The “evil Santa” trope has been around for ages…. or it least it seems that way. Krampus doesn’t count (no matter what the contrarians trying to revive his legend might think), nor does Santa Claus Conquers the Martians. For some reason, the idea of the traditional holiday bringer of cheer becoming the holiday bringer of death is popular with the producers of cheap horror films. The producers of Santa’s Slay decided to take that idea, toss what must have been some decent cash at it, and turn it into a comedy.
Category Archives: Reviews
Reviews of books, movies, what have you.
Book Review: Things to Make and Do in the Fourth Dimension
Things to Make and Do in the Fourth Dimension
Matt Parker
Farrar, Straus and Giroux (2014)
Physicist Stanislaw Ulam was bored. Stuck in the middle of an interminable lecture, he started doodling on a piece of graph paper. Starting with “1” and going outwards, he made a spiral pattern of all the positive integers. Then, he marked off all the prime numbers in the spiral. Something odd popped out. Prime numbers weren’t distributed randomly, as one might think. They tended to lie in clusters along diagonal lines. It turns out that this is NOT random, but why it is so is still a puzzle.
Self-described “stand-up mathematician” Matt Parker has turned his videos at Numberphile into book form (and added a few more fascinating topics). Like those videos, the book covers the entire world of mathematics. From counting in different base systems to packing coins into squares to untangling knots to the many different types of numbers, it’s all presented in a delightful and easy-to-follow manner.
Book Review: Ready Player One
Ready Player One
Ernest Cline
Random House, 2011
This highly regarded (and being made into a movie) novel left me, well, a little flat. It’s like a slice of chocolate cake prepared by a master baker. Sure, it’s lovely to look at and tastes magnificent, but in the end, it’s not really satisfying as a full meal.
The creator of a truly massive online world died a few years prior to the action of the story, and has left both his multibillion fortune and control of the company that manages this super-MMORPG to the first person who successfully solves a set of puzzles hidden in that world. Our hero, Wade Watts, manages to discover the location of the first puzzle – and solves it. Naturally, he attracts the attention of an EEEvil megacorporation, whose owner wants to win just to extend the power of his business empire.
Turns out all the puzzles have to do in some way with 1980s computer culture – games, movies, and music. This makes it a rather decent nostalgic romp through that era, which is what all the critics and reviewers seem to love.
I liked the ride, too, having been a young adult at the time, and having actually played the games and seen the movies referenced. But after I put the book down, disillusion set in.
Wade comes upon the solutions to the puzzles just a little too easily. There’s never any sense that he is being challenged, or even in any danger. It is a problem for anything set in a virtual world, admittedly, but even in the one occasion where he is actually physically threatened, it turns out that Wade set up the entire situation.
There’s a heck of a lot that’s unsaid in Cline’s world building. The novel is set in a world of scarce resources, to the point that it takes on a post-apocalyptic vibe. But the idea that the U.S. is in such a crappy state precisely because everyone is spending so much time in the online world (Wade even attends school there) that the real world has been allowed to go to rot is unexplored. Even the fact that indentured servitude has become legal again (you can be outright kidnapped by a private corporation and forced to work for them to pay off a debt) is tossed off without comment or elaboration.
Cline has some good ideas, but I think he should have spent a little more time with actual world-building than playing games in some 1980s fantasyland.
Movie Review: Attack the Block (UK, 2011)
It’s Guy Fawkes Night in South London, and a young woman (Jodie Whittaker) is walking home from work. As she approaches her home in a public housing complex, a gang of teenaged thugs surround and proceed to mug her. Before they can complete their task, something crashes down into a parked car at the side of the street. Moses (John Boyega), the gang’s leader, goes to investigate, and is slashed in the face for his trouble. This assault cannot go unpunished, so their mugging victim forgotten, the gang tracks down the wild animal responsible.
The thing is tracked down to a shed in a playground, and is quickly beaten to death. Moses carries the body back home as a trophy, but it takes him and the rest of the gang a while to realize that the thing is no earthly creature. And when a number of flaming objects start landing in the neighborhood in the same way that their victim arrived, they are in for a whole heck of a lot of trouble….
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Movie Review: The Great Yokai War (2005, Japan)
Movie buffs tired of seeing the same old rehashes or sequels really should give a look at what other countries are doing. Sure, you’ll have to deal with subtitles and a lot of little cultural differences, but you don’t have to be Joseph Campbell to realize that certain stories are universal. Priests are always going to be going into battle with the devil over the souls of the departed, romance is romance no matter what language the lovers speak, and young people are always going to go through rites of passage into adulthood.
Book Review: The Last Unicorn
The Last Unicorn: A Search for One of Earth’s Rarest Creatures
by William DeBuys
Little, Brown and Company
2015
It starts right in the middle of the “action” DeBuys is on a boat in the middle of the Nakai Reservoir, the lake formed by the construction of the Nam Theun 2 Hydropower Project (NT2) in central Laos. The project is the largest hydroelectric power plant in the country, producing so much electricity that there’s a surplus available for export to Thailand. The reservoir is so new that trees in the flooded area are still standing, an eerie reminder of what was there.
The reservoir itself borders the Nakai–Nam Theun National Biodiversity Conservation Area. A percentage of revenue from the dam is supposed to be directed to conservation efforts there. And that area is where DeBuys is headed – to track down the elusive saola.
Movie Review: Russian Ark (Russia, 2002)
I’m sure you’ve heard the basics of this film. One long, single take of a walk through the Hermitage in St. Petersburg, and Russian history. The techical achievement is amazing, but for me the historical element was very minor. Sure, there were scattered references to historical figures and events, but they were in no real order. Nor was the movie a guided tour of the Hermitage. If there is a plot or a message, it’s that museums serve as repositories of civilization.
The whole thing was intended to come across as a dream – and it does that extremely well.
BOOK REVIEW: Independence: The Tangled Roots of the American Revolution
by Thomas P. Slaughter
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2014
Pity the poor high school teacher of American History. They have so much required material to cover, along with an assortment of topics mandated by various outside agencies, that they cannot possibly cover everything, much less make what they do cover interesting.
I know from my own education (way back in the Mists of Time – the 1980s, to be precise), that when it came to American history we were briefed on the colonies in Jamestown and Plymouth – and then suddenly it was a century and a half later, and the Revolutionary War was starting in Boston. Slaughter attempts to rectify this omission.
Movie Review: A Chinese Ghost Story (1987)
Usually, when someone tells you a movie “has everything”, they are either lying or the movie tries to “have everything”, but it fails utterly at putting them together in a rational and balanced manner. A Chinese Ghost Story (literally: “The Ethereal Spirit of a Beauty”) has romance, action, horror, and comedy – and actually does integrate all of them successfully.
Ning Tsai-Shen (Leslie Cheung), a novice tax collector, arrives in a small town to carry out his work. Unsurprisingly, no-one is willing to give him a place to stay, so he ends up spending the night in a nearby ruined temple. There, he meets Taoist swordsman Yen Che-Hsia (Ma Wu), who tries to warn him away. But with nowhere else to go, he holes up in the ruins. There he meets the beautiful Nieh Hsiao-Tsing (Joey Wang), with whom he falls in love. Unfortunately, Hsiao-Tsing is a ghost, enslaved to a demon who uses a group of young women ghosts to sustain her by sucking the life out of men….
The gods must watch over novice tax collectors, since Tsai-Shen manages to somehow escape one peril after another. For example, on his arrival in the town, he is shoved up against a rack of scroll charms. They stick to his wet robe, causing him to be accused of theft. But that night in the temple, when he meets Hsiao-Tsing, it turns out that the fresh ink on the scrolls stained the back of his robe…and the charms were for Protection Against Ghosts….
Can this odd couple overcome the gulf between them and find happiness? Will Tsai-Shen’s luck run out, and have him become another victim of the spirits and undead inhabiting the temple? Will the demon find out that Hsiao-Tsing is betraying her by helping Tsai-Shen? Is Che-Hsia’s “Taoist Rap” one of the most awesome things ever committed to film? And just what the heck is the deal with that tongue?
The action sequences are amazingly well executed, the romance between Cheung and Wang is believable (and the pair are both easy on the eyes), the comic moments are deftly handled, and the scary parts are done very well. The artifice does show through a bit in some of the demonic scenes, but to Western viewers, the unfamiliarity with Chinese supernatural concepts is enough to compensate.
About the only thing wrong with this movie that I can see is that it is widely regarded as the epitome of Hong Kong cinema. So if this is your first exposure to that genre, you will have to live with the disappointment that no matter how much you look, you’ll be hard-pressed to find anything better.
NOTE: There is an animated version of the same tale from 1997 (by the same producer), two sequels, and another movie (presumably a remake) of the same name from 2011. I haven’t seen any of them.
ANOTHER NOTE: Chinese names can be troublesome for a Westerner to get right. Forgive this humble “round-eye” if I have miswritten any of them.
Book Reveiw: Operation Nemesis
Operation Nemesis:
The Assassination Plot that Avenged the Armenian Genocide
Eric Bogosian
Little, Brown and Company, 2015
This year marks another centennial; one that is going with very little memorial or commemoration, or even much more than a passing nod in the general press. In 1915, using World War I military operations against the Russian Empire as a cover, the Ottoman Empire began a program to systematically wipe out Armenians in their territory.
For various reasons, many countries still haven’t gotten around to calling it what it was: genocide. It’s not like Armenia is really going around demanding reparations or punishment for those responsible. After all, it was a century ago and everyone responsible is dead. In fact, some of those deaths were the direct result of the Armenians themselves.
Pure Blather 