TV Series Review: Agent Carter

Sorry that this is late folks, there's no really good answer for it except general tiredness coupled with knowing this was going to be a long review and not wanting to start it. Since I did really love this show, hence why I knew it was going to be a longer one! 

Agent Carter

Comic Review: The Shadow Hero

I heard Gene Luen Yang talk about this book at Small Press Expo 2013 and it sounded like a pretty cool idea, take an older comic which had never gotten off the ground and indulge in some fan theories by redoing it as a Chinese-American superhero for sure and just making a good story out of it. I didn't expect my library to get it but over the past few months I've started seeing more newer manga titles out there and my theory that my branch suddenly has a very savvy librarian was confirmed when I saw a "Sad that Naruto is over? Try these!" display in the window. I was walking out and glanced back over only to see this book there, doubled back, checked that these books were actually available to check out, and then headed home with one more book in an already too-full book bag, hope some other people got something good out of that display as well!

The Shadow Hero written by Gene Luen Yang and illustrated by Sonny Liew

Movie Review: Captain America

Sorry this is late, it's finals week for me and the USB with projects for two of my classes exploded and had to spend a few hours fixing that, fun times. Also, Christmas is coming up really soon which means I'll be traveling around so the updates might be a bit wonky. I have plenty of things to type about it's just a matter of getting my computer to agree with the local wi-fi, fingers crossed that my laptop will be in a good mood.

So here it is, the last movie I'm watching on campus for the year and there's not much else to say to introduce it. This is the last Marvel movie before The Avengers coming out this summer (it even has Avenger in the title) and was meant to introduce the last big member of the group (since the Black Widow and Hawkeye only got cameos in Iron Man 2 and Thor and no one knows what's up with Nick Fury, I've heard that even Joss Whedon, who directed the movie, knows his backstory) and it did that pretty well.

Captain America: The First Avenger

Summary: It's World War II and Steve Rodgers just really wants to go to Europe to fight Nazis on the front lines. Trouble is that he is a 4F, completely unfit for combat, and keeps getting denied until the scientist Abraham Erskine decides that he might be just the kind of man they need for their new combat project to create the perfect soldier.

The Good: I was pleasantly surprised that plot wasn't as straightforward as "Steve Rodgers becomes Captain America and goes to kick Nazi ass," it was actually a bit more complicated to get to that point and it actually worked well both logically and for the plot. I was also surprised that again there was a prominent female side character who was very competent at her job and, since her job is being a British secret agent, she also gets a chance to kick ass. In this respect Captain America is a bit more like Thor than the Iron Man movies since both of them have a bigger side cast that gets a chance to be more fleshed out, something the movies really didn't need to do since, well, if The Avengers is set in the modern day you can already guess the ending.   

The Bad: While the plot progression worked and was logical there were times it just felt too slow to me in the early parts of the movie. It probably wouldn't feel as slow a second time around but for a while I was wondering how they were ever going to get to Nazi Germany. There were also some scenes that seemed too over the top and unrealistic, even for a superhero movie (mostly the parts involving Hydra, the actual villains of the movie) and at times Red Skull was just so hammy that i couldn't help but roll my eyes. The movie wasn't my favorite of the Marvel superhero films but it was a solid entry regardless.

The Audio: One again the music in this movie stood out much less to me than the visuals. The only piece that really stands out to me was a scene towards the end where there is a radio playing in the background and I liked how the sound people had gone to the trouble to make it sound like an authentic 1940s transmission (and considering nothing jerked me out of the movie they must have payed the same amount of attention to everything else).

The Visuals: The CGI in this movie didn't look as sharp to me as it could have and some of my friends, who had seen the movie once already, noticed the same inconsistent bits in places. It's a given that a superhero movie is going to need CGI to achieve quite a few scenes but with movies as high budget as these the CGI doesn't seem to be quite top of the line. For the traditional bits on screen I rather liked them, I'm fond of 1940s clothing and style and the movie did a good job at making these things look both historically authentic and like real set pieces or articles of clothing. Nothing looked shiny and fresh, they looked aged and used which was a very nice touch. And of course, the CGI used to make Captain America's actor look like a super scrawny person at first was exceedingly well done. I was really curious to see how well this turned out since I know of another movie in the planning stages who want to use this same group for body modification CGI and now I really want to see what else they can do. 

Tangentially related to this, the other night my friends and I marathoned the two Iron Man movies back to back and after seeing this and Thor relatively recently we noticed something interesting. In Thor we are introduced to both a seemingly magical device called the tessecrat (or apparently the cosmic cube according to wikipedia) and one of the characters also figures out that the "magic" of the gods is in fact highly advanced science. This tessecrat appears in Captain America (it's the little blue device that Red Skull obtains from the monastery that powers one of their weapons and Howard Stark experiments with it) and then in the stinger in Thor (I think they had just recovered it from Captain America's plane). My friends figured out however that whatever the tessecrat is is the new element that Tony Stark created in the second Iron Man movie and it was based on plans that his father had left behind. I think this is a really neat little subplot that Marvel has woven through their movies and it also took care of some of my issues with Iron Man 2 so kudos to Marvel so putting in some serious thought for how to connect these movies in more than just a superficial manner.   

Book Review: What I Saw And How I Lied

I was browsing at the local library and only meant to grab one or two books there, these days I don't have as much time to read so I try to keep my to-read stack a little smaller (emphasis on "try") but this book caught my eye as I was browsing and it was a small one so I figured why not. It was historical fiction (1947 so right after World War II, rather interesting since there are tons of books set during wars but not enough set after them) and realistic fiction which I do make an effort to read to try and balance out all the "less" realistic kinds of fiction I read. I was surprised, although I probably shouldn't have, to find even more Jewish characters in this book (which I mentioned in the updated Diversity post) but I'm glad they were there since one of them ended up being my favorite character in the book.

What I Saw And How I Lied by Judy Blundell

  An interesting cover and I thought it really evoked the feeling of 1940s/50s glamor, a style of beauty that really looks different from current day fashion trends. I also felt like that portrait portrayed the main character, Evie, very well and had no trouble believing this was a picture of her.

Summary: World War II has ended and life has returned to normal for Evie and her mother which, while boring, is stable. But one night her stepfather announces that they are traveling to Florida for a week and Evie is thrilled at the chance for something different in her life and is even happier when she meets a young man at their hotel and falls for him. But she discovers that everyone there is keeping secrets, some benign some malicious, and that those secrets affect everyone there, even her.

The Good: There were some lines that Evie, Joe (her step-father), and Peter (her crush) said during the book that really stuck out to me that I really liked. Both Joe and Peter are WWII veterans and both of them make a comment or two along the lines of "I thought life would be different after the war, after what we had been through and fought for, but nothing changed," and that really resonated with me since, as far as I can tell from growing up, unless you know people in the war they are really distant things and that's why we need fewer stories set in war and more set afterwords, to remind us of the things they do affect. And there was a line by Evie to the hotel manager, who has just kicked out characters who have just been outed as Jewish, about how it was wrong to get so much pleasure out of kicking them out for nothing, one of Evie's few observant moments in the book is noticing this as it happens so I was glad to see she didn't just think about it but also said something.

The Bad: I was fairly naive at 15 myself so I often use a measuring stick when a naive character appears, if they are even less knowledge about the world than I was (without extenuating circumstances) then they start to be unrealistic. Evie comes off as unrealistic which is doubly annoying since her character development centers around her becoming more knowledgeable about the world and the growth seems much too fast and out of the blue. She isn't growing over the course of the book, she seems to grow between scenes in the final 50 pages, so I found the ending a bit jarring and, while I liked what events had occurred, I didn't like how the characters got there and found myself really frustrated with the book. It's a character driven book and I just could not sympathize with the main character for most of it, thought the side characters were getting what they deserved and that all the bit characters were completely flat people created to up the tension, this did not work for me.    

So, in the end this book just did not work for me and I've noticed that I'm more disappointed by realistic fiction books these days than fantasy, it sounds strange but I usually find characters in fantasy works to be much more human characters. I did like the later parts of this book more than the earlier parts but I can't really talk about those parts since that would involve some spoilers (even if leaving them out gives a slightly skewed version of what I thought about this story).

TV Series Review: Doctor Who (The Curse of Fenric)

Hah, you guys thought this would be on season six didn't you? Well I haven't actually had time to watch the last episode yet plus I like to give myself more than a day to reflect on things before I write a review, the timing here is actually just a coincidence. But why did I go back to Classic Who now when I have so much else to watch you might ask, it was actually because of one of the new episodes. Some of my friends on facebook had seen the episode before I had a chance to and were half freaking out half saddened by it so naturally I start speculating what happened. I guessed, from their comments, that something happened to a companion (I guessed it was probably to Amy) came up with a few theories, discarded an obvious one and then thought of something that I had only heard about happening once in Doctor Who and lo and behold that's what happened. I remembered what serial it came from, asked a friend of mine who loves Classic Who if they happened to have the DVDs for it (and they realized immediately why I was asking for them) and it turns out this was one of their favorites as well so I was in luck. And now, back to the Seventh Doctor and amazing companion Ace for a very satisfying serial.

Doctor Who: The Curse of Fenric

Summary: The Doctor and Ace have landed in Northern UK in World War II and the Doctor is intrigued by one of the scientists who is using a code cracking machine to try and translate centuries old Viking runes in the local church crypt. The runes don't tell a happy story though and with mysterious Russian soldiers showing up on the beach will this story end unhappily as well?

The Good: On the advice of my friend I watched the special edition of this serial which had edited together all the episodes into one movie and, going by what my friend said, rearranged some scenes to better match the order they were in the originals script (apparently the order had to be changed to fit in the broadcast times). I liked not having to fast-forward through the opening and ending credits each time so this was a nice feature, although I'm curious which parts were switched around for the tv version. Regardless, Ace is now one of my favorite companions after this episode (partially because she is one of the few to really yell at the Doctor when he's keeping her in the dark) for how resourceful and capable she is. She's a fully recognized character and, something I've pointed out before as a difference between Class and Nu companions, it feels like she's traveling with the Doctor for her own reasons and expects to have some fun and adventures without him, unlike all the current companions who travel with the Doctor just because of the Doctor.

The Bad: Part of the reason I'm so curious about the change in order of events in this serial is because there were several points when I didn't understand why there was a scene change from one to another one, why that second one was so important at that moment, and had a little bit of trouble figuring out what was going on at a few points. The head of the English forces also seemed mad for no reason (was he paranoid? possessed? just plain crazy?) and I was completely confused by his motivations for the entire story, it felt like the writers needed someone to cause problems and that he was the man for the job. Honestly there were a number of little bits about this serial that I either didn't pick up or that confused me, perhaps they would make more sense on a second watch-though but I already knew all the major plot points of this episode and that didn't seem to help much.

The Audio: One thing that I didn't even notice while I was watching is how absolutely none of the English characters sound like they're in northern UK and apparently it was even in the script that some of the actors accents should change but that certainly didn't happen here. The opening theme still sounds incredibly 80s (which for me isn't a good thing) but other than that I was paying more attention to the visuals on screen than any of the background music, background music from live action shows just doesn't stick with me as well for some reason.

The Visuals: My friend mentioned that the special edition included some touch-ups to the special effects and either they were wrong or the touch-ups were really good since none of the special effects jumped out at me in a jarring manner (they still weren't the best but they were regular, Doctor Who level, looking decent effects). The prosthetics on some of the creatures still looked rather silly however (and I wanted to burst out laughing each time the two girls-turned-monsters appeared on screen, such 80s hair) but again, Doctor Who has never had the budget needed to do a lot of really quality special effects.

So a good character episode but I didn't think the actual plot was so great, or at least that it was execute in the past manner it could have been. But oh well, I like the Seventh Doctor and Ace pretty well so I did enjoy this serial pretty well, now let's see how I enjoy the current stuff!