters haven’t gotten as much screen time in the previous couple of books. Even Sephira, who has been turning up a lot in previous books, was mostly a secondary antagonist before where as now she and Ethan establish an uneasy peace that lets us see her in a new light. All of this is great but above and beyond that, unlike in previous books, the villain is also very well developed.

It turns out that Ethan has a history with the villain, another conjuror who has a twisted relationship with Ethan and… well just about everybody. While there’s not a whole lot that’s new to the urban fantasy/paranormal investigation genres in this story’s formula the execution of the formula and the construction of the characters on both sides of the conflict makes it worthwhile. On top of that the villain offers real intelligence and menace whenever he’s on hand to threaten Ethan. Finally the feel and danger of pre-Revolution America is icing on the cake, making the setting in the Theiftaker Chronicles much more real and engaging than many other urban fantasies.

A decent, if formulaic, story filled with very interesting characters makes A Plunder of Souls a read that’s attractive and fun.

Cool Things: Jani and the Greater Game

Posted by natechen on

Steampunk meets space opera? Yes, please!

One of the worldbuilding challenges a steampunk story faces is explaining how technology managed to get so advanced without the British Empire’s place in the world going in a weird direction. Some people chose to gloss over the question, never addressing it, some actually do try to warp the development of the world and change Britain’s place in the world and some just create a new world with analogs for the British Empire and it’s colonies. Eric Brown’s Jani and the Greater Game both answers the question in a nice way and integrates the secret of advanced technology into the foundation of the story.

Now there’s a spoiler here so you’re warned but it’s hard to discuss the book without mentioning this and I can’t really see anyone not getting this by the end of the first chapter or so.

So the way the world works is the British find a crashed spaceship in the late 1800s and start reverse engineering it’s technology. This makes the British Empire an even more dominate force on the planet than it was in our timeline and triggers a kind of cold war between the British, the Chinese and the Russians over the land of Nepal, where the space ship is located. Of course, most people don’t know what makes Nepal so special but at least the leaders of Britain and Russia do. (It’s not clear if the Chinese are aware of what makes the territory so valuable but that’s forgivable since they’re not really a part of the story of this book.)

The primary character of this book is Janisha (Jani to family and friends), a young half English half Indian woman who has been called back to India from studying medicine in England because her father has fallen ill. Along the way her airship is shot down by Russians. Because that’s the kind of thing that happens to airships during cold wars.

Once again this plot point serves multiple purposes. Not only does it establish the Russians as our antagonists in this story it also provides a very natural reason for Jani to encounter the airships’ most exotic passenger – Jelch, an alien that was under heavy guard in the hold of the airship. When Jani’s ride crashes Jelch’s prison breaks open and the guards wind up dead. Jani offers Jelch medical treatment but Jelch tells her the medicine she knows will not work on him. Still, Jani’s generosity and compassion is something Jelch has apparently not seen much of from humanity and he’s moved to leave her a gift and protect her from the Russian landing party that has been sent to eliminate survivors.

Another plot point that it won’t take a perceptive reader long to figure out is that Jelch is on earth to oppose an invasion from a second alien species. Earth is a piece in the Greater Game being played by this expanding alien empire. The aliens already have agents on earth and, along with the Russians, these alien agents will plague Jani and her friends from beginning to end.

Now like War of the Worlds there are undoubtedly parallels between the British Empire and the invading aliens intended but, at least in the first installment of the series (and yes, this is a series), there’s no preachy moralizing or hitting us over the head with messages. While Jani does feel a bit like a Mary Sue at times she and the cast around her are at least well written and beginning to grow from hastily sketched archetypes to well rounded characters and the story promises to put a new, fun skin on the fairly well explored prevent-otherworldly-invasion storyline. If you enjoy steampunk sensibilities it’s worth your while to check it out.

Local Theater: A Laura Ingalls Wilder Christmas

Posted by natechen on

We’re back for more local theaterings! Yes, there was an all for One show already this season that I didn’t remember to plug, but Interval was a very high concept show and I wasn’t sure what to say about it beyond it being about two people on a park bench. This time around there’s a little more backstory available for the show. Like, a whole book series worth.

Little House on the Prairie is a classic piece of Americana, a tale of the West and the settlers that loved it. While Laura Ingalls Wilder wrote about a huge chunk of her early life there is a two year period which she left a blank. There are some personal papers and other documents that give a decent picture of what her life was like but that period of time isn’t a part of her famous series of books.

There are plenty of possible reasons for that. The family was hard up financially and Laura’s father was managing a hotel, a line of work that didn’t really fit with the theme of the stories. Also, on the advice of her publisher, Laura made herself older in her first two books than she actually was at the time, to make the viewpoint of her narrator more believable, and cutting the period out of the novels allowed her to sync her actual age and the age of her character in the stories back up. Finally, her youngest sibling had died in infancy and the death cast a pall over the family that Laura probably didn’t care to share with the world at large.

But there’s nothing like public interest to fill in the holes in a person’s life. A Laura Ingalls Wilder Christmas tells the story of part of those missing years, taking us into the hotel Charles Ingalls managed and letting us join with the Ingalls family as they struggle to deal with the loss of a child and the poverty of their circumstances.

I can’t say much more about the story as I’ve never read this play and I’m (gasp!) not involved in the show! But it promises music, fun and heart, so if you’re in Fort Wayne early this November it might be worth your checking out.

How to Survive a Horror Movie

Posted by natechen on

Well they tell me Halloween’s coming up. I’ve never been a huge fan of this particular occasion, since I’m only moderately enthusiastic about dressing up in costumes and my sweet tooth isn’t that big either. Still, I thought it might be fun to take another tongue in cheek look at genre savvy this year and so, without further ado, I present you with How to Survive a Horror Movie.

Now this idea may sound preposterous on the face of it. After all, there are so many different approaches to horror movies, different kinds of threats and/or monsters to menace the characters (henceforth “the opposition” in this article) that being prepared for all of them seems like an impossible task. But it’s important to keep in mind that tackling impossible tasks is what fiction is all about and horror movies are just as much fiction as anything else. So let’s get dangerously genre savvy and see what you’ll need to survive should you find the creepy music tinkling in the soundtrack of your life.

Now I’m going to assume that you’re media savvy enough, or common sensical enough, to realize the basic measures that need to be taken to survive a horror movie. Things like:

  • Avoid dark places.
  • Don’t go anywhere alone.
  • But don’t couple up. Three is a good number.
  • Don’t investigate strange noises even if you have an entire combat infantry regiment for backup.

But there’s more to surviving a horror movie than just that. Let’s take a look at some things you shouldn’t do, let me make a few suggestions on added precautions to take and finally look at a few places where your mileage may vary.

For starters, don’t:

  • Try to acquire conventional weapons, at least nothing beyond a decent knife. The opposition tends to target the largest, most dangerous people first to prove its overwhelming power and make itself as scary as possible.
  • Mock the opposition directly or the people you’re with. Antagonizing the opposition just draws it’s attention, much like trying to out muscle it. On the other hand, being a jerk is a lot like looping a millstone around your neck. People will hesitate just a fraction of a second when you’re in trouble, and that’s enough to sink you.
  • Try and drop off the radar completely. The opposition never forgets you’re there and if your friends do… well, it’s like asking to be left alone. And we all know how that ends.

On the other hand, do:

  • Try and keep the attitude light. Jokes are okay, just not mean-spirited ones. While the opposition often strikes when you’re feeling relatively secure, and breaking up a lighthearted mood does add to it’s threatening nature, it can’t strike you directly, as then you die unafraid (which is unacceptable) and it can’t continually strike during a punch line – that makes it predictable and thus less frightening.
  • Get ahold of a bag of salt. From giant slugs or oozes to ghosts and demons, salt is  a great general purpose horror survival tool, either as a weapon or a defense. And if you get trapped somewhere for a long period of time you can use it to season your food.
  • Get ahold of a bag of rice. If the opposition is OCD, as vampires (see Sesame Street or just look up arithmania) or human psychopaths tend to be, the need to count it, or at least clean it up when you spill it, will slow them down.
  • Get ahold of a bag of fresh garlic. The opposition often smells horribly, which is to say you will not enjoy smelling them; often to the point where your attempts to flee will be overcome by gagging. Garlic was good enough for Van Hellsing to overcome this problem, so it’s good enough for you.
  • Try to avoid confusion over which bag is which and combine all three of the above items into one bag. Trying to dissolve a giant slug with a bag of garlic will just make you look silly. Shortly before you end up looking dead.
  • Find and burn anything that falls into the uncanny valley. Leaving that stuff around is just asking for trouble.
  • Burn any documents in languages you can’t read, especially when it’s in dead languages. Don’t try and figure them out. Don’t take them around to experts. Don’t hang sings around your neck that say “Victim, Please Eat Me”. Just get ’em gone then get out of town.
  • Put objects to be destroyed directly into the fire and watch them burn. Put them in a box or something else before burning them and you’ll walk away thinking they’re gone when they’re actually hidden in the ashes. Or worse, some kind of switcharoo will take place and you’ll burn the wrong thing.
  • Maintain a respectful attitude towards the objects you destroy. The fact that you regret destroying them may be enough to deflect whatever vengeful spirit is using them as a vessel to attack you. Yeah, the odds are bad but it’s worth a shot. Don’t laugh like a maniac unless you’re prepared to try and out-evil horrible ancient evils.

Finally, here are a few things where value is going to depend on what your opposition is, or what kind of person you are.

  • First and foremost, wearing a cross or other holy symbol. If you wear one all the time, great, keep it on. Ditching it probably paints you as a target. But if you don’t wear one normally, putting one on is just as big a target – the opposition loves hypocrites. And not in a good way. Of course, many forms of opposition don’t care about your faith one way or another but oftentimes you won’t know what you’re facing until it’s too late.
  • Learning about the opposition is a two edged sword. The opposition gets a lot of it’s fear factor from the fact that you don’t know anything about it. On the other hand, it’s a bad idea to start your research before you know you’re in a horror movie – being the know-it-all is just a another kind of target on your back, so don’t do this until you’re sure you’re in a horror movie so finding out the opposition’s weaknesses, if it has any, can be a death sentence. Sometimes ignorance is bliss. Just don’t be the annoying dumb guy.
  • Building positive relationships with the people you’re stuck with seems like a good idea. It keeps them from leaving you behind and it makes the time pass easier. However, the opposition likes nice guys. And not in a way that’s any better than it likes hypocrites. There’s a careful balance between being a target and getting along, especially since jerks are just as big a target as the overly nice. It’s probably best to act like yourself and hope everything pans out. Not much of a plan, I know, but in some ways fiction is exactly like life…

So there you have it. The next time you find atonal music drifting through the background you’ll be ready, or as ready as anyone ever can be, to face the horrors of… horror. So long as the film has a decent budget you should come out okay.

Cool Things: Scorpion

Posted by natechen on

It’s not often that I talk about TV shows on this blog, much less ones that are still in the airing. Scorpion only has a couple episodes under it’s belt so far and that makes talking about it meaningfully even more difficult. I still think it’s still worth your consideration.

The premise is that the Federal Government is building a special unit to deal with unique, highly sophisticated technological crimes. So far, so good. There’s been a lot of programs with that premise in the past, we live in an age of evolving information technology with an ever-greater impact on our lives and people are still grappling with the implications that has on their safety and security.

The thing about Scorpion is that it’s as much a comedy as it is a thriller. You see, four of the five main characters are certifiable geniuses with attendant impediments to proper social functioning. From the moment we see Walter O’Brien breaking up with his girlfriend and, in the process presenting her with a flowchart that will help her work through the emotions that she’ll be dealing with, we know that the people we’re about to meet are not normal.

Scorpion is a goofy mashup of 24 and The Big Bang Theory, chalk full of looming disasters, technobabble and humorous social awkwardness. But where 24 is all about the suspense and The Big Bang Theory celebrates geekiness with the nudge-nudge-wink-wink glee of an insider, Scorpion is more about how the brilliance of some minds leaves them isolated.

The heart and soul of Scorpion is less Walter and his quartet of geniuses. It’s not even Paige, their girl Friday, who is the social buffer they need to interact well with “normal” society. At least as far as I’ve seen, as of this writing, the heart of the show is Ralph, Paige’s son.

Walter first meets Ralph at the diner just after he breaks up with his girlfriend. Ralph has been suspended from school – and not for the first time from the sound of things – and has gone with his single mother to work. Walter sees him pushing objects around on the diner’s counter in a seemingly random fashion and he watches for a moment. Then he steps over and starts pushing salt shakers and creamer packets himself. After a few seconds Paige interrupts and Walter leaves, but not before telling her she needs to help her son. Walter could see what she missed.

Ralph was playing chess.

Paige thinks her son is slower than normal kids, handicapped in some way. On their next meeting, Walter is forced to tell her, “I’m sorry, but you’re son’s a genius.”

In our society we tend to think of people who are better than us at something as privileged and special. Scorpion is a TV show about how they’re also awkward and difficult. That doesn’t mean we can’t connect with them, but it’s going to take a lot of effort. Walter and his team are a larger than life portrait of why that’s worthwhile – thanks to a Homeland Security agent that realizes their potential they’re out to save the US one problem at a time.

But Ralph embodies Scorpion’s real message. Paige tells Walter her nail polish is streaky because Ralph likes to paint and he puts it on every morning. “He doesn’t like to paint,” Walter tells her. “He wants to hold your hand, but doesn’t know how to process physical contact.”

Even “mentally enabled” people like Ralph and Walter face a host of challenges just making it through the day. They need love, support and understanding just as much as the next person. Unfortunately, in today’s society there’s a tendency to say, “Oh, they’re smart, they can handle it” and leaving it at that. Scorpion makes a convincing case for the smart people we know very much needing the understanding and help of people who’s strengths lie in other areas.

Scorpion is still a new show, the cast isn’t entirely comfortable in their roles yet and there’s no telling if the writing will continue to be as strong and effectively character driven as the first couple of episodes, which are all I’ve seen as of this writing. But it promises to deal with a rarely addressed topic in an insightful, meaningful and entertaining way. And that makes it more than worthy of your attention.

Cool Things: Balance and Ruin

Posted by natechen on

Video games are considered a lot of things these days but an art form is rarely one of them. That’s too bad, since there are several aspects of them that require very careful craftsmanship to be done right and it’s the mastery of craft under difficult conditions to communicate our thoughts that creates great art. One of the aspects of video games that’s seen the most forceful realization of this principle is the creation of music for them.

In the early days, when Nintendo was making the first installments of it’s well known Mario and Zelda franchises the technology available could only really create a single tone at a time. To create music that would really inspire the sense of adventure and fun that went with those early games the composers probably spent days writing simple, powerful melodies one note at a time that would go on to define a generation. Don’t believe me? Listen to the theme from Mario 1-1.

Now find a person between the age of fifteen and forty. Whistle the first three notes of that tune and at least two thirds of those people will not only join you by the third note but go on to complete the entire tune. The music was that strong, that memorable, that good.

Now Mario is a cultural touchstone, his face is almost synonymous with video games and it’s no surprise that his tunes would be well known, too. There are plenty of other examples of video game music as art, rather than just part of commercialized escapism. The influence just isn’t as widely felt.

One of the key things that sets great art apart is that it inspires. By this standard some people might argue that video game music falls short. They will suggest that the music behind a mindless diversion can’t possibly serve to inspire others to create. To these people I offer one small glimpse of just how far down the rabbit hole goes.

The name is Balance and Ruin.

It’s a seventy four track album of music assembled by the OverClocked Remix community and inspired by Final Fantasy Six.

OC Remix is a community devoted to exploring video game music as an art form and most of their work are remixes, reimaginings of old music through new technology or stylistic choices. Several people in the OC Remix community have gone on to work as professional musicians. Their tributes to game music is more than derivative – in fact, a panel of community judges must approve each piece of music not only for artistic and musical quality but originality – and it shows a creativity that is always impressive and sometimes breathtaking.

It’s very, very hard to adequately describe music with text and explaining how all those tunes fit in to the massive, multilayered story that makes up FF6 is way beyond the scope of a single post. So I’ve decided to let the music speak for itself, since the OC Remix community has made their work available for free. I’ve picked three tracks from Balance and Ruin that show how the music has really inspired the creation of solid art.

First, Ascension of a Madman, based on the anthem of the game’s villain.

You can just feel the insanity bursting out, right? Here’s something a little more upbeat to help settle down those brainwaves. Don’t ask why it’s called Train Suplex. It would take too long to explain.

So those two tracks are peppy and fairly fast paced. But one of the most famous, most artistic moments in FF6 is the opera sequence. You understand what I mean if you’ve played it and if you haven’t, well, my explaining it won’t help you. So I’ll let Jillian Aversa try it for me. Seriously, if you can listen to this and not hear art you have no soul and should spend more time getting that fixed and less time talking about what is or is not art.

If you’re interested in finding and listening to the whole album the OC Remix community page for it is here: http://ocremix.org/album/46/final-fantasy-vi-balance-and-ruin

Cool Things: William Shakespeare’s Star Wars

Posted by natechen on

That immortal bard, Shakespeare, is possibly one of the single best known playwrights in the world. So what would it be like if he had tried his hand at writing science fiction? That’s the question Ian Doescher seeks to answer with his William Shakespeare’s Star Wars trilogy. Verily, A New Hope, The Empire Striketh Back and The Jedi Doth Return are three gleeful, tongue in cheek romps through the twin mythos of Shakespeare and Lucas, blending thoughtful soliloquies with starfighter action in a weird but fun reminder that there really are no new stories, just new takes on them.

This trilogy has plenty to love, from the irreverent twisting of old soliloquies to new circumstances to hilarious illustrations of how the play might be staged, these books are love letters to both sets of source material and a reminder that we love stories best when we enjoy them. Doescher does a great job both painting the movie characters and scenes we know so well while letting the format of Elizabethan theater give further insight into characters that the franchise, due to it’s early limits, explored in other media or the eventual prequels.

You can do a lot with these texts. Obviously, you can just read them, and believe me that’s a lot of fun. But you can also get together with a dozen friends or so and have a hilarious night doing a dramatic reading of them. I did this about a month ago and it was incredible fun. In this way you, like the people of most times up until a hundred years ago, can make your own entertainment and participate in the process, things modern entertainment rarely allows for.

You might even explore staging these shows, although between the difficulties of staging, costuming and finding a large enough cast, to say nothing of the legal challenges inherent in messing with someone else’s IP (especially one as big as Star Wars) make this a daunting prospect..

But most of all these scripts are interesting for what they say about the stories themselves. The timelessness of the characters far surpass the language or the medium used to convey them to us. That’s one of the reasons great art has such enduring qualities, why people are motivated to try and marry such diverse concepts as Shakespeare and Star Wars in the first place.

A careful reading of these texts, especially in comparison with the movies that inspired them, say a lot about the structure of story and relatable characters. Just try not to do it while you’re eating unless you want to spray food all over your kitchen table.

It’s a real hazard, believe me.

Whatever you do, should you choose to peruse these strange yet familiar texts, enjoy yourself. Even the best of these kind are but shadows, after all…

Cool Things: Maximum Overdrive

Posted by natechen on

Try to imagine, if you would, what would happen if you had a pair of Klingons who had been raised their whole life by Vikings in the tradition of Nordic myth and then learned to speak English and play the electric guitar. Time travel would obviously be involved and I’m not sure it wasn’t a part of what created Dragonforce, one of England’s more recent rock exports to the world at large. At the very least it would certainly explain a lot.

Dragonforce, for those of you not familiar with the band, is a British power metal group, formed near the end of the last millennium and founded on the guitar sounds created by their two lead players, Herman Li and Sam Totman. These two men have one goal in life, namely to play the guitar as fast as is humanly possible. They are very, very good at it. In fact, they may very well be the best in the world.

That said, Dragonforce’s early discography has some notable weaknesses. It’s been said that they basically only play two songs, a power ballad and a sort of upbeat power metal. It’s hard to argue with that – a lot of their songs on their early albums are very similar and most of the rest border on identical. Listening to their sophomore album, Sonic Firestorm, is a lot like listening to a single, hour long track. On the other hand, that album has some if their defining songs on it and the music is good, it just sometimes feels like it’s overstaying its welcome. And for a band noted for routinely cranking out tracks six to eight minutes long a focus on epic scope is kind of to be expected.

The lyrics on those albums are not anything impressive. It’s laced with fantasy imagery and largely focuses on bloody conflict and overcoming it by courage and determination. While having the grit to face such dire challenges is an important thing to strive for and the musical style Dragonforce embraces certainly goes along with such themes, there’s nothing else there on those early albums. It’s pure escapism.

This technically brings us to The Power Within (2012), Dragonforce’s second most recent album, where the band began to show more variation both lyrically and musically. However this post is mostly about Maximum Overdrive (2014), which came out about a month ago and most of what I’ve got to say applies to both albums so let’s skip to the present.

First, Maximum Overdrive has about five different musical aesthetics, four if you remove their cover of “Ring of Fire” by Johnny Cash. This gives the album a little more musical diversity than earlier albums, which is definitely welcome. Now it’s not to say that Totman and Li’s fascination with fast guitar playing is bad. Quite the contrary, that’s the band’s claim to fame and something you really can’t get anywhere else. But a little variation in how it’s delivered is good.

Second, the band’s lyrical depth has been growing. If you get the Special Edition album off of Amazon it comes with a total of fifteen tracks, three of which are stark departures from the usual lyrical themes. “City of Gold” focuses on a young girl who’s left home to try and make it in Hollywood only to find herself homeless instead. “Extraction Zone” examines the difficulties of video game addiction and what might drive a person to it (a theme already explored some in “Give Me the Night” on The Power Within although that song is about drug addiction.) Finally, “You’re Not Alone” is a powerful song about recovering from grief after the death of a loved one.

Quite a difference from old songs that were basically The Ring of Nibelung set to electric guitar (not there’s anything wrong with that.) All the songs still offer a perspective about overcoming extreme difficulty to gain great reward, which goes nicely with Dragonforce’s musical style, and it is nice to hear that the band thinks that’s as much a part of the real world as it is the myths and legends the band clearly loves so much.

Dragonforce is not a musical experience for everyone. But it is a must for fans of excellent guitar technique and inspiring music.

Cool Things: Prince of Foxes

Posted by natechen on

Prince of Foxes is a work of historical fiction by Samuel Shellabarger set in the long ago days of Italy during the era of the free cities, specifically during the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, as the power of Cesare Borgia was at it’s zenith. As the name implies, the book centers on a character who prizes himself on cunning and subtlety – although the relative value of those things is left more for the reader to decide on his own.

The plot revolves around Andrea Orsini, a young noble and chevalier (or knight) in the service of Cesare Borgia, who’s working his way up the ranks of Borgia’s court and has just been assigned his first political mission (as opposed to a combat mission.) Andre faces a lot of problems along the way – he’s lying about who he is, he’s fallen in love with a married woman and he winds up dueling one of the most proficient chevaliers of his era on something of a fool’s errand. And then there might be the little part where he adds to his problems by deciding to betray one of the most powerful men in the land for the sake of outdated notions of love and honor…

At the very heart of the conflict is the growing and competing notions of honor and self interest Andre holds. On the one hand, Andre prides himself on being very modern and quietly sneers at the values of honor and chivalry that so many of the foreign knights espouse. That’s not without cause – Northern Italy was one of the richest parts of Europe at the time and wouldn’t be eclipsed until it’s poor avenues of trade to the American continents gave the advantage to England and the Dutch, and they got there in part by shedding feudal ways of living often upheld by notions of honor and duty. But they were also ways that Borgia would take them back to.

On the other hand, the Lord Varano, an old soldier who has lived by the code of honesty and respect for all people, is the embodiment of the Italian free city. He serves his people as much as they serve him and he lives chivalry rather than preaching it. He has married Camilla, Andrea’s love interest, for her protection and not out of romance or a desire for heirs. Varano respects his people’s rights because that is the honorable thing to do in his mind, providing a picture of honor and chivalry that upholds something worthwhile rather than something cynical and self-serving, like Borgia and the serfdom he’s seeking to go back towards. Neither honor or cynicism are ideals, it turns out, but rather tools to uphold either freedom or slavery – and it’s these Andre has to choose between.

Although Andrea has been promised Varano’s city and wife by Borgia, if only Andrea will help take them by treachery and murder, ultimately Borgia doesn’t view Andre as his equal as the old man and his wife do. In no long period of time Andre will have to decide where his loyalties lie and each choice comes with unpleasant consequences.

This story has pretty much everything you might like from a good piece of historical fiction. A wealth of real, historical figures, a backdrop of events of great consequence – although little discussed now, Italy of this time period was a testing ground for democratic principles like citizen’s rights – and most important of all, fictional characters that blend seamlessly into the historical narrative. It also grapples with questions of what it means to be a man, to lead people and where the place of God and honor (or societal pressures if you want to be technical) fit in it all.

While the plot moves pretty slowly by modern standards that is fairly reasonable for a book over seventy years old and not all tales of intrigue hinge on how fast events move. Prince of Foxes is one that prefers to entrap readers by how much pressure it puts on. The story is chock full of characters, real and imagined, noteworthy for their cunning. There’s at least three different agendas at work most of the time and gambits pile up pretty high by the end. At the same time, at least one protagonist gets through most of the book totally ignorant of all the machinations and if you can’t follow them all either you won’t be any worse off.

If what you want is a good story with memorable characters who do a little scheming and a little standing on principle, this is one of the best books I can recommend. On the other hand if all you want is a good yarn well told this is… still one of the better options out there.

And if you want a hero without fear and above reproach, it’s got that too.

So go read it! It’s worth your time.

Cool Things: The Lego Movie

Posted by natechen on

Confession time: I was fully prepared to hate this movie.

This is mainly due to my viewing the trailer and assuming that, as is so often the case, I’d seen the best parts of the movie. It turns out that not only is this not the case, it’s so far from the truth as to be kind of laughable. The biggest misconception the trailer gives is that this is a movie about Legos. It is not.

The Lego Movie is a film about people playing with Legos. This makes all the difference.

I have fond memories of playing with Legos when I was young (and when I was not so young and I anticipate doing it some more when my niece gets older) so I remember the fun of mashing all the pieces together and making something cool. Essentially, that’s what The Lego Movie is all about.

Yes, it’s true that the movie leans on a lot (too many, in my opinion) of stupid pop-culture references that won’t make sense to much of anyone in five years. But even if you took all those away you would have a solid and meaningful movie  that works on two levels.

The first level is the story of Emmett. Emmett is a Lego construction worker who lives in a world of Legos. Every day he gets up, pulls out his instruction book and does exactly what’s expected of him. He goes through the same routine, builds the buildings, listens to the proscribed music and works for the totalitarian government of Lord Business – we’ve been here before, right? There’s really no need to rehash the plot, you’ve seen it at least a dozen times.

What sets Emmett’s half of the story apart are a couple of things. First, Emmett is (mostly) humble. He’s told he’s “the special” but has a hard time seeing it, since most of the people he’s working with are so much more experienced and skillful than he is (and let’s face it, one of those people is Batman.) But more than that, what’s impressive is Emmett’s ability to work with the Master Builders.

These are the heroes of the Lego world, people who can take the parts around them and build new and amazing things out of them. Emmer’s told he must be one but he can’t figure out how to do what they do. Ironically it will turn out to be Emmett’s ability to get the other Master Builders to work together in spite of their quirks and follow the directions no matter how much they dislike the limits on their creativity that is his greatest strength.

Ultimately we find that it’s not creativity or a lack thereof that’s making things difficult for people in Lego Land. You see there’s more to it than just a case of an overbearing would-be dictator. There’s also the Man Upstairs – which is to say, the people who are playing with the Legos. The Lego Movie is also about a man and his son, both of whom love Legos.

Unfortunately, the grown man has come to see Legos as his way to control his life – if things aren’t exactly as he wants them he flips out (we never see this behavior directly but that’s how Lord Business reacts and the two are obviously meant to reflect one another.) His son, on the other hand, clearly admires everything his father is capable of and just wants to join him in the fun, in his own way.

The two stories parallel one another to a conclusion that is both satisfying and, better yet, reflective of real life. Emmett and his human friend don’t triumph over their antagonists, they convince them to have a change of heart. And that is a true victory.

So, much to my surprise the story was awesome. So was seeing all the Lego guys running around doing their Lego things. A brilliant bit of humor comes from the addition of non-Lego things to the Lego world, like Lord Business’ ultimate weapon, the Kraggle (a tube of Krazy Glue that has gunk over a few of the letters) or the sword of Exact Zero (the blade tip of an X-acto knife.)

The various cameos by other franchises like Star Wars or the DC Superheroes don’t really add a whole lot to the movie (other than the Millennium Falcon’s conveniently providing a MacGuffin) but neither do they really harm the story, either. They’re just sort of there and most people will probably be able to live with that. The pop culture throwaway lines are dead weight but they don’t harm the story much.

The biggest strike against the movie is it’s pace – it’s aimed primarily at kids with short attention spans so it jumps from one thing to another at a rate that’s going to be too fast for some people to be fully comfortable with.

The Lego Movie is a CG film that’s aiming to duplicate Legos, so it’s not breaking any ground in the cinematography department, but I will say both the zany action sequences and the building sequences, both of which play out in the same kind of rapid fire real time that you used to see in Lego commercials, are a huge joy to watch. And the movie has a very catchy soundtrack with one song in particular that you, like the Lego people, will probably have to live with all day for at least one day. Whether you enjoy it or not is up to you.

In all, The Lego Movie is a great film for all ages, so long as you won’t have a seizure from the frequently breathless pacing. So go check it out and relive – or discover, or just plunge deeper into – the joy of Legos.