Capote in Kansas by Ande Parks, Chris Samnee

I picked up Capote in Kansas at APE (Alternative Press Expo) in San Francisco last year, mostly because I judged a book by its cover and because I really enjoyed In Cold Blood. I thought it was an extremely well written and engrossing true crime story. Plus, who doesn’t like that crazy Truman Capote? I was really pleased with what I ended up with.

Ande Parks infuses a lot of truth in his fictionalized tale, Capote in Kansas. Here he tells the story of how Truman Capote came to write In Cold Blood, the struggles he had fitting in with the local folks in Kansas, the emotional struggle he had trying to get a grasp on the tale, and how writing that book changed him. It’s a high-level view of course, but hey, it IS a graphic novel. I mean, I don’t expect a whole ton of depth here. There is even the ghost of Nancy Cutter, who helps Capote get that sense of humanity to infuse into his story and shows him the heart, so to speak.

Samnee’s bleak, angled black & white drawings do a nice job showcasing the town, the time period, the emotional struggle of Capote, even the confusion and despair in the atmosphere of the town.  It does get a bit difficult to keep track of who is who though.

I would never say Capote in Kansas would be a replacement for reading In Cold Blood, or even a deeper look into Capote and the desires that drove him to write his masterpiece, but if Capote or the Clutter family murders interest you, you’d probably find this graphic novel of interest.

Rating: 3 ½ Purrs for a nicely meshed piece of art and story that is able to include a “ghost girl” without seeming trite

30 Days of Night: the movie and the comic

“Welcome to Barrow. Top of the world.”

It took me a movie to get me to finally pick up the graphic novel 30 Days of Night. I would flip through the book in Titan, and I just couldn’t bring myself to pay 20 bucks for something that looked like so little story. But, lucky me, because the movie was released, they released a cheaper version of the book, so I went ahead and succumbed to the call of the bloody vampire graphic novel. After all, I couldn’t see the movie without reading the source first. 

The plot’s pretty much the same in both the graphic novel and the movie. In the small, secluded town of Barrow, Alaska, the residents are battening down the hatches for winter. Many of the residents have moved out to their winter homes out in warmer parts, but the few that remain are in for and even bleaker winter than they expected. There are some unexpected guests coming into town, and they want more than just a room at the bed & breakfast. These guys have big, pointy teeth and are out for a vampiric vacation in the town where for 30 days it’s nighttime, all the time. Will the police chief and his wife be able to save the people and town they love? Will they be able to save themselves? 

The art in the graphic novel was bleak and bloody, like what you would expect from a horror comic. It’s all in shades of gray, black, red, and white, scraggly lines and splashes of color. It’s all desperate and full of teeth. The movie’s art direction follows closely to these images, with the computer editing stripping the little color there is in the clothing and atmosphere. It’s a decent replica of the graphic novel – not nearly as close as say, Sin City or 300, but not much is.

The movie deviates a bit from the comic in that it removes a few baddies and adds a few residents for you to care about, bit other than that, it’s pretty close. Josh Hartnett and Melissa George are good as the bickering sheriff and his estranged wife. Josh Hartnett’s earnestness plays well, but I would have expected an older actor to play the role. Danny Huston is pretty creepy as the head vampire. This movie relies on a bunch of creepy, toothy atmosphere form his character and it does a pretty good job of it.  How cool that Amber Sainsbury showed up – she’s from Hex (a BBC show, think British Buffy) and it’s nice to see her in another role.

Overall, I’d recommend the graphic novel over the movie just because it was a bit more effective. That could also be because I read the comic first and so knew most of the scares and twists in the movie. Either way, both are a good 90 minutes for a horror buff. 

Rating: 4 Purrs for both, with plenty of blood for everybody’s thrills and chills

28 Days Later: The Aftermath

I am a huge fan of 28 Days Later and 28 Weeks Later. If you have read any of this blog, you will know that I adore zombies. (Okay, I know some think the fast bloody fellas aren’t real zombies, but fie on you I say – Fie! I consider them zombies of a sort, so there. They may not be brain-dead reanimated kind, but there are single minded as such. Anyway…) I picked this graphic novel up at my favorite local comic shop, Titan Comics, and wasn’t disappointed. My matching zombie socks weren’t knocked off but it was a decent “interim” story to the two movies.

The idea behind 28 Days Later: The Aftermath was to tell the story of what happens between the two movies.  On that level, I don’t think it really meets that goal.  Most of the stories take place in the same time period of the first film or shortly thereafter. The last story kind of gives you an idea of where the sequel film will be, but honestly, I think the stories here add little to the 28 Days narrative. In one story, we see the researchers who developed the virus and more depth on how it was released. In the second story, we see a family on a picnic the day after the accidental release of the Rage virus. A chimpanzee attacks the young son and the family must flee to survive. In the third story, we see Hugh, a lone survivor in London tracking and killing the zombie hordes. As he engineers the death of another survivor by zombie attack, he sees American fighter jets zooming overhead. In the fourth story, the characters from the previous three stories meet in the refugee camp set up by the Americans. The survivors find out the truth from each other, with dire consequences.

The art in this graphic novel was good, with the starkness of Piccadilly Circus beautifully done in Chapter Three. It’s nothing terribly groundbreaking though, I think the style of 30 Days of Night would be even better. Overall, I was expecting more from this, but then I have high expectations for the 28 Days franchise. I wanted more to do with the time in between 28 Days Later and 28 Weeks Later.

Rating: 3 ½ for a decent bridge between two of my favorite zombie films

Cloverfield

 “What is that?”

“It’s a terrible thing.”

“Oh my god what is what?”

“I don’t know! Something else! Also terrible.”

Cloverfield’s viral marketing campaign pretty much passed right by me so I think I saw the movie with a set of completely untarnished set of eyes. I also saw it way back in the theater, in what, January, and am just now getting around to posting this. (Call me lazy. It's okay. I know.) I avoided as much about the movie as I could so I could see it with no real expectations other than the completely random images in the trailer. I think that’s what made the movie so enjoyable for me.

 Cloverfield tells the story a small group of New Yorkers who, while having a going away party for a friend, are thrust into a life-or-death situation. Something is attacking the city and no one knows what it is.  These friends are thrust into trying to survive, get out of the city, and save the life of the love interest. All of this told through recovered videotape, and thus is told with a fair amount of shaky camera scenery.

I adored Cloverfield. It was a movie that even my husband (who hates monster movies, horror movies, pretty much anything I lap up with a spoon like it's carrot cake soup) loved.  I loved that it was a monster movie, and a terribly scary one at that, but I loved that it had even more going for it.  I loved the weird, gigantic monster out of nowhere. I love that no one knows what is going on. I love that no one explains and no one is safe. I loved the unknown, the terror, the real scary-ass, holy shit, what just happened situations.  I loved the commentary on contemporary history, the post-911 world New Yorkers and the rest of us. I loved the use of the camera as character and narrator.  The actors were relatively unknown, which made it much easier to see the characters as involved in the story rather than as “Mel Gibson” or “Tom Cruise.”

The only thing I didn’t care for was the vertigo. Other than that, I loved this movie.  Loved.  Loved it like take her home to your momma and say you are going to marry her loved it. In fact, we might be sending out invitations any time now. (Next Tuesday when the DVD comes out I am sure.) But I have heard, the best way to see it is without a whole lot of expectations or guesses about the story. Just go in for a good, scary monster movie.

Rating: 5 Stars for a near perfect film going experience. I loved this movie, but from what I have heard, it’s either a love it or hate it type of thing.

 

World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War by Max Brooks

I waited anxiously for World War Z to be released in paperback for ages (I rarely buy hardback books, just too heavy to carry around with me), and when it finally was released I snatched it up so fast I might have knocked over some nuns on my way to the counter. After reading it, I would have bought it in hardback it was so good.

In World War Z, Max Brooks creates much more than just a zombie story. He takes that step that most zombie films have tried to do since Night of the Living Dead. He uses zombies to address the real possibilities of a global epidemic and how the world might be after the war is finished and peace is reached. It’s amazing. Brooks tells the story of the Zombie War, a true World War that affects every corner of the earth, from small province to large city using a series of first-person accounts and interviews. It creates such a feeling of history and truth that it’s almost spine chilling. The story covers tales from military folks, smugglers, doctors, teenagers and children, political officials, and regular Joes, all who in their own way dealt with the 200 million plus zombie horde. The ones that stick out to me, even now after weeks of reading it, are the stories from the young woman whose family fled to Canada to ride out the zombie horde, the military team with the trained dogs, and the military personnel who recount the stories of PTSD and the Battle of Yonkers.

I’m definitely going to pick up Max Brooks’ other book, The Zombie Survival Guide, just to see if it is just as good. I really can’t recommend this book enough. It’s scary as a horror novel, but it’s even scarier as a contemporary history or story of one of our possible futures. It feels impossibly real but never loses its entertainment value.

Rating: 5 Purrs for zombies with a purpose. Buy this now.

DOA: Dead or Alive

“You can have him. But what about the other 300?”

I rented DOA: Dead or Alive because I can’t help but love Jamie Pressley. I’ve followed her career every since that god-awful and yet somehow impossible to turn off Poison Ivy sequel. She’s gorgeous, funny, and sexy-as-hell. What’s not to like? So when I saw that she, along with some other nice-to-look-at ladies were teaming up in a martial arts film that looks like a ladies Mortal Kombat, I snatched this puppy up in my NetFlix queue and put it right up there at the top.

 In the opening montage of DOA, a group of the best women fighters are challenged and invited to the ultimate martial arts contest – DOA.  These amazing ladies each have a specialized skill, including Christie Allen, a jewel thief who really wants what is in the island’s safe, Tina Armstrong (woot Jamie!), a pro-wrestler who wants to prove she isn’t a fake, Helena Douglas, the daughter of the creator of DOA who wants to honor her father’s memory, and Kasumi, a Ninja princess who has been exiled from her clan so that she might find what happened to her brother, who left the year before to fight in DOA. Off these ladies go to the private island where the tournament takes place. After being told to jump out of the place and make their way to the main fighting location and actually enter the tournament. All of the fighters are put into a pool and pitted against each other where they must knock out their opponents or be sent home. As the usual story goes these ladies fight each other but soon learn to depend on each other when an even greater evil is unearthed. The tournament’s master Donovan is up to something, and the only way good can win is if these ladies can start to work together instead of fight each other.

This movie is fun. Period. The story is silly, of course, but the scenery is nice. The martial arts are fun while not nearly as “true” as a Jackie Chan or Stephen Chow movie. There is this one scene in the film that is hilarious – two of the ladies end up sharing a room together later in the film and one of the girl’s Dad walks in (they are scheduled to fight). The exchange there is priceless. So funny.

I’ve never played the video game DOA was based on, so I have no idea how good of a “video game” movie it is, but as a fun Mortal Kombat flick it rates highly in my book. It’s funny, it has some nice fight scenes, and it’s nice a short. It never takes itself seriously. I’m seriously considering picking it up at the used DVD store just so I can watch it again for a laugh or two. 

Rating: 4 Purrs for the ladies. That fight scene in the rain was very nice.