Rant: The Covenant, via X-Men Origins: Wolverine

As a Batman obsessive I have been following the Dark Knight[*] build up quite closely. Last night I was looking at the premier photographs whilst avoiding spoilers and again this morning, and inbetween being struck at just how hot Christian Bale is looking and annoyed that it hasn’t been release simultaneously over here despite its 3 British stars (Bale, Caine and Nolan), I basically IMDb-stalked — a variation on Facebook-stalking but your fave celebs and movies rather than loved/loathed ‘friends’ — Dark Knight stuff. Including the joint story author of Dark Knight: David S. Goyer to see if I’d liked any of the other films he’s written.

Through this I discovered that X-Men Origins: Magneto was in the works. Which I’m frankly baffled by. Magneto’s origins have been fairly well covered in the other films in the X-Men franchise — his stay in Auschwitz, his former friendship with Prof. Xavier, his co-building of the School — so why the heck do we need a film dedicated to him?!

Through this rather convoluted route I realised I hadn’t checked up on the progress of the Wolverine film, now titled X-Men Origins: Wolverine, which is frankly shocking considering the comic book geek in me (though I am more a DC girl than a Marvel girl). So I scrolled through the cast list and saw to my great joy that there definitely will be a Gambit! Hooray!, I thought. Until I looked at who had been cast. Taylor Kitsch. Name didn’t ring any bells, click, pause, and then I saw that he was indeed the “biker” guy from The Covenant.

He is not hot. He does not have the Cajun accent. He cannot act. He is not hot. He is not Gambit.

Gambit is hot, scorching even. He is suave, clever, scathing, lovely, arrogant, Cajun and hot.

Taylor Kitsch is not Gambit.

This also reminded me that after having watched The Covenant I didn’t rant about it, to anyone in fact. It may have been a few months since I watched it but I can still goddamn rant about it.

Spoilers and (most likely) swearing below.

[*]Please no spoilers, it’s not out here until next Thursday.

Review: Vellum

THE BOOK OF ALL HOURS: 1

In the Vellum–the vast realm of eternity on which our world is just a scratch–the unkin are gathering for war.

In the Vellum, a falling angel and a renegade devil are about to come to blows.

In the Vellum, blood magic made in hell is about to come face to face with nanotechnology forged in heaven. Past, present and future will collide with other worlds and ancient myths.

And the Vellum will burn.

An extraordinary, incendiary masterpiece from a rare new talent, this multi-stranded, multi-charactered imaginative fiction that blows traditional literary concepts apart.

Vellum, Hal Duncan, Macmillan 2005.

That’s taken from the dust jacket. And if that makes any sense to you before, during or after reading Vellum, then all power to you! I thought as a blurb it wasn’t that great, but it’s better than the one on FantasticFiction.co.uk and the lack of one on Amazon.

Here’s the Guardian review which made me want to buy the book in the first place:

Guy Carter is searching for the Book of All Hours, which he believes contains the names of all who have ever lived, be they human, angel or demon. It’s a short search, because Guy finds it at the end of the first chapter, in his college library. Instead of names, it contains maps, of everything. Vellum is the parchment on which God writes; the act of writing makes all true, and God’s word alone is enough to create. It’s a big concept, and Duncan approaches it with a pair of scissors and a pot of paste. Narrative styles change, perspective shifts and typefaces swap around; characters turn into other characters, or simply disappear. Duncan has gone all out to break the rules in a debut that is flawed, but brave and occasionally brilliant.

Guardian Review, Fantasy round-up, 22nd July 2006

In fact I quite want to read all the books in that round up, but only to date have managed to buy Vellum, and then its taken me almost 2 years to sit down and read it. How do I know this? I used the receipt as a bookmark. I found a hardback, signed, first ed. in Hay-on-Wye, Town of Books, and couldn’t resist.

Review below the cut.

Books

Nicked from Nicole

Instructions:

• Bold all the books you have read
• Underline those you loved &/or have read more than once
• Italicize books on your To Be Read list (books you own just haven’t read yet)
• Add an asterisk to those you started but didn’t/couldn’t finish

A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens
A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole
A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry
A Prayer for Owen Meaney - John Irving
A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth
A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens
A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute
Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle *
Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll
Animal Farm - George Orwell
Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery
Atonement - Ian McEwan
Beloved – Toni Morrison *
Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks
Bleak House - Charles Dickens
Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh
Bridget Jones’ Diary - Helen Fielding
Captain Corelli’s Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres
Catch 22 - Joseph Heller
Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger
Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl
Charlotte’s Web - E.B. White
Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis
Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons
Complete Works of Shakespeare
Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas
Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
Don Quixote - Miguel De Cervantes
Dracula - Bram Stoker
Dune - Frank Herbert
Emma - Jane Austen
Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy
Foucault’s Pendulum - Umberto Eco
Frankenstein – Mary Shelley
Germinal - Emile Zola
Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell
Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck
Great Expectations - Charles Dickens * (actually enjoyed what I read, was a set text so I’ve never ended up finishing it)
Gulliver’s Travels – Jonathan Swift * (sort of like above, except I didn’t like it)
Harry Potter series - JK Rowling
Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad (HATED it, BUT it didn’t defeat me!)
His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman
Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell – Susanna Clarke
Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy
Les Miserables - Victor Hugo
Life of Pi - Yann Martel
Little Women - Louisa May Alcott
Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
Lord of the Flies - William Golding
Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
Mansfield Park – Jane Austen
Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden
Middlemarch - George Eliot
Middlesex: A Novel – Jeffrey Eugenides
Midnight’s Children - Salman Rushdie
Moby Dick - Herman Melville
Mrs. Dalloway – Virginia Woolf
My Antonia – Willa Cather
Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell
Northanger Abby – Jane Austen
Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson
Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck
Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens
On The Road - Jack Kerouac
One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
Persuasion - Jane Austen
Possession - A.S. Byatt
Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen
Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome
Tess of the D’Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy (same as Heart of Darkness, HATED it)
The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath
The Bible
The Canterbury Tales – Geoffrey Chaucer
The Color Purple - Alice Walker
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon
The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown
The Divine Comedy – Dante Alighieri
The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton
The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom
The Fountainhead – Ayn Rand
The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald
The Handmaid’s Tale - Margaret Atwood
The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams
The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien
The Hunchback of Notre Dame - Victor Hugo
The Iliad - Homer
The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini
The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis (Wasn’t the whole Chronicles on this list a short while ago?–I agree with Nicole here)
The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery
The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien
The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold
The Odyssey - Homer (liked it but not loved it, I much prefer The Argonautika, aka Jason and the Golden Fleece by Apollonius of Rhodes)
The Outsiders - S.E. Hinton
The Picture of Dorian Gray – Oscar Wilde
The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro
The Scarlet Letter - Nathaniel Hawthorne
The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett
The Secret History - Donna Tartt
The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon
The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas
The Time Traveller’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger
The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks (nasty, nasty book. Clever, but nasty)
The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame
The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins
To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
Ulysses - James Joyce
Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray
War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
Watership Down - Richard Adams
Wicked : the life and times of the wicked witch of the West – Gregory Maguire
Winnie the Pooh - A.A. Milne
Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte

Conspiracy, bwhahahahaha!

CONSPIRACY! Cue manical laughter.

Eh, I couldn’t resist writing it in capitals, generally I perceive it was a word that needs to be said in capital letters, followed by manical laughter. In my writings at least.

Oh yes. This is mostly based upon an idea that’s been kicking about my head for a few months now, I blame Batman.

Well, the comics. And Fables, it has swearing in! GASP.

Yes, indeedy, Charlie’s trying her hand at writing comics. I give you extract! You like, yes!

Doc: [...] One of the firefighters said something interesting to me.

Page 28:
Panel 1: Page width, Else looking at Doc
E: Really? What?
Doc: That the accident and explosion didn’t look accidental at all.
Panel 2: Page width street scene
E: Oh, how I’ve missed these consipracy theories!
Doc: And when they turned out true?
Panel 3: length-ways, at apartment building
E: Then you got to say ‘I told you so’.
Panel 4: length ways, stairs.
[...]

Page 32
Panel 1: Very dark, computer screen(s) glowing in background. 2 faces just visible. One male, one female wearing glasses
Male fed: This is not good. We did not factor for this.
Ms. Beau: No.
Panel 2: Beau’s face shrouded in darkness, light glinting off glasses.
Ms. Beau: Action needs to be taken
Panel 3: Beau’s toothy, evil smile
Ms. Beau: And I know exactly how to do it.
Panel 4: casefile entitled “*****”, photo of masked Else clipped to it, underneath report on murdered John Graeme.

Bwhahaha! Else killed him earlier on. Go, go super-flawed superheroes, shady rooms with even shadier people in and cliff-hanger endings! Some without names. “Ms. Beau” was spur of the moment naming, she still needs a first name, and doesn’t reappear for … um, awhile when I actually plot out this first story arc instead of coming up with cooler ones with BIGGER EXPLOSIONS (that can be blamed on Nextwave).

I starred out Else’s alias because I haven’t decided whether it’s a shitty superhero name or not, but it does tie in beautifully with this first (very loosely in my head) planned arc. Shady male fed needs a name desperately. I suck so much at naming. I already had three loose arcs in my head before I came up with Else’s name, and THEN I had to come up with a superhero alias, ditto the same for the Doc, and several other characters … BAH. But behindthename.com rocks the proverbial socks, so does surnames.behindthename.com.

End ramblings.

How I am amusing myself at home

Home sucks. I hate home. There’s nothing to do, no one to do anything with, and no funds to even try and do anything with. Minor expansion on the latter point: and no one’ll employ me, because there’s nowhere to employ me.

I reiterate: I hate home.

And a minor suffix to my last blog post: the Gossip Girl Drinking Game, now having been put into practise should be played with half shots and long drinks. Otherwise a bottle of Southern Comfort is consumed far too quickly between two people over two episodes. That was an interesting night …

So, anyway, I’m having to amuse myself. Much hard than I first thought it’d be. Wimbledon is helping currently. I love Wimbledon, I love tennis and the only time it’s ever on terrestrial TV is Queen’s 2 weeks before Wimbledon and then Wimbledon.

I’m also thinking about the flat a lot that I’m moving into for this coming year at uni. And I get to move into it second week of August! Woo! I’m not quite sure how I didn’t do a victory dance around the kitchen. I can’t wait, but unfortunately I have to.

And as I’m thinking about the flat, I’m thinking about the stuff I need for it. This includes silly little things such as my favourite comic strips to be printed off:

I’ve also procured myself a graphics tablet, a Wacom Bamboo courtesy of eBay, so there’s some more stuff on my DevArt account.

I am going back to Latitude Festival, which I’m very excited about, Franz Ferdinand, Sigur Ros, Interpol, Bill Bailey, Adrian Mitchell … exciting peoples! And I’m going with the same group of people again so I’m looking forward to that!

Otherwise I’m trying to tackle my towering (metaphorical) to-be-read pile (they’re all on my shelves). Including, but not limited to:

• Dragon and Phoenix*, Joanne Bertin
• Cloud Atlas, David Mitchell
• Catch-22, Joseph Heller
• Brave New World, Aldous Huxley
• Wild Swans, Jung Chan
• The Sound and the Fury*, William Faulkner
• The Monk, Matthew Lewis
• Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass*, Lewis Carroll
• My Swordhand is Singing, Marcus Sedgwick
• Blood Red, Snow White, Marcus Sedgwick

* Already started

So that’s something at least. And I’m trying to write. But either my brain’s stalling or I have to many ideas, oh well.

I may or may not post a review of Coldplay’s new album Viva La Vida, or Death and All His Friends. And by review I may or may not mean rant. Huzzah …

Gossip Girl

Completely trashy, but great fun!

Drinking game a friend (Parner in Crime) and me came up with:

1. Every time anyone says “Chuck Bass”
2. Every time Blair cries
3. Every time Dan or Jenny feels bad/complains about being poor
4. Every time Rufus lusts after Lily. Double shot ever time Lily lusts back
5. Every time someone’s a complete hypocrite. (Use discretion)
6. Every time someone rich (mostly Nate) has a token Trouble-Sympathy moment
7. Every time Blair throws a party
8. Every time there’s a slutty-Serena flashback
9. Everytime anyone angsts about their family
10. Every time Gossip Girl calls Dan “Lonely Boy” or makes a terrible pun
11. Every time incriminating evidence is sent to Gossip Girl
12. Every time Blair mentions Cedric, Dan’s Cabbage Patch Kid, double shot

April …

Hm. I keep neglecting my blog. *poke* *dust billows up* *sneezes*

What have I been doing? Writing essays and not getting them back before a 2 week break. Which cannot be called ‘Easter Holidays’ as it began the weekend after Easter. Gr. Procrastinating from writing another essay because I can’t be arsed and I’d rather go out and buy graphic novels in bulk. Or indulge in Marcus Sedgwick. Or read books I bought years ago, but found I couldn’t read because the previous one upset me so much. The latter is in reference to Infernal Devices by Philip Reeve, as I couldn’t bear to start it because I had been so upset by Tom’s-nearly-dying at the end of Predator’s Gold. Because of this my mother thinks I’m mad; but it’s true, it’s the one book I’ve cried the hardest at, not the most, as in most frequently, (that would be Checkmate by Malorie Blackman, most likely) but I was a wreck after reading Tom got shot, thank goodness he didn’t die!

I am now procrastinating further from starting or even thinking properly about my essay. I’ve updated my Readings ‘08 page majorly since coming home. Twice. And also update and re-updated my books spreadsheed, which I seem to do ever year in April. Must be something to do with the new financial year or something.

April is not the cruellest month; Eliot was a plagiarising twat.