District 9

District 9 is a science fiction movie. It is an action movie and it is a thinly veiled allegory. Now I like allegory, but much of the time science fiction stories are dragged into unnecessarily because, well frankly like that embarrassing double-jointed aunt who comes over for Christmas and keeps showing off her ability to reach back and grab her ankles, well she's good at it despite the fact that it's obviously embarrassing for her at such an advanced age. Same thing for sci-fi allegory. It's good at taking the heavy political messages and weaving itself through them but too often the author get lost in the cool "special effects" moments and drops the proverbial ball. In short, that's what's happening here in District 9.

The set-up is that there's this ship, a huge spaceship like the one we got in the early 1980's in V: The Mini-Series, but instead of dealing with an alien plot to take over the world and a beautiful alien baddie played by Jane Badler, we get what looks like a derelict ship filled with humanoid insect creatures who have arrived malnourished and dying. Not only is there no sense of wonder at first contact, the film begins with faux-interviews with the local human inhabitants, filmed chronologically 20 years after the fact, and it is a hate-filled bigot fest. The "prawns", who have built a shanty-town below the ruined Mothership, are petty and disgusting, living short and disagreeable lives for sure, but the humans (both black and white) are even more brutish than their alien neighbors. Did I mention that the film was set in South Africa?

I get the heavy-handed analogy. The "prawns" are the interstellar immigrants, the latest challengers in an already crowded sea of competition, and the humans want them moved out, in camps away from the city, in smaller more crowded spaces so that they can live even shorter and more disagreeable lives. It's a downer of a movie for sure, but the script never gets too bogged down with the thematic skeleton and the director gives it a grimy coat of sci-fi cool action like Halo meets Mad Max meets Alien Nation.

Still, my biggest complaint of the movie isn't about the allegory, heavy handed or not, but about the set-up. When science fiction is good on the screen, it's because the writer did his homework and made the movie follow its own internal logic. See Alien, Blade Runner, god even David Lynch's Dune had a better raison d'etre. It doesn't have to be hard-science, you don't need to dot all the eyes and cross all the tees, but you shouldn't be spending too much of the movie wondering why things are happening the way they are happening in your movie. You should not be asking questions like:

What is the significance of the spaceship? Why did they come to Earth? Why are so many of the prawns barely intelligent and yet one of them is a genius with a genius in the making son? What makes him special? Why did it take 20 years to collect the space juice? If the space-juice is the ship's propellent, why did it trigger a genetic mutation? Or even: if the ship has no juice, then what's keeping it up in the sky?

There are a hundred similar questions, I could go on, but I'd say that I'm not revealing any spoilers to say that none of them were satisfactorily answered. I get that the racism is what is keeping the characters from asking these questions, that it took one character to spend 70+ hours in another man's exo-skeleton to start asking those questions, but a film has certain basic needs regardless of plot and character and thematic content. It needs to make sense. It's an exciting movie. It's made a ton of money for such a small film and my fellow geeks have raved about it, calling it the best sci-fi movie of the Millenium, which it is clearly not.

One More Day

Look, let me get it right out and say that my favorite comic-book character is Spider-man. Always had been and always will be. He's funny and loyal and human, with the pre-requisites of a real hero. Not the gun-toting Dirty Harry, of the ant-hero Wolverine variety, the one that chick's dig and adolescent a-holes aspire to be, the real kind of hero, the sort that we all wind up being, the one's who live quiet and desperate lives punctuated by loneliness and heart-break. Oh, his life is still exciting. He's got a rogues gallery of villains like no other hero in comic-books: Green Goblin, Dr. Octopus, Mysterio, the Vulture and Sandman, Wolf-Men and Kingpins, even cold-hearted alien doppelgangers have graced his pages. But the real culprits, the real villains that have run Peter Parker's life recently has been Marvel Comics itself and specifically Joe Quesada its moronic, meat-headed Editor-in-Chief.

About a year and a half ago, J. Michael Straczinsky, the creator of Babylon 5 and renowned Spider-man author was finishing up his long running term on the flagship title. He had saved the the comic from goombah editorial directions before resulting in a character Renaissance, from one of the lowest selling titles after the ill-conceived clone saga to a top selling title under his watch. He did it with innovation, an exploration and expansion of the myth and an adult sensibility. It wasn't the Spider-man I grew up with certainly but it was the Spider-man of today and if you were yearning for a simpler take on the character there was always Ultimate Spider-man the concurrent systematic reboot written by Brian Michael Bendis. Instead of telling the stories he had planned, JMS was forced into a corner by the dim-witted blockbuster mentality that writer Mark Millar forced on the Marvel Universe with his Civil War, darkening up the character even further, changing the status-quo and revealing his secret identity to the world. In my opinion it was a character ruining event for sure, one ok'ed by Joe Quesada I might add, but they compounded it. Instead of running with it for a time, using it to organically re-mount the character, Marvel chickened out. Instead they planned an event for Spider-man that took every noble attribute of the character and washed through the sewers of New York.

In the comic, Peter Parker and Mary Jane Watson like the movie reality references, fell in love and got married. They handled the stressors of life and mutual careers and settled into a normal life of committed matrimony. He had super-powers, he saved New York but he had the love of a beautiful woman behind him to urge him on. It was the character arc of an adult with great power and great responsibility. Peter Parker may have been a kid with the same ideals but he had grown. He was no longer the eager nebbish with glasses and girl problems that secretly fought crime as the flamboyant Spider about town.

The powers that be at Marvel had been quoted for some time as being against the current reality. They wanted to reboot him to that original continuity, strip away the trappings of the adult and make him a kid again. Quesada met with the Spider-man editors. He laid out his long standing plans, ones that he had held since he had been a freelancer. He wanted the marriage ended. He thought Spider-man needed to be single and younger, more reflective of the losers who had taken Peter Parker to heart for over 30 years. Quesada thought divorce for Spider-man would create a darker undercurrent and wouldn't free him of the last 15 years of continuity, so instead, he sanctioned this even darker monstrosity: One More Day.

In One More Day, Aunt May is threatened for the umpteenth time with death. Having already lost his Uncle Ben, Peter is unwilling to stand by a let her succumb to old age and injury. He realizes that his powers alone can't fix the situation so he calls on Mephisto, the demonic ruler of the Marvel underworld, and he requests an audience. He bargains with him for Aunt May's life. Mephisto agrees but in payment he requests to strip from him the love that he has for Mary Jane and vice versa. He brings back Peter's life, the life he once had as a struggling photographer at the Daily Bugle. He brings back his best friend, the deceased Harry Osborn, and Peter wakes up the next day alone, Mary Jane has disappeared to Hollywood again and his Aunt May is alive. Finally, to contradict both Civil War and post-Cival War continuity, Mephisto takes all memory away from every character in the Marvel Universe that remembered that Peter had ever been Spider-man.

In this bastardized continuity Peter had never married Mary Jane. They had a long-term relationship that he barely remembers but sometime in the past instead of marrying they broke up. He never developed the organic web-shooters that the movie continuity referenced. Everything else remained the same. Every story counted, except for this one small piece of the puzzle. Peter Parker had been a clone, he fought the Beyonder and even brought back a symbiotic alien with dental problems, but the one regret for the company that publishes his comic is that he got married? That was the irreparable harm they wanted to fix with Spider-man? Joe Quesada wanted him to be more accessible to new readers, a lighter hero with less emotional and physical baggage. He wants Peter to be more like the kids who read his comics. So he has him make a deal with Satan?

This is what you get when "pencillers" make creative decisions. When Joe Quesada took over as Editor-in-Chief at Marvel he brought with him the experience of a an assembly-line drone. They handed him keys to the Marvel Ferrari and he has succeeded sure, obsessing over the engine or the transmission, the technical details and the surface sheen, but he hasn't been able to create something new. He doesn't know how to redesign the Ferrari. That is what artists do. This is the legacy of Image Comics. What is also clear to me is that Joe Quesada doesn't understand Spider-man at all. The vitality of the character is that despite its age, he's been able to grow and change with the times while always maintaining his dignity and the core of what makes Spider-man a hero. By returning him to a kinder simpler time, a more innocent one referencing the early issues of the title and specifically the Steve Ditko run in the 1960's, he has taken the character outside of Marvel continuity, stranding him in a thematic cul-de-sac, a curiosity but nowhere near the vibrant and important character he was before this travesty of a storyline began.

The Shadow of the Wind

I'm not a big fan of event books, the ones that you find amidst the best-sellers and the beach reading, the ones that are on everyone's recommended reading list. They bore me. A plucky protagonist, in these days usually an anachronistic nod to modern tastes and sensibilities if its a period piece, a meandering plot with a load of self-referential psycho-babble, or more than likely just a transposed True Crime novel aping a Silence of the Lambs, pandering to the least common denominator.

The Shadow of the Wind by Carlos Ruiz Zafon is oddly none of these and all of these. Let me explain. The book is set in post-war Barcelona but not any Barcelona that I recognised. It's as if the quirkiness of the city, the colorful and inviting qualities of Dali and Gaudi, the Sagrada Familia and Park Guell, was gray-washed out, darkened and in its place the city was blanketed by a layer of soot or decay equal to any inflicted on the literary London by Charles Dickens.

This is a foreboding place, a place of violence and Gothic tragedy, and our guide into this labyrinthine world is a 10 year old boy named Daniel Sempere. He's a bookseller's son, inquisitive and intelligent, but fiercely loyal to his father (who is a widower) and the people of his neighborhood who guide and protect him. In the beginning, his father takes him to a cemetery, but he quickly finds out that this cemetery houses books, thousands of lost and endangered books, and not people. I'm not giving anything away to say that Daniel is given a book in this Cemetery of Lost Books that will change his life. It is called the Shadow of the Wind by the fictional author Julian Carax.

My impressions of it? The Shadow of the Wind is a very modern novel, with all of the tricks of meta-fiction, very self-referential, but not so terribly manipulative as I've read in the past. It is a piece of fiction that explores itself: a book about books and about reading and writers. It references Gothic romances, pulp-fiction, early weird tales, and especially post-war roman noir. It is also highly influenced by different media, especially the modern Spanish cinema of Alejandro Almenabar (The Others), Pedro Almodovar (Bad Education), Juan Antonio Bayona (The Orphanage) and Guillermo del Toro (The Devil's Backbone). It is atmospheric, bordering many genres, and smartly written. It doesn't talk down to you, but it allows itself to breathe and relish in the absurdity of its own plot. You can tell that the author is enjoying himself, revelling in the act of storytelling.

He has big plans for the series. 5 books that share many of the same characters, a timeline spanning generations, covering the grand story of Spain in the last century, interweaving the individual stories, books separate from each other, but intertwining their narratives and their characters, shining new lights on the previous and subsequent books, for a very modern take on an old storytelling tradition.

With that you might also think the novel no more than a construct of plot and events, made by machines for machines and yes we have all read these sorts of books before: twist endings tacked on after the fact, red herrings and manipulative narrators nudging you along at a breakneck pace so you don't see the flaws in the plot sure, but so that you also ignore the holes in characterisation and that ultimately have nothing to say to you as human beings. This is a smart book sure, but it is also a wise book. It teaches about the power of love, and duty, and family, and like all great books it leaves it mark: it is quotable. Here are a few.

• Presents are made for the pleasure of who gives them, not for the merits of who receives them.
• We exist as long as somebody remembers us.
• Books are mirrors: you only see in them what you already have inside you.
• Few things leave a deeper mark on a reader than the first book that finds its way into his heart

A wonderful novel. I can hardly wait for his next one.