Posted by jukkahoo
Dark from Brains Brewery. Rich, nutty, creamy ale. Vey quaffable. :)
For the longest time, I had problems with zombies, or more precisely, with fiction where zombies where depicted. Why should I really care about the written word, when the visual media presents the monsters that much more entertainingly? That all changed after reading Mira Grant's first Newsflash-novel Feed.
Feed was a fun romp of zombie-filled world, with bloggers, presidental race, betrayal, idealism, hope and ultimately disaster - as any genre-knowledgable zombie-story does. The writing in these books is very good, fast-paced, descriptive yet plot-moving, exciting and most importantly, FUN. Mira (Seanan McGuire) Grant has written fair number of romantically spiced urban fantasies and knows how to tell a story. I was therefore a bit vexed by the second Newsflesh-novel Deadline. It is fun, action-packed and all that, but also too long, too wordy and the terrible ending of the first book just gets mangled by the ending of this one. It all went from "How terrible, brave and gutsy thing to do as a writer" to "wait, wot?" Stil a good read, but several paces behind the first book. WIll the pace hold, will the Hugo-nominators choose the third part as well? If so, I will read Blackout. Otherwise, I'm afraid there are too many books I want to read before that one.
Now I like pirates. And pirate stories. I have a soft spot for Cutthroat Island, for goodness sake! I even like Pirates of the Caribbean. A bit at least. Thus I was bitterly disappointent with the pirate section in the middle of The Adventures of Tintin (2011), when the breakneck pace the movies had been running with suddenly just stalled and then pretty much just stopped. The movie itself is good-looking, action-packed, entertaining (albeit only just about), filled with stooopid humour (much in the vein of the original), but ultimately dull. There are moments that give hope for the viewer, but those moments are few and far between.
As someone who has read the comics only in Finnish it almost always took me a moment to "get" the characters and locations. Is Marlinspike Moulinsart? Why, of course it is! Snowy is Milou, of course. Who the heck is Sakharine? For a moment I thought it'd be Calculus. Then I thought Calculus must the bloody pickpocketer. Sigh. Anyway: Forgettable movie, unremarkable, unnecessary, uninteresting.
Slightly undeady episode this entry. Hence, therefore: Unborn living, living dead.
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