Genre Character of the Week: Mr. Hublot

Last night I went out with friends and family to see the live action and animated short film nominations for this years Oscars.  The films are all pretty great and well worth watching, but the standout for me was the animated short, Mr. Hublot. 

The film focuses on a robotic citizen of a future city, who clearly has a few issues, (OCD being one of them), and his attempts to live a quiet life.

As the film was only 11 minutes long, I don't really want to spoil it past that, but the animation was great, the film created a wonderful world for its characters and I couldn't stop smiling all the way through.

Choosing my next Horror Series

So this week the universe answered my Necroscope question from a few weeks back, the copy I had purchased from my local used book store was a few pages shy, actually five pages, the last five pages, which meant that if I wanted to read the third book in the series I would have to find another copy.

So now I get to decide which horror series I'm going to follow next - although to be fair it may not be a specific series by one author, maybe I'll hit the award winners again or just go through my ever-increasing shelf of books I mean to get around to reading someday.

One quick stop in the horror genre I'm definitely going to be making however, is Ed Brubaker and Sean Phillips series Fatale, which melds film noir-style crime stories with H.P. Lovecraft style horror.  At this point I've read the first collection and it was pretty amazing; moody, intriguing and really, really creepy.

So, while I'm looking for great horror series, if you happen to know of any, feel free to send a comment my way!

Book Review: Revival #1: You're Among Friends

Last fall in Library School I took a course on Comic Books and Graphic Novels in public and school libraries, and during that course I wrote a paper on the current stuff at Image Comics.

It's funny because going into the course I knew Image for three titles; Spawn, Savage Dragon, and The Walking Dead (of which I'm a pretty huge fan).  Little did I know that the publishing company had a number of other titles I should have been reading.

Number one of them was Hack/Slash - which I spent all of last October focusing on, but after finishing my paper I ended with a large number of titles to check out.

First up was Hack/Slash author Tim Seeley's series Revival.  In many ways you can think of it as Images other zombie book.

In the story a small town changes dramatically over the couse of an afternoon when all of the towns dead apparently come back to life.  Unlike in Kirkman's The Walking Dead, they aren't mindless killing creatures, but are instead the same people they were before, only a little different.

I really don't want to spoil this series (also it would be hard for me as I've just started it myself), but it does a great job of mixing Gothic Horror with Zombie themes.  An awful lot of fun and really compelling stories.

Prepping for the Oscars

With a week and change to go between now and the Oscars, I'm in pretty good shape for this year - I've seen eight out of the nine nominees for Best Picture, and my last one, Nebraska will be available on Video on Demand next week.

In this last week and change I've still got a few movies to go, but what I'm really excited about is the fact that here in Edmonton you can catch most of the Oscar Shorts this year while also supporting the Edmonton International Film Festival.  I was able to take advantage of the offer two years ago and absolutely loved the event as it let me see a number of films I would never have had the chance to check out before.

Although genre films don't tend to make much of an appearance in the big categories at the Oscars, this year there are actually two Science Fiction films, Gravity and Her, that are both well worth the watch and will both end up in my home video collection (although I have to say I'm nervous about how the visual grandeur of Gravity will translate from the big screen to my television).

Retro Viewing on Family Day

Here in Alberta Canada we celebrate Family Day on the third Monday in February (since 2007), which gives us a nice long weekend between New Year's and Easter.  This year my wife and I decided to show our kids some movies that they haven't seen, but should have; Purple Rain (1984) and Hackers (1995).

Purple Rain (which I have to admit I've never seen before, unless you include seeing the music videos from the film) was an interesting experience - part concert film, part romance, part family drama, the film moved back and forth between the amazing musical numbers and stuff that really just came across to me as strange: the creation of a girl band that was to be quote "…sexy but not dirty" which ended up being three women singing a song called "Sex Shooter" in lingerie, the fact that a woman is thrown in a dumpster by her boyfriend's henchman, or the incredibly rude way "The Kid" (Prince) treats two of his band members throughout 90% of the film.

Our biggest fear in showing the kids Hackers was simply that it wouldn't date well - that all the references to hacker culture or the mid-90s fear of what "Hackers" might do to your information may have seemed too cheesy for our kids.

Instead, they really just ate it up.  The fact that it starred current Elementary star Jonny Lee Miller definitely helped,   Also the fact that the film has a nice pace, over the top villains and is an interesting look at a specific (albeit dated) sub-culture was a lot of fun as well.

In the end, we didn't show the kids either film because they were the best movies of their time, but for my wife and I there were a part of our culture growing up, and now our kids have a taste of what we thought was cool growing up, just as their kids will have when shown films like High School Musical 2, Another Cinderella Story, and LOL.

Happy Valentine's from Bookmonkey

Hello all,

Just a short one today as I'm spending my time giving my wife the Valentine's day she's been hoping for (which mostly means we'll be doing things on her to do list, like taxes and whatnot.)

So happy Valentine's to all my readers, can you believe it's been about four and half years since I started blogging here?

Anyway, I hope you all have a great day and get to spend it doing taxes with the one you love.

Your old pal,
Bookmonkey

Book Review: The Long War

Yesterday I finished The Long War, Terry Pratchett and Stephen Baxter's follow-up to their 2012 novel The Long Earth.  The book takes place ten years after the discovery of The Long Earth, a series of parralel Earths accessible to most everyone on Earth; also when I say a series, I mean millions.

The book itself focuses on how governments across the world deal with a massive shift, being the exodus of their citizens into parallel versions of their own countries sometimes millions of worlds away.  Are these people still citizens?  Do they still pay taxes and require government services?

The book continues to follow the main characters from The Long Earth, and has both multiple story lines and in some of those story lines a quest format, but for me the most exciting bit was the sheer world building that goes on in the series.

The authors have already signed on for more books in the series, and if your interested in a great introductory novel to science fiction, the series is definitely worth a try.