Flink, a Graphic Novel

Conrad, a young teenage boy, gets to go on his first hunting trip with his father, who works for some government agency tasked to capture one or more bigfoot creatures. Conrad doesn't seem terribly interested in the hunt, since he never stops playing video games. When the plane crashes into a lake, Conrad assumes that his father died in the crash.

Conrad tries to make his way out of the Washington forest on foot, but he has only a small pocket knife and no provisions. Upon waking up after the first cold night, Conrad finds a trail of berries, which he follows. The berries lead to a cave, which unfortunately houses a bear. As the bear chases Conrad, the adultbigfoot who left the trail of berries comes out of hiding and helps Conrad escape from the bear.
During the rescue, the bigfoot gets bitten by the bear, and Conrad does his best to provide first aid.

TenNaple's art consists of lots of broad strokes. He draws with excellent consistency from frame to frame, but the broader brushes give a feeling more like a storyboard than a finished product. The art does well enough to convey the story, but I think some finer details could have conveyed more subtle emotions beyond base emotions like fear and sorrow.

Mongol

Mongol provides a historical supposition about the life of Genghis Khan in his rise to power from a nine-year old boy namedTemudjin to a thirty-something uniting the Mongol people under his military rule.

Director Bodrov clearly wants to paint a different picture of young Temudjin than most people have from from reading about the savage Gengis Kahn. Mongol paints a picture of a stubborn, religious man devoted to his wife and determined to create a great empire for the benefit of all Mongol people -- 'even if half of them have to die for it.' We never see much of the cruelty or torture often associated in history toGengis Khan. Clearly he has enormous chrisma, or he couldn't have assembled such a huge army. We get a slight glimpse at why men choose to follow Temudjin, but we never see how he amasses an army with thousands of warriors. Also, we get the implication that Temudjin has brilliant battle strategy, but again we don't see much concrete demonstration of these skills.

We do see a lot of bloodshed, but only on the scale appropriate for cavalry or hand-to-hand combat. The Mongols use long swords and spears, so you see a lot of blood flowing from lengthy abdominal and leg wounds. And even though the Mongols don't kill women or children, they clearly don't spare the horses. I did like thatBodrov used a huge cast of extras to film his armies rather than the current technique of using CGI effects to copy and paste platoon after platoon of combatants across the battle field. Maybe I couldn't have seen the difference, but just knowing that every man in those huge armies was a real person and not a computer-generated image made the final battle scene much more effective.

Hot Fuzz

I didn't find Hot Fuzz as riotously funny as Shaun of the Dead. Hot Fuzz has much more subtle humor, mostly irony created by the totally metropolitan Angel trying to fit in to a small town lifestyle. But Hot Fuzz has a much more intelligent plot than Shaun of the Dead. Angel has a real mystery to solve, and the crime elements do enough to keep your interest in place of the morezany humor of Pegg's previous films.

Pegg and Frost continue to play amazingly well against each other, and the rest of the big names in the cast create an atmosphere of mystery and collusion that support the more serious side of the plot. But don't take Hot Fuzz too seriously or the corny ending will seem out of place.

21: Bringing Down the House

Intrigued by the 2008 movie 21 directed by Robert Luketic, I decided to read Bringing Down the House. For the most part, the movie sticks with the basic events in the book. Kevin Lewis, a bright, young M.I.T. student has a couple of friends, Fisher and Martinez, that have dropped out of school but always seem to have plenty of cash. Kevin's friends recruit him to join their Blackjack team.

The system works well for a while, but then some of the casinos start sharing information about card counters, and the team finds that they get banned from a casino almost as soon as they begin playing. Micky finds out that someone on the team sold a list of all the M.I.T. players (including other teams Micky financed) to a private investigation firm for $25,000. For a while disguises fool the casinos, and the team continues to make a profit. But soon even the disguises don't fool the casinos as the casinos employ the latest face- and gait-recognition technology.

The movie does a good job at recreating the emotional tension that Mezrich develops in the book. So, unless you have a keen desire to know the "true story," I think that the movie does in two hours what it takes the book 300 pages to produce. The book gives details like the fact that team gambles all over the country and not just in Vegas, but the movie condenses the emotional states that Mezrich wanted to convey into a much more intense experience.

Wanted

About a thousand years ago, a guild of weavers discovered that the seemingly random flaws in their fabric encoded the names of individuals who would do more harm than good if left alive. So the weavers also trained themselves as assassins -- not killers for hire, rather killers assigned by fate to remove undesirable persons.

In the present day, one of the guild's assassins has gone rogue and started killing the members of the guild. To remedy the situation, the guild recruits Wesley Gibson (JamesMcAvoy ), the son of one of the recently murdered weavers.

The plot follows pretty typical lines of the normal boy who finds out he has some unusual heritage -- think Harry Potter, but with school condensed down to a few weeks. The boy learns about his heritage, has a rough transition period into his inherited role, and must somehow use his new skills to defeat the evil that threatens his inherited lifestyle. Usually much of the plot centers on the character learning about the new world he has joined, and Wanted follows that path. Over half of the film centers on Wesley training to take his place in the guild of assassins. Wesley doesn't have much fun training, but the film moves the story along with a nice combination of explosions, rapid-fire gunfights, chase scenes, and the discovery of cool and interesting things about the weavers' heritage and skills. You don't get a lot of deep thought out of Wanted, but you do get a fun, adolescent romp filled with plenty of action.

Fablehaven: Grip of the Shadow Plague

The slow-moving first half of the book disappointed me, but I still find the Fablehaven books one of the most interesting and well-written adventure series around.

You can read my reviews of the first two books in the Fablehaven series:

1. Fablehaven
2. Fablehaven: Rise of the Evening Star