Friday, September 28, 2012

Movie Review: Looper

Been a while since I've done one of these, but then again it's been a while since I saw a film that left me with anything pressing to say.

Looper is painful to recall having viewed. Not because it was bad but because, like Battleship, I can see the much more awesome movie it could have been. Someone had the script for a Philip K. Dick pastiche, and it was incredible: clever, gritty, visceral, and mindbending. The perfect summer sci-fi flick. Then, halfway through filming, the budget ran out. So they shifted gears to a half-assed Terminator ripoff and cut every corner they possibly could. The brillliant futurist cityscapes are replaced with more realistic sets, the cast is pared down to the bare minimum (including reducing Bruce Willis to a supporting player), action scenes are cut out or toned down, and the plot slows to a crawl as they desperately try to make do.

There are bright spots. That first half is still great, Joseph Gordon-Levitt does a bang-up job impersonating Willis. The movie handles the usual time-travel mindfuckery better than most; There's a remarkably plausible explanation of how altering your own past screws with your memory, and the ending, though predictable, is something I've always wanted to see in a time-travel story. And it's a rare movie indeed where a ten-year-old boy steal the show from Bruce Willis. But the whole does not add up to the sum of its' parts.

It's a pity, because between the trailers and the buzz I've been hearing, I was psyched to see this. But it all fell apart.

Friday, September 14, 2012

*whistles* FREE BOOKS!

Okay, sorry again for a long period of quiet, but I have been hard at work on my writing these past few weeks, and as it turns out I have something to show to you for it. No, not the Bonds of Fenris sequel, though work continues on that. As I mentioned last time, a bunch of us on Goodreads have put together an anthology called All the Lovely Creatures, due out in October. My story is called "No Such Thing", and it's about a vampire detective and his human assistant investigating a haunting. It's actually the second story I've written with these characters. The first never made it to publication, so I decided to release it for free on Goodreads and Smashwords. It's a brief read, maybe 20 minutes or so. I hope you enjoy it.

In addition, as of today the entrants in the Windhammer Prize for Short Gamebook Fiction are available for download. One of them is my first gamebook, The Evil Eye. If you have any interest in gamebooks, or any fond memories of Fighting Fantasy or Lone Wolf back in the day, I highly recommend you check it out. And vote for me, of course. ~_^