Category Archives: Editorial

by | January 23, 2014 · 6:16 pm

Editorial | Review: Fates

While I was at New York ComicCon, I was fortunate enough to be able to snag several advance copies of some really interesting books.  I am really pleased to be able to review these books before they are available for sale.  Today’s review is Fates, which will go on sale next month.

The cover image and tagline for Lanie Bross’s book were definitely not encouraging.  “There will be no miracles today,” the front cover proclaims.  I opened the book thinking that I was going to read another fairly trite piece of young adult fantasy.  (This is called foreshadowing, and in this case it indicates that the content of the book changed my mind.)

The first couple of chapters were told mostly from the point of view of typical, modern, high school students.  The dialogue is atrocious, and my heart sank.  I was prepared to put the book down.  Then the story seemed to come into its own, and I really started to enjoy it.

Corinthe, the main character, was a Fate, once upon a time.  She made a mistake while doing her job one day, and her punishment was to leave her Eden-esque home in Pyralis (in an alternate dimension) and walk the earth.  She is now an Executor, tasked with carrying out assignments to make sure that humans’ fates proceed according to plan.

The other protagonist, Lucas Kaller, is a human who has been forced to grow up too soon.  His home life fell apart after his mother left the family, and his dad retreated inside himself.  His sister turned to drugs, and Luc was left to keep the pair of them alive, if not functional.

In opposition to the orderliness of the Fates and the current system, a group that call themselves Free Radicals roam between worlds and attempt to bring chaos to all dimensions.

The plotline of Fates is fairly straightforward, with few surprises for the experienced reader.  The heroes go on a quest, feel a strange attraction for one another, and fall in love.  However, the quest itself has some unique twists—Corinthe seeks redemption, while Lucas seeks something else entirely—and the final act of this book is not at all what I expected from fluffy YA fiction.

The setting of this world was well created.  Most of the scenes set on Earth feel like a depiction of a yuppy, California city.  The secondary characters aren’t quite as fleshed out as I would like, but the primary characters are very bright and lifelike.  It is easy to empathize with them.  The prose is simple; the vocabulary is light and pleasing.  I appreciated that the dialogue matured quite a bit once I got through the first few scenes of high schoolers interacting.

Fates caught me by surprise and made me change my initial judgment.  I liked Corinthe a lot by the end.  It certainly is not a classic piece of fiction, but it is very enjoyable, light reading.

This book goes on sale on February 11, and will be available in hardback and e-book form.  I would say that it is worth buying at the e-book price.  Therefore I Geek’s rating is three and a half out of five Death Stars.3.5 Death Stars

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by | January 20, 2014 · 4:30 pm

Editorial | Sherlock, “The Empty Hearse” Reactions & Recap *spoilers*

***** SPOILER ALERT *****

This review will be discussing plot points which may be considered spoilers. Consider yourselves warned.

This is not a review of the first episode of Sherlock season three, “The Empty Hearse.”  No, the season premier has left me with the warm glow of satisfaction that usually accompanies post-coital cuddling.  I’m reduced to a mere reaction, rather than review.

So… Sherlock Holmes isn’t dead.  We already knew that, since British television apparently has not fallen into the silly trap of creating a season’s end cliffhanger for no reason other than to frustrate fans.  It was still better to have the mini webisode that appeared several weeks ago, “Many Happy Returns,” which showed us Anderson—now fired as coroner and obsessed with clues of Sherlock’s whereabouts—Lestrade, and Watson all receiving premonitions and oracles that seemed to tell them that Sherlock was indeed alive.

It is well known among my friends that I dislike most female characters.  I usually find them weak, catty, and foolish.  As a reader of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, I knew that Watson would eventually find his future wife and I fully expected to hate her.  Instead, Sherlock’s creators have given us Mary, played by Amanda Abbington (Martin Freeman’s wife IRL).  I enjoyed her performance and I already adore her depiction of Watson’s significant other.

As for Sherlock…  I cried when he met Watson.  I cried when he met Lestrade.  I laughed when he met Mrs. Hudson.  I can be incredibly critical of television shows that have poorly developed characters and inconsistent plotlines, but these characters get to me in a way that I have rarely felt.  I could feel the pain that both Watson and Mrs. Hudson went through, and I could feel how it simultaneously pulled them together and pushed them apart.

Molly is now engaged to someone who looks just like Sherlock.  I don’t want to like her character or be sympathetic to her plight, but I cannot help but feel sorry for her.  The look on her face when she tells Lestrade that she has moved on from Sherlock pleads for someone to believe her words so that she can believe them herself.

I appreciate the use of romantic tropes as metaphors for the relationship between Sherlock and John.  Again I am surprised at how much this amuses me, since I would normally find this humor pedantic and trite.

I loved the pat exchange between Mycroft and Sherlock Holmes regarding the Icelandic hat and the profile of its owner.  It really highlighted for the first time in this show how much alike they are in thought process and intellect.  They are very much brothers.  At the same time, their parents… what to say about their parents?  I honestly did not think we would ever see the elder Mr. and Mrs. Holmes.  To have them appear and seem so normal was rather disconcerting.

I must say that the situation in which John Watson is thrown into on Guy Fawkes day was confusing.  The motorcycle sequence as Sherlock and Mary rush to his rescue was wildly unbelievable and that entire section of plot left me confused.  However, I am learning to have faith in the show’s creators that all of this will make sense in time.  Instead of a pathetic device to move the plot forward, it will most likely turn out to be incredibly important to the rest of the season’s storyline.

Finally, the beautiful and convincing act that Sherlock uses to finally get John to admit to missing him and forgiving him was disturbingly realistic.  I honestly did believe Sherlock (foolish I know) when he said that he had no idea how to disarm the bomb.  My feeble brain thought that John would come up with a way to save Parliament in a shocking plot twist.  Apparently John Watson and I are equally gullible.

This has been a recounting of my reactions to the fantastic first episode of Sherlock just as I felt them.  Post your own reactions in the comments!  (Please avoid spoiling episodes two and three if you’ve already seen them.)  Now if you’ll excuse me, I need to rewatch it and make sure there isn’t anything I missed!

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by | January 15, 2014 · 8:16 pm

Confessions of a Geek: Cinematic Influences, Part 2

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Seeing moments like this on the big screen for the first time was amazing!

Much like Andrew, I enjoy movies as escapist entertainment.  I had a very sheltered childhood and didn’t get to watch a lot of movies.  We did not have a TV in our house, and I was never allowed to go to movie theaters.  (This has bemused many of my friends, especially because I don’t associate popcorn, or food in general, with watching movies).  As an adult, I’ve had to catch up on a lot of pop culture references that I just didn’t understand (for instance, I was an adult before I had seen a Disney animated  movie and I still haven’t seen all of them).  I also often don’t have the nostalgic love for poorly made, cult classic movies and shows.

 I’m a little more demanding about consistency and plot than many moviegoers, which drives my movie loving friends a little crazy.  However, there ARE cinematic influences on my life.  Here are a few of them.

  • Disney’s Treasure Island –this was one of the earliest movies that my siblings and I saw.  I was probably around nine or ten.  We reenacted the movie many times in our backyard, using a large cardboard box as a ship.  Our favorite character was Ben Gunn because of a goofy line, “Many’s the long night I’ve dreamed of cheese–toasted, mostly.”  We were too young (and not British enough) to know what toasted cheese was, of course.
  • Buffy the Vampire Slayer—if my mother only knew how many days I would ask to go down the block to spend the afternoon with my friend Alex and her dog… but we were really watching Buffy. That was the beginning of my love of Joss Whedon, although I didn’t know who he was at the time.
  • Pollyanna—this movie was influential not because of its content, but because in my house every movie was compared to it.  It was actually a very perky, overly bright movie about a little girl who was good all the time.  We kids were supposed to look up to Pollyanna as an example, but she was mostly just annoying.
  • NOT The Wizard of Oz—I put this movie in here because it was NOT actually an influence on me.  This was my mother’s favorite movie when she was a child, and she made the fatal mistake of introducing it to her children when they were teenagers.  Of course, we make snarky comments about how cheesy the movie was, which frustrated her quite a bit.
  • The Lord of the Rings—these were the first movies that I properly “geeked out” about.  The Fellowship of the Ring came out when I was fifteen years old.  By this time, even we had the internet, so I was able to follow the process and development of the movies with intense anticipation.  I will never forget sitting for over an hour waiting for our 54k dialup to load the official trailer so that we could watch it in all its glory.
  • Star Wars: Revenge of the Sith—was the first movie I ever saw in a real movie theater.  I was nineteen years old, and was living on my own.  A friend of mine found out that I had never actually been to the cinema and dragged me along.  I enjoyed the experience but thought (and still think) that it was far too loud.

Those are just a few of the movies and TV shows that have had some profound influence on my life.  Mine are more like milestones of development, but even so, they each mark a significant piece of my life.  What movies have influenced you?  Let me know in the comments! -t

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by | January 13, 2014 · 4:41 pm

Editorial | RegularJOE, and why I like him

The first time I saw Joseph Gordon-Levitt was not Third Rock from the Sun.  It was Inception.  Since then, and especially over the last couple of years, he’s done a lot of stuff  that has caught my eye… and always in a good way.   It’s appropriate that I mention the first time I saw Joseph Gordon-Levitt (or JGL, as he’s lovingly called by his fans—Joseph Golden Rabbit on reddit), because last week, he introduced the world to his new show HitRECord on TV.  Its first episode was about firsts.

The glasses are a not-so-subtle reminder that he’s a geek just like us

Joe’s geek status seems to have originated organically.  His good friend Zooey Deschanel says that when she first met Joe, he was “Very intellectual. Very, very serious and very intense… you would say something, and he would go, ‘What do you mean by that?’ Not a word went unexamined, you know?”  Now, he’s much more open, friendly, and able to express himself freely; and that is also something he admires in others (such as his older brother Dan, who passed away in 2010).

JGL seems to be enthusiastic about everything that he helps create.  I think it is inherently geeky that he is so in love with what he does and shares.  His big box office hits may make him a well known and wealthy man, but he seems incredibly grounded—even drives a 2005 Honda.    His passion appears to actually be about what he does, rather than about making money by doing things.  He has given multiple interviews in which he declaims the idea of “celebrities” and the culture that makes their words and actions more important than those of other people.  On the internet, he goes by “RegularJOE” or “hitRECordJoe,” to put emphasis on his work rather than his status.

Joe believes that the media plays a large—perhaps too large—role in forming public opinion about the way the world is and should be.  “My mom and dad brought me up to question dominant cultural gender roles,” he says at one point.  The “old media,” as he calls it, is on its way out.  Thanks to the connectivity now afforded by the internet, a new type of media is forming in which artists can connect directly with their audience without the Hollywood song-and-dance.

He’s able to geek out about the same types of things that his fans are passionate about.  “Movies are something I care deeply about,” he says, in an interview about Dark Knight Rises, “Often times in our culture, movies are thought of as something more disposable, a bit of entertainment.  That’s not how I feel about them; and it’s great to be a part of something where people aren’t just looking at is as some piece of disposable entertainment but as something that means a lot.”

Now, after his directorial debut with Don Jon, he’s putting his efforts into a new form of art:  HitRECord.  For the past few years, Joe has been working on a project that is now hosted on hitrecord.org.  Creators of all forms of media—singers and songwriters, artists and animators, even just people with fantastic speaking voices—come together to make collaborative pieces.  Now, for the first time, some of these pieces will be on a television show hosted by Joseph Gordon-Levitt himself.

regularJOEJoe seems to have a unique way of reaching out to connect to his fans, and it shows in this project.  It is hard to comprehend how a young man who has acting for the public’s entertainment is able to empathize so perfectly with those who love his work.  Somehow he always does the right thing—like right now, when he released the first episode of his new show HitRECord on TV a week early to his internet fandom, and announced it with an AMA on reddit.  (You can check out the AMA here and the show here).  His sincerity and zeal are obvious—this type of public relations cannot be taught.  Unsurprisingly, this appeal resulted in an enormous response from his fans.  It seems to have worked, because HitRECord on TV has already been picked up for a second season—still a couple of days ahead of its January 18th premier.

It is rare for me to speak so glowingly of anyone—especially a celebrity—but I just really like this guy. I like his down-to-earth style. I like his grasp on social media, and his ability to advertise without appearing to advertise.  I really, really love his enthusiasm for his life and his art.  I’m excited to see what else Joseph Golden Rabbit and his brave new world of media has to show us and wish him the best in all of his endeavors.

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