The Adventures of Tintin

From a kinetic title sequence to a final shot baiting for a sequel, The Adventures of Tintin never stops to take a breath. Racing from setpiece to setpiece, Tintin leaves not a single scene without at least a punch (if not a full-blown explosion). The wall-to-wall action should by rights be exhausting, but adventure is no foreign terrain for Steven Spielberg. Under his practiced direction, Tintin pulls us easily into its energetic pace, catching us up in an adventure story that feels familiar but is no less exciting in the telling.

Introduced via a gag that passes the baton from Tintin creator Hergé to Spielberg and co., Tintin (Jamie Bell) and his faithful dog Snowy find themselves caught up in a high-stakes chase around the globe after discovering a hidden secret in a model of the lost ship The Unicorn. Bell plays the famous comics creation with a bright, can-do verve, dashing without fear from rooftops and windows in certainty that good will win out.  Until it does, though, the adventuring pair is pursued by the sinister Ivan Sakharine (Daniel Craig, enjoying himself in an unusually villainous role), a hunt that quickly extends itself from land to sea, where Tintin meets the drunken but good-hearted Captain Haddock (Andy Serkis). Together, Tintin, Snowy, and Haddock struggle to unlock the mystery of The Unicorn before Sakharine can claim whatever treasure it holds or take them out in the process.

The Tintin comics always had a surreal humor to them, an element not lost in this adaptation. Every action scene pops along with a smoothness and grace that still make room for plenty of visual gags, a task aided by Spielberg’s new motion-capture toolset. Although sometimes pushing the film uncomfortably toward the Uncanny Valley (usually during close-ups that give us time to study the bizarre proportions of Tintin’s face), the motion capture is ultimately a boon to Spielberg’s work here, allowing him to create fantastic setpieces impossible in live action. One of the film’s most thrilling scenes is a sustained single-shot chase sequence through Morocco, and Tintin is at its best as it glides us through deserts, streets, and canals, gleefully following after the intrepid young journalist and his canine pal as they chase down an adventure.

Ben's Faves: Part the Fourth

Moonwalking with Einstein

A powerful art once practiced by the world’s greatest minds. An underground society where this lost art now thrives. An international tournament where these society members compete. And a young man who stumbles into this world, overcomes his incredulity, and struggles to become a new champion.

This synopsis may sound like it belongs to a fantasy novel, but it’s actually the plot of Joshua Foer’s thrilling non-fiction Moonwalking with Einstein.

The art of memory, according to legend, began in the wake of a catastrophe. In ancient Greece, an earthquake wiped out a palace, killing everyone inside. The destruction was so total that no one could identify their loved ones’ remains. Moments before the earthquake, however, the poet Simonides had stepped outside the palace and surveying the rubble, he had a revelation: he could visualize the entire undamaged building and everyone in it. “At that moment,” Foer tells us, “the art of memory was born.”

What Simonides ostensibly did then on the fly, his successors do intentionally and only after great practice. For the memory artist, familiar walking routes and well-known buildings become mental storage houses for memories. Whatever things need be memorized—digits of pi, items on a grocery list, or lines from “The Waste Land”—are converted into a series of memorable images that are packed into the memory palace. A poker hand becomes for Foer a stroll through his palace’s hallway where Michael Jackson defecates a salmon burger and farts into a balloon.

The vulgarity of Foer’s imagery is nothing new to the art of memory. Moonwalking takes us through the art’s history, when Catholic monks conjured up lurid images to remember devotional passages. Religion and the art of memory, we learn, often intertwined throughout history, as Christians, Muslims, Jews, and Buddhists all passed down sacred teachings through memory techniques. With the advent of the printing press, however, the Golden Age of Memory came to an end as human memorization was largely replaced by what Foer calls external memories—books, newspapers, videos, and the like.

As Foer discovers, however, the art of memory isn’t quite dead yet. A group of dedicated memorizers across the globe annually pours their way through decks of cards, literary passages, and binary codes (among other things), stocking full huge memory palaces of their own creation. The memory subculture is not without its internal drama, and along the way to becoming a memorizer himself, Foer meets his fair share of foes, friends, liars, and conmen. Both Foer’s naivety in this world contrasted with his later success as well as the numerous “ordinary people” who make up the world’s top memorizers give Moonwalking with Einstein a seductive flair, suggesting that if the reader wished, he or she too could become a master memorizer. As Foer furiously memorizes his way into the final rounds of the U.S. Memory Championship, we root for his victory as if he were an underdog boxer and wonder if we too could train our memories into that kind of shape. 

Despite the personal narrative and the enticing invitation to the reader, Moonwalking is neither memoir nor self-help book. Foer the journalist ultimately presides over Foer the protagonist, guiding us through a broader exploration of memory and its meaning for humanity. We meet some individuals racked with mental disorders that leave them socially non-functional but with memories like a computer's. On the other side of the spectrum is a man like EP who cannot form any new memories and lives a life of constant forgetting. Such bizarre cases of human memory lead Foer to ponder memory's role in human identity and how such wide disparities in memory can be possible. Foer fuses together these moments of journalistic and philosophical investigation with his own immersion into the world of memory training. The end product is a work of non-fiction that manages to be as thrilling as it is intellectual.

I'm sold!  Amazon, Barnes & Noble, library, it's a book, dude, you know the deal.

Ben's Faves: Part the Third

Adventure Time

Although Adventure Time’s current season stretches into 2012, I’m including it on this list anyways not only because I’m a huge fan dying to sing its praises but also because in its third season, Adventure Time has shaped into one of the best fantasy shows on television. Seriously.

On a post-apocalyptic earth that has been renamed the Land of Ooo, nuclear fallout has created a world full of mutant hybrids, talking objects, and evil monsters. The last living human (or so it seems) is a heroic boy named Finn who lives in a tree house with his best pal Jake, a shape-shifting bulldog. Their adventures reveal an enormous fantasy world that encompasses a “lumpy space” dimension resembling a lumpy, modern-day America; a Candyland-like Candy Kingdom ruled by Finn’s crush Princess Bubblegum;  a 1000-year-old vampire named Marceline who plays the bass guitar; a crystalline fortress ruled temporarily by a tiny, green elephant; an underworld filled with cannibalistic skeletons; a cross between hell and Tartaros called the Nightosphere; a Cosmic Owl who presides over the Land of Ooo like Aslan; and an entire parallel universe containing everything just mentioned but with everyone's genders swapped. Every episode of the show develops this universe a little more, either filling in a previously hazy detail or introducing some new character or locale.

Adventure Time approaches its massive world with the same fun-loving attitude of its protagonists. In this show, epic battles with demon lords end in fart jokes and Finn’s abduction leads to goofy, childish singing. As juvenile as the show can be, it also displays a broad tonal range, slipping easily from goofiness into poignancy or romance or even genuine creepiness. The humor and fun are always there, but they never prevent the show from exploring diverse emotional territory.

In “Dungeon,” an episode that exemplifies the show’s range, Finn runs through an underground dungeon where he is confronted by evil creatures, gold-barfing treasure chests, and a Venus fly trap door. He’s not terrified but narrating gleefully and laughing. As Finn busts out of a trap, two glowing eyes appear and put an end to his happy monologue: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W9_iQ1FSnp8

Looks a little like MewThree

A cute kitten's head is revealed to be the tongue of a more sinister beast, and out of the darkness slinks a demonic cat. With slices of its body eerily missing and a long purple tail that looks more like a vein protruding from its side, the cat is a little threatening and more than a little creepy. Although its dialogue—revealing it to be, hilariously, only somewhat omniscient—and Finn’s backtalk leaven the mood, the cat’s presence is legitimately menacing and pulls Finn and the show into frightening territory. So frightening, in fact, that this “guardian angel” shows up, scarring young viewers for life: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dgbrw8wbvWg

In its most recent season, Adventure Time has moved increasingly toward stories like “Dungeon,” stories that push the show into new emotional terrain. With an anything-goes approach and a huge world to play in, the show often pulls us into moving scenes when we least expect it. In Adventure Time’s recent Christmas special, an otherwise cheery holiday episode suddenly breaks into the Ice King’s past, revealing his tragic, Lovecraftian origins. In one of my favorite episodes, Finn awakens from a coma to find everyone is missing except for Jake, who seems to have lost his mind. The whole episode is creepy from start to finish, but no moment is creepier than the one in which Finn discovers who’s behind everything. (Not so much for who it is, which is fairly obvious, but for a surprising and ultra-creepy motion that being makes when discovered.)

Nope, not telling you who/what it is. Watch the episode for yourself.

I know Adventure Time is not a show for everyone. Even for those who aren't immediately disinclined toward liking cartoons, the show’s fondness for puerile humor may be a turnoff. But Adventure Time is doing something truly unique on television right now. It’s telling emotionally resonant stories in a huge fantasy world in a way that’s always fun and never less than hilarious. As much great television as there is these days, no show brings me greater joy than this cartoon about a boy, his dog, and their epic adventures together.

I love Finn's pasta limbs

I'm sold!  I think a bunch of episodes are on dvd, and if you’re clever with YouTube searching, you can find quite a few there too. If you’re really sneaky/not afraid to watch illegally uploaded videos, Google your way around and I’m sure you’ll find some. Also, there’s the legitimate way to watch them, on TV every Monday at 8.    

Here's Some Stuff About Fantasy

Pizzaheads! (By putting that word into your eyeballs, you have implicitly agreed to it as your new nickname.) So I was writing up my faves part the third, but the post eventually spiraled into a discussion of fantasy as a genre and I was like, "Man, this is getting out of hand. It has little to do with what I had intended to talk about." Rather than just (wisely) deleting what I'd written forever though, encasing it in the netherworld of my consciousness, I am instead (unwisely) going to post it here on the internet so it can go in the netherworlds of all your consciousnesses! Hurray! It's just like we've Avatar hair-connected! Only that was supposed to be sex? Gross. Whatever. Hate that movie.

This is one of the first images that shows up when you Google image search "fantasy."

As a genre, fantasy begins without limitations. The sun doesn't have to be a blazing ball of plasma, it can be the physical incarnation of an Aztec god. A spider bite results not in a trip to the ER but in arachnid super powers. A wardrobe in Christian England can contain a magical world that ultimately looks a lot like Christian England. The limitless canvas of the fantasy work is at once immensely liberating for the writer even as it poses extreme authorial risks. It’s hard enough sustaining believability and tension in a world designed to be as realistic as possible, so when you create a world where a potion or a chant can demolish gravity or rewrite someone’s DNA structure, as a writer, you've let loose a dragon, so to speak. But if you, like an authorial Hiccup the Viking, can rein that limitlessness in and impose on it a strict set of rules that you damn well stick to, you can hopefully make that freedom work to your advantage and produce something great. (It is probably no coincidence that within most fantasy works involving magic, there is usually a high price to be paid if a character breaks whatever the established magical rules are. The dicta of the magical universe bind not only the writer but the characters within that universe too.)

Unfortunately, unlike Hiccup, you cannot train your magical universe with dead fish

There remains always, though, that potential that you’re going to drop the reins and get burned. Every new magical trinket, every new mythical creature, every new bit of chaos you introduce to your world makes it just that much harder to keep things under control. In the fourth Harry Potter book, for instance, after Harry sees Cedric die, he later does not see the thestrals on his way home. In an interview somewhere or other, J.K. Rowling explained that this was because death first needs to sink in before thestrals become visible—a response that smacks a little of retconning to me, but regardless, this scene exemplifies exactly what I’m talking about. The way thestrals work, as explained in the fifth book, suddenly renders an otherwise ordinary scene from a previous book anachronistic (at least without the explanatory interview). When fantasy is done really badly, the resultant logical loopholes can be infuriating verging on insulting. The “How It Should Have Ended” YouTube series recently mocked the ending of X-Men: First Class for the numerous ways it falls apart on its own established terms: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B-5tMPInetg

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And that's what I wrote. Hope the netherworld of your consciousness has been enriched. Tune in probably tomorrow for the post I was trying to write tonight! (What will it be?? Something to do with fantasy? Yes.)

Ben's Faves: Part the Second

Y'all super excited for me to do this again?! "Yes! We are!" Daww, I'd hoped you would be!


Portal 2

If much of the excitement of Portal lay in escaping from enclosed chambers into a chaotic, behind-the-scenes inferno, then much of its sequel’s fun comes from learning just how small the first game really was. In Portal 2, Valve has expanded the scope of the Portal universe from several testing rooms to a laboratory the size of a metropolis. Each new level of Portal 2 has the player staring in amazement as they mentally reconfigure the magnitude of the ruins they’re trapped in. Unlike the dilapidated surroundings, protagonist/player stand-in Chell reawakens as silent and determined as ever, blasting her way through challenges we’ve seen before and new ones like blue, bouncy gel and platforms of light that must be manipulated to move across dangerous surfaces.

Portal 2 retains all of its predecessor’s wit, and in fact, is even funnier, with the addition of multiple new characters who allow for greater dialogue opportunities than were possible in the first game between the mute Chell and her constant critic GLaDOS (although there remains plenty of great interplay between those two as well).  Wheatley, a hilarious and not-so-helpful helper bot voiced by Stephen Merchant provides a running commentary on the player’s actions whenever GLaDOS isn’t around. J.K. Simmons also turns in a winning performance as the safety-be-damned founder of Aperture, whose booming commands accompany the player as they make their way through the game’s underground sections.

As the primary hook into both Portal and Portal 2, the portal gun is such a great gaming device that were the Portal games simply puzzles for the player to run around portal-ing through, they’d still be a ton of fun to play. Instead, Valve marries their amazing toy with an equally engaging storyline. Drawing as easily from 2001: A Space Odyssey as it does from Bioshock, Portal 2 slowly reveals a grand narrative at its center in which the mysterious circumstances behind Aperture Science’s fall must be rediscovered to prevent present disaster. Each new discovery leads to a new twist, and the game’s creators aren't hesitant to punish the player who rushes from level to level--a main character’s entire history is suggested by a piece of cardboard you might easily just walk by. Packed with excitement, humor, and a surprisingly moving ending, Portal 2 is as entertaining and fun as any movie or show I've seen this year. 

I'm sold! Pretty much as always, this item is available on Amazon, and you can get it for XBox or PS3. It's also a download available through Steam for either PC or Mac. 

Ben's Faves: Part the First

Hey guys! Long time no see! "Who are you?" Haha, very funny, you guys! Anyway, one thing I'd been planning to do at the end of the year was to write up a list of my favorite things from 2011. (Things being movies, shows, books, and the like; not so much "my favorite moment involving the stars." I'm not that kind of blog!) At any rate, although I had initially planned to compile all of these things into one post, after having written just the first one, I discovered it was pretty long by itself, and a list of ten or so of these would probably mean very few people would bother to read the whole thing. (As opposed to my usual thousand-plus members readership.) So instead, I will post each item one at a time in its own separate post, beginning with this one. At the end of each post, I will include a brief section devoted to telling you where you can acquire the item I just reviewed. (Since my reviews will no doubt have you scampering to pick up whatever I've just pimped out, I'm sure.) So, without further ado...

Me and you guys right now

Ben's First Favorite Thing of 2011!!!!!!


Big Questions

As the product of over fifteen years of work, it is no surprise that Big Questions clocks in at nearly 600 pages, a hefty tome both the size and weight of a classic Russian novel. The intimidating bulk, however, belies the gentle, dreamlike story contained within: a tale of talking birds and a mysterious egg that brews destruction. 

At the novel’s beginning, drifting through a vast, grassy field populated with a cast of aimless, philosophizing birds—each so visually indistinguishable from the next that I was constantly flipping to the characters index to make sense of who was whom—it seems as though Big Questions is a series of amusing but unrelated sketches, more a comics anthology than an overarching narrative. The arrival of a dropped bomb, however, jumpstarts Big Questions into full, sprawling-story gear. For some of the birds, the bomb becomes a mystic sign from on-high, and they quickly form an increasingly dangerous cult dedicated to its protection. Other birds find their own obsessions, like Algernon who searches for his missing wife and soon finds himself captive in one of Nilsen’s most beautifully rendered spaces: a labyrinth-like snake’s den that plunges ever deeper into the earth, hiding at its nadir a mysterious, avian underworld. As the birds discover their callings and forge their alliances, they are pulled into conflict with one another in moments of startling and brutal violence.

Unlike Watership Down, the classic Richard Adams novel Nilsen seems to be channeling, Big Questions derives its existential horror not from its characters’ endless fight to survive but from the needlessness of their suffering. Whereas Watership Down’s rabbits searched continually for a peaceful warren, Nilsen’s birds already live in a paradise of plentiful food and few predators. Their wars, betrayals, and misery are the product not of Darwinian struggle but of conflicting philosophies about the world they live in. (Literally, philosophies: in one of Big Questions’s most humorous moments, one of the birds struggles to articulate his understanding of the current situation and inadvertently summarizes Plato’s Allegory of the Cave.) 

Like us, the birds of Big Questions struggle to make meaning in a world they can’t quite understand, inflicting a lot of pain and suffering on each other in the process. And like us too, their suffering leads still to heroism and self-sacrifice, no matter how pointless the cause. In Big Questions, Anders Nilsen has crafted an epic story spanning the full gamut of emotions—from wistful humor to breathtaking anguish and triumphant compassion—in a beautifully drawn work that asks the largest of questions through the smallest of creatures. 

I'm sold! I was lucky enough that the William and Mary library had a copy, so I borrowed it from them. You can see if your library has gotten Big Questions in or just hit up Amazon.com: http://www.amazon.com/Big-Questions-Anders-Nilsen/dp/1770460470/ref=tmm_pap_title_0 (You may notice my review here sitting in Amazon's reviews section. I try to post reviews on Amazon for books I really liked if they haven't gotten much attention from anyone else. According to a writer whose blog I follow, doing this can really help boost sales / the probability they'll get published again. I completely forget why my Amazon reviewer name is "tripp9009," though...)

My Favorite Fiction in 2010

These are my favorite fiction books that I read in the past year (not my favorite books published in 2010, although there are some of those too). Read these blurbs... before they, um, read you? That's dumb. Bad joke, Ben. You're fired.


Fiction:

The Corrections and Freedom by Jonathan Franzen: Although I think a lot of people eschew Franzen's writing, I personally find it invigorating, witty, and even poetic. IMO, Franzen is basically the bees' knees in the literary world today (a statement I am hilariously unqualified to make). I am at a loss to decide which is the better of Franzen's two most recent books. While The Corrections is more comic and less flawed than Freedom, the latter is more relevant today and its bleakness about the state of affairs in America and about humanity in general is only so harsh to read because it is so convincing. Both novels are very powerful though, and you should read both of them. Immediately. Run, little birdie, go read them! (I just told you to run and then called you a bird. I guess you're an ostrich or something.)

Little Women by Louisa May Alcott: The only "schoolbook" I decided to put on this list, not because I didn't enjoy anything else I read for school this year (I thought Sister Carrie was awesome enough to join the honored bees' knees ranks of The Corrections and Freedom), but mostly because I already had a sentence I wrote about this book at hand. And here is that sentence: "Beneath Little Women's thick gild of cozy Christianity and warm sentimentality, there pulses a burning core of frustrated feminine rage." Good sentence, right? True too, the book acts as a fascinating portrait of Alcott's inner frustrations and struggles with the limitations in her own life and for women in all of society.

The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time by Mark Haddon: A dog has been stabbed with a garden fork, and an autistic boy sets out to solve the mystery of the dog's murder in the style of his literary hero Sherlock Holmes. Told in first person from the autistic boy's point-of-view, Haddon deftly avoids either sentimentalizing or trivializing his protagonist's disorder, instead giving us a character with both rich mental complexity and terrifying problems, without either of those things being contradictions.

Room: A Novel by Emma Donoghue: Another tricky first-person narrative, this one from the point-of-view of a five-year-old boy who's spent his entire life in one tiny room, kept there with his mother by a psychopath the boy knows only as "Old Nick." While Room contains some of the most terrifying and suspenseful stuff I've ever read, its young protagonist's narration keeps the book from ever becoming too unbearable, and his naivety recasts his world in an almost poetic light. (In the novel's opening scene, the boy describes "waterfalling" milk into his cereal bowl.) A deeply moving novel about motherhood and the sacrifices and demands it necessitates, I highly recommend it.

Falling Man by Don DeLillo: This short novel follows the lives of a 9/11 survivor and his family as they cope with our nation's greatest modern tragedy. DeLillo plays here with time and voice, drifting in between paragraphs from one narrator to another, from years before the disaster to the weeks after. In less skilled hands, such a conceit might confuse or alienate, but in DeLillo's meditative prose, this drifting instead reflects the internal chaos and melancholy of its protagonists. The novel gradually follows its characters to 2007, showing how they, and the rest of the country, have come to internalize and cope with the events of 9/11, before concluding with a devastating first-person account of the World Trade Center's Collapse.

The Magicians by Lev Grossman: Oh man, you guys... I love this book. I think I want to marry it. You are cordially invited to the wedding celebration of Benjamin Joseph Baker and The Magicians by Lev Grossman. I don't know how to sell this book to you because I want you to read it but I also want you to read it knowing very little about it. You shouldn't even read the back cover, it gives too much away. Look, you like Harry Potter, right? Of course you do. This book is like that, only R-rated. Well, that's an oversimplification. It's more an author grappling with how to reconcile his childhood love for fantasy books (Narnia in particular) and his understanding that most children's fantasy is hinged on the suspension of the sort of psychological detail and realism that animate the modern novel. The Magicians basically finds a way to fuse both those things together, which is reflected not only in its construction but in the story itself too. It's a great book, and Grossman is not afraid to take his characters to some unpleasant emotional places. That ending is a gut punch.



Well, that's it. Now go out there and read, kiddos!