E. Bear, HAMMERED and SCARDOWN

Today I didn't wake up with ecoterrorist nightmares, which is what happened yesterday because of matociquola. I read HAMMERED on Friday and wound up staying up until 4:30 am to finish it, even though it was bleaker than I usually like in my fiction--and especially right now when I'm recovering and am a bit more emotionally sensitive than usual. Then Saturday I read SCARDOWN; started off very slow, nothing much happens for the first hundred pages or so, but then she throws her characters into some really interesting moral dilemmas that made the books worth reading.

They remind me of Chris Moriarity's SPIN STATE, with a lot more violence-- M. John Harrison LIGHT sort of violence, it is part and parcel of the world and worldview and doesn't merit much dwelling on consequences or so on. Very different from the violence in mystery fiction, which is all about the consequences of violences and how to restore the social order.

I found the Quebecois a bit irritating, in part because it wasn't standard French.

(Also, if one extrapolates our current world, I find it hard for Spanish not to have an impact on English as she is spoken in the U.S. Let alone the impact of latinos/latino culture on a global level, which are pretty much ignored in the novels...)

These gripes aside, I was impressed that Bear doesn't pull her punches very much. Her tech is dangerous and complicated and not all the characters embrace it so willingly. People often do bad things for good reasons and good things for bad reasons. The betrayals and backstabbings and respect/loathing and all that make for complex and interesting reading.

I had a personal fondness for the parrots, but that has more to do with my mother raising African Greys and moluccans than anything else.

I'm very curious to see what happens next in WORLDWIRED.

(I hope this isn't too spoiler-y for anyone...)

Presque rien

Last night I watched this French film, whose English title is COME UNDONE. (I had met my friend Luis for tea and he loaned me a few DVDs to break up my reading with some visual narratives for a change.)

What a lousy film! The two protanogists, Jeremie Elkaim and Stephane Rideau, are both cute, but that is the film's only redeeming value. And even then, it's not quite enough. Plenty of beach scenes, some nighttime skinny-dipping, a bit of sex on the beach... But the plot (hah!) if very poorly elaborated, and doesn't really amount to anything. It's like a 98 minute slice of life with no point. Feh.

The film jumps around in time without any indicators of when or where we are, and none of the potentially powerful emotional moments of the film are ever realized. The major conflict is not even shown in the film, you have to deduce that it happened (and what it was).

Sebastian Lifshitz obviously disagrees with that famous Chekov line about how if you have a gun on stage in act one of a play it must go off by the end of act 3.

(I haven't seen the other gay teen flick, WILD REEDS, which also stars Stephane Rideau, but if the plot is as non-existant as this, I think I won't waste my time. Different director, so perhaps there is hope...)

The poster image/DVD cover shows a Pierre et Gilles photo of the two cute protagonists, but there is a full-frontal version of this same image in P&G's new book from Taschen which is more rewarding--and perhaps more interesting and dynamic than the film itself.

Not recommended for anyone seeking something more than soft-porn twink titillation.