Recent Acquisitions to the Library

I love birthdays. I spent the Amazon love from my brother and his girlfriend (who somehow got me shamefully addicted to these ridiculous vampire novels everyone has been raving about...seriously, I am embarrassed to say it. 

Books:

• Eclipse by Stephenie Meyer
• Rising Dawn by Stephenie Meyer

DVDs:

• D.E.B.S. - Love this movie. It's so adorable, and it fosters my Jordana Brewster crush.
• Imagine Me & You - So sweet. Plus Piper Perabo and Lena Headly fall in love.
• Commando: Director's Cut - I love this movie. It's one of those that I watch every time it's on. I thought Alyssa Milano was so cool in this movie (I was also, maybe 11 when I first saw it.)

Recent Acquisitions to the Library

Thanks to the pater and mater, I had a nice run at the used DVD store and Barnes & Noble for my birthday (it's Wednesday, if you are curious). Thanks to my brother and his girlfriend, I also have some Amazon love still to spend. 

DVDs

• Catch and Release  - Yes, I know it was silly and sappy and all that, but I just had to have it.
• Bats - Yes, that movie. My Dina Meyer crush knows no bounds.
• The Ruins Unrated - Loved the book, movie was alright
• Nightbreed - Gotta love Clive Barker
• The Shining (BluRay) - I absolutely love this movie. Now I can see it in super crisp definition.
• Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone - As much as I fought it, I love Harry Potter.
• Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets
• Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban
• Clash of the Titans - Ray Harryhausen - genius
• DOA: Dead or Alive - Chicks and karate. Need I say more.
• The Cave - Lena Headley. Piper Perabo. Slimy cave creatures. It's not The Descent, but it is too fun to pass up for 5 bucks.
• Vampires - James Woods is such a smart ass. Plus, my pal at work used to date Sheryl Lee's cousin. 
• The Tripper - Slasher killer in a Reagan Mask. Hee!
• Tomb Raider: The Cradle of Life - I dunno. I couldn't help it.
• A Clockwork Orange (BluRay) - Kubrick. BluRay. How could I not?
• Ghost World - Loved the comic. Loved the movie. Love Scar Jo.
• Mars Attacks! -  I don't know how I never got this on DVD. So funny.
• 30 Days of Night - So bleak. Danny Huston is pretty good, but mostly I just love vampire movies.
• Spaced: The Complete Series - I also love Simon Pegg and Nick Frost. Pandabob got this for me. 

Books

• The Lust Lizard of Melancholy Cove by Christopher Moore 
• Snow Angels by Stewart O'Nan
• New Moon by Stephenie Meyer

Catacombs

“My sister sent me a postcard. All it said was, "Come to Paris. It will be good for you." Forty-eight hours after I arrived, she and everyone I'd met were dead.”

Catacombs sounded a whole heck of a lot more interesting than it ended up being. The idea is this: young woman travels to Paris to visit her sister. The girl is a bit tense, not so comfortable in unfamiliar surroundings, while her sister is vivacious, carefree, and constantly on her sister’s case for being too “stiff.” So what happens? The crazy sister drags the wallflower sister out to a rave in the catacombs under Paris, after telling her, of course, all about the scary, mass murdering, crazy child of a satanic cult that stalks the underground tunnels, looking for hapless victims. What happens next – well, what do you expect? Pretty soon the tense sister is running around, lost, scared about of her mind that the satanic love child is after her.

I loved the idea of a horror movie in the catacombs. The whole idea of underground parties, miles and miles of underground tunnels and old stuff sounded like a wonderfully claustrophobic setting for a horror movie. It was a great idea – in fact, the setting was the best part of the movie. Everything else, well it was rubbish. But you know, I have to say what bothered me the most was Pink. Yes, I said Pink, the pink-haired, Let’s Get This Party Started singer with the crazy abs. Her music, not terribly bad – but her acting was awful. She plays the fun loving sister and has absolutely no chemistry with Shannyn Sossamon, who plays the other sister. She wooden, and in turn, Shannyn seems even more wooden and bland. Instead of being tense and spooky, it ends up just being painful. Oh yes, also, the whole trick ending is just ludicrous, really. We’ve seen it before and seen it much better.

If you can’t tell already, I was disappointed with Catacombs. So much potential and it ended up being just a horrible retread of Creep (which wasn’t awesome by any means, but it was much better than this. Plus Franka Potente – got to love her!)

Rating: 1 Hiss – stupid movie – made me all interested with your creepy catacombs and ending up being ludicrous Phooey on you

Recent Acquisitions to the Library

Here's the latest haul from Half Price Books:

• The Catcher in the Rye by J. D. Salinger
• A Spot of Bother by Mark Haddon
• The Exorcist by William Peter Blatty
• The Night Country by Stewart O'Nan
• The Ring art by Misao Inagaki, original novel by Koji Suzuki
• Last Night at the Lobster by Stewart O'Nan
• Light on Snow by Anita Shreve
• Skylight Confessions by Alice Hoffman
• Origin by Diana Abu-Jaber
• Lamb: The Gospel According to Biff, Christ's Childhood Pal by Christopher Moore
• Ten Days in the Hills by Jane Smiley
• The Concrete Blonde by Michael Connelly
• The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald
• The Member of the Wedding by Carson McCullers
• A Thousand Acres by Jane Smiley

Y The Last Man by Brian K Vaughn, Pia Guerra, Jose Marzan, Jr.

I picked up the first few trades of Y The Last Man because Whitney from Pop Candy (USA Today's pop culture blog) recommended it in a post about great comics to pick up and read. I read the first trade and then promptly put it down. I knew then that I couldn't read any more until Brian K Vaughn had decided to end the series. I knew I wouldn't be able to stop reading once I started, and you know, I was right. I picked up the last trade in the Y series a month or so ago, and then read them all as quickly as possible in two nights' sitting. I just couldn't stop, they were so good. 

In Y The Last Man, Yorick is just your average, out of work college graduate. Nobody special. He likes books (lit major, got to love it).He also happens to be the only surviving male on the planet after a plague wipes every other man or animal out that has the Y chromosome. Well, outside of Ampersand, the monkey he was training. For some reason he survived too. And now, Yorick and Ampersand join forces with Agent 355 (a government agent sworn to protect him) and Dr. Alison Mann (the woman who might have started the plague and hopefully can find a cure) to make it across country to Dr. Mann's lab to find out why Yorick survived.  It seems like it might be simple, except there are crazy ultra-feminists calling themselves Amazons running in packs across the country, and they want to see Yorick dead. The Israelis want him to help rebuild Mother Israel. The rest of the country can't believe he's anything but a myth. Yorick just wants to find his girlfriend, Beth, who happens to be trapped in the Australian Outback. Will he ever find Beth? Will Dr. Mann save the future of human kind? Will the world rebuild itself? Who started the plague?

The story really just pulls you along, but of course I really like armageddon, end of the world type stories. The Amazons drove me nuts, but you can imagine how society would fall apart when struck with something so random. (Now, I'm not saying the ladies can't take care of themselves. They most certainly can. It just shows you that it's not only the Y chromosomes of the species that can make you drink the Kool-Aid.) Yorick is a funny guy, and I love all of the literary references that end up in the different stories. The art in these comics is really lovely. 

Really, I can't recommend these enough. I loved them. Now I am just sad that it is over. The ending of the series was really the best way to end it, but now I am sad. I know Yorick's story had to end sometime, but I can't help but feel wistful. Phooey that it's over. Maybe Ex Machina (another Vaughan series) will fill the void. 

Devour

I picked up Devour because I can’t help but have a super crush on Jensen Ackles. He is from Texas after all. I am so very thankful he got his role on Supernatural so he can have better character to play, because Devour, well, it sucked.

In Devour, Jake Gray (my favorite snarky demon fighting brother, Jensen) keeps having these really nasty nightmares. He’s in the woods hunting something, or sees his friends covered in blood, things like that. His two best friends decide that for his birthday they will sign him up for this weird online game called the Pathway, cause, you know, all the kids are doing it. Soon, his dreams get worse, his friends are starting to go a little but nuts, and he starts losing them one by one. Soon Jake is investigating the game with the help of the new gal in town, thinking somehow it is responsible for what is happening to his friends. Is it connected with the Devil somehow, and how is Jake connected?

It could have been an okay movie, if they had just left out the stupid game, or if they were going to have the game be a major player, make it more interesting like say, Stay Alive. Maybe tried to, I dunno, not try to mix a bunch of different ideas together like they threw darts at a dartboard. Overall the acting wasn’t atrocious, you could tell the actors were trying to do something with the poorly written dialogue they were given. The atmosphere was decent at times, I always love a woodland setting.

I can’t really recommend Devour, even though Jensen is in it. Just rent or buy Supernatural and watch that instead. Trust me.

Rating: I can’t even give it a 3 Purrs for Jensen being in it. This one has to get a Hiss. I hate to do it, but there it is.

Duma Key by Stephen King

Once again, Stephen King wrote a book that kept me reading like mad, not wanting to put it down even to sleep. While I eagerly anticipate each new book of his, I also dread it, because I know I won’t wait for paperback and I won’t stop reading it until I am finished. Duma Key was no deviation from this pattern.

In Duma Key, we meet Edgar Freemantle, a very rich man, self-made of course, who has a horrific car wreck at one of his building sites. He loses an arm and bangs his skull up nicely, and he eventually claws his way back out to somewhat normal after a long bout of rehabilitation, despite the uncontrollable rages that cost him is wife of 20 years. His psychiatrist recommends that he have a change of scenery, so Edgar shops around and finds a house out on a very remote Florida Key, a very bright pink house that seems to call to him. (You know what that means…there’s going to be something creepy going on.) Once there, Edgar finds himself returning to his first love- art. He becomes obsessed and churns out pencil sketches, paintings all with a Dali-esque quality that haunt him in his dreams and earn him a following in the Florida Keys art community. Very quickly Edgar discovers that his art has a power to kill and to heal, and soon he discovers that there is something haunting Duma Key, something that wants to use his art to destroy his friends and family. Will Edgar save his family, or will the evil that lives in his paintings be freed?

I liked some parts of Duma Key very much, but others I felt were too much of a retread of places we have been before. Towards the end of the book, it roams at that point into Bag of Bones and Lisey’s Story territory with ghostie types and haunted houses. I like the supernatural mystery though, so it doesn’t bother me much, I just want to see something really fresh next time. What I liked? The fact that Edgar was a painter and I loved the images of his paintings and sketches that I conjured in my head. I also felt a real sense of building dread in this book, right up until the big climax and slowly whittling down the dénouement.

Overall, I am going to say Duma Key was a good Stephen King book, but it wasn’t great. I liked it, but I won’t read it year after year like The Stand.

Rating: 3 1/5 Purrs for making Raggedy Ann creep me the hell out

Shoot'em Up

“I’m a British nanny, and I'm dangerous.”

Never has a movie been so aptly named. Shoot’em Up is pretty much that – a shoot’em up game brought to the big screen. It’s really a very silly movie – I don’t know how they got Clive Owen and Monica Belluci to sign on for this flick.

One night, a down-on-his luck looking guy (Clive Owen) is just minding his own business when a very pregnant lady comes running by, followed by a guy with a gun very intent on whacking her. Cue the homeless looking guy ending up kicking ass and helping deliver the baby, but unfortunately, now he’s stuck with it and is on the run from the baddies. Luckily, he knows a lactating hooker (Monica Belluci), and soon they are all on the run. Why do these bad guys want the baby dead? What do heavy metal music, a gun factory, and politics have to do with it all?

Really, this movie is quite ridiculous. It feels very comic book and video game-ish, but not in a good way. It was better than Crank, by far, but just a tad too silly for my tastes. But since I love Clive Owen and Monica Belluci, I had to rent it. It was funny and it was bad. Sometimes that is a good combination but other times, it’s just plain not.

Rating: 3 Purrs, cause I just can’t give a hiss to a movie with Clive Owen and a lactating hooker called DQ (who ends up working at a sort of Dairy Queen) in it

On the Road by Jack Kerouac

On the Road is really my first real introduction to the Beats, other than some poetry reading here and there during college. It’s a shame to think I graduated from college with a degree in Literature without more of it under my belt, but you know how those classes go – and to be honest, I did tend to focus more on those women’s studies and contemporary lit classes than post war literature. On the Road wasn’t quite what I was expecting, and I read it mostly because Pandabob has delved into his Beat era interest and he handed it over to me.

In On the Road, Sal Paradise (or Jack Kerouac, since this is a thinly veiled autobiographical work) chronicles his travels back and forth across America and into Mexico after the war. His pal, Dean Moriarty, has inspired him to hit the road to expand his horizons. He takes you on the journey with him, but it’s a journey of the days where you drive cross-country, pick up hitchhikers or become one yourself. You live free, have very little if any money, and eat cheap sandwiches made from the bread and meat you snatch from the roadside gas stations while the owner isn’t looking. There is a naiveté about it, a gleeful freedom, an energy and drive that still captures the itchy feet anyone gets sometime in their lives – the desire to break off from the known and head out to somewhere, anywhere that is different to see what there is to see – to live abundantly and honestly and free in the world at large. There is all of that, but I also felt there was also an underlying unhappiness, a feeling of drifting, with few ties to anyone or anything.

I understand the place On The Road has in American literature. It’s an important work. It’s bohemian, it’s raw and full of honest, simple language, much like you would expect. I understand that it’s highly influential. I just had a very hard time getting past just how much of an asshole Dean Moriarty is. So even though I can respect the feel of the work, what Kerouac was doing, his purpose in writing it and the movement he spawned by doing so, I also want to reach into that damn book and slap that fool Moriarty around for being such a jerk. But you know, maybe that’s just me. Part of me wanted to get in the car right then and drive, and every time we get in the car and drive to New Mexico, maybe I'll carry some of that spirit with me. 

Rating: 4 Purrs for being a great work of art, and for Kerouac for being honest enough to show the warts on himself and the people he knew

Happy Birthday to Me

You have just got to love a horror movie that has Melissa Sue Anderson in it.  Who would believe that sweet little Mary from Little House on the Prairie would be in a slasher film, and a good slasher movie at that.

In Happy Birthday to Me, Ginny (Melissa Sue Anderson) attends the Crawford Academy, a college prep school, where she finally belongs to the clique of cool kids. As Ginny’s 18^th birthday approaches, her friends are disappearing one by one. Could it have something to do with the car accident she suffered a few years before?  What happens to Ginny during her blackouts?

This is a slasher worth watching. The Crawford Academy is a great setting for a horror flick, and although Ginny and her friends do lean into stereotypes, they are also not so stereotypical that they don’t have something to them. There are several memorable deaths, including my all time favorite – death by shish kabob. What other film can say they have a death by shish kabob? It’s so good, I wouldn’t be surprised if someone used it again, but this movie will always be my first. Also the icky brain surgery scenes from Ginny’s car accident are right up there with those Exorcist Regan in the MRI scenes. Ouch.

This is truly a great slasher. Sure, it’s got some problems, like why are teenagers at a prep school served alcohol at the local tavern? It really feels like it should have been a college movie - they all look like college kids anyway. But it’s got a good twist ending and good acting, plus plenty of icky deaths to round things out. I’ve seen this one several times and love it every time.

Rating: 5 Purrs for death by shish kabob, the red herrings, and an unexpected ending