Action Double Feature: Romance Special Edition — Valentine’s Day may have been a couple of weeks ago, but I didn’t have a chance to read this new addition to the double feature lineup until this afternoon.  Although modern comics has relegated romance comics to the indie stacks, they used to be a successful genre of the business, pioneered by comics giants Jack Kirby and Joe Simon.  Although DoubleFeature is marketing this as a special, I honestly hope that Four Star Studios decides to expand their lineup to include something like this, if only to help expand the population of comics readers.  After all, not all comics should be about superheroes.

1. In Other Words — Written by J. , Art by Doc Shaner.  I am a huge fan of Doc Shaner, who is second only to Darwyn Cooke when it comes to period drawing.  Set in 1967, we have a black man and a white woman talking and drinking at a wedding reception.  She’s a bridesmaid and he claims to be the bartender.  They flirt a little, touching on but never acknowledging the race issue.  It’s a good story and there’s a neat little twist at the end. It’s probably my favorite of the two stories included in this issue, but then again I’m a sucker for nostalgia.
2. Two Wheels, Two Feet — Written by Jamie S. Rich, Art by Megan Levens.  This story is something like the opposite of “In Other Words;” it’s about the breakup of a relationship, it’s set in the modern day, and there’s relatively little character interaction.  Most of the story takes place in the protagonist’s head, as he reminisces about a failing relationship.  There’s an interesting story hook with graffiti on a sidewalk explaining the situation, but it’s relatively difficult to describe so read it yourself.
   
   To be brutally honest, I didn’t like this story the first time through.  For one thing, shifting around in time made clarity a little difficult.  For another, the graffiti hook seemed a little implausible.  However, on a second read, I liked it a little more — especially after reading in the commentary that the graffiti actually existed on a bridge and that’s where the creative genesis for the story came from.  Oddly enough, I was willing to give the story more credibility once I saw that.

As always, Double Feature provides an enjoyable read for an extremely affordable price ($0.99).  Also, the commentaries and special features remain one of the best selling points of the app.  Definitely pick this up if you haven’t already.  If you don’t have an iPad, then you can still pick up the .pdf version for the same low $0.99 price.

Action Double Feature #3 — I haven’t done one of these reviews of a Double Feature issue before, but I had to for the most recent issue that I just read.  I’ve explained the concept here, so check that out first before reading any further in the review.  This issue of Action had something of a pulp hero theme with two strong female leads.  Here are the two stories in this issue:

1. Athena Voltaire & The Wings of Death — This wonderful little gem, started its life as a webcomic.  This story is completely original for Double Feature app and does include a few retcons.  However it’s still a rather fun time.  The basic premise is that Athena Voltaire (and sidekick Agent Forsyth) are captured by the villainous pirate-turned-witch-doctor Khir bin Khalid.  The commentary by creator Steve Bryant is pretty hilarious as he explains his creative process.
2. Amelia Earhart: Jungle Princess — Using the real life Amelia Earhart as a starting point, James Asmus has created a throwback to the 30s “Jungle Girl” serials and pulp stories.  What makes this so much better is the fact that Amelia Earhart was pretty badass in her own right, and we do see that here in spades.  It’s probably my favorite story of the two, both in terms of art and writing.  I’m really looking forward to any sequel to the story.

Sunshine, directed by Danny Boyle, is pretty much a great movie.  The premise sounds like an incredibly silly disaster movie, but it is crafted not for explosions and computer-generated mayhem.  The sun is dying and Earth sends two ships to reignite the sun by exploding a massive (and completely theoretical) nuclear device inside the star.  The Icarus I was sent some seven years prior to the movie but did not complete its mission and has since been lost.  The Icarus II was sent using the last of the world’s fissile material and is the final chance for human survival.

What follows is a relatively “hard” science fiction movie where actions have consequences, mistakes cost lives, and the lives of the few are measured against billions.  Above is my patented quality/time graph for Sunshine, and as you can tell I definitely liked the movie.  I recently picked up the bluray for cheap and it was pretty damn good.  Perhaps the best part is the two commentaries on the disc, one by the director and the other by Brian Cox, the film’s science advisor and a physicist working at CERN.  By far the best part is when Cox says that one of the characters mistakes the temperature of space for absolute zero, but derides her as a “botanist” so that makes sense.  Anyway, go watch it.  It’s pretty amazing.

And yes, there is a point on the graph where it breaks outside the axis.  It is that amazing.

How to Train Your Dragon, which really should be called “How to not prepare Chris for an ending” is perhaps the best animated movie Dreamworks has come out with.  And fuck. That ending.  I really, really liked the movie.  Also David Tennant is in it, if that suits your fancy.

Rango — Ever since I saw the first trailer for Rango I’ve wanted to see it and it didn’t disappoint.  Rango is a great little western animated film about what it takes to be a hero. It stars Johnny Depp, Isla Fisher, and Abigail Breslin. And Bill Nighy. And Timothy Olyphant.  It’s good and everyone should see it.

Daybreakers — I don’t even think I could explain how poorly executed this movie was. There is something of an interesting movie buried in here but it is extremely incoherent. In my opinion, the best narratives are logically consistent. That is, you start by postulating some axioms (in this case: (1) vampirism exists, (2) a vampire that does not drink sufficient blood turns feral, (3) a blood substitute may exist, (4) a cure exists).  From these axioms you can then build a tale, for instance combining axioms 1 and 2 to create the human blood farm that is the setting of most of the story.  Add in a dash of #3 and you get a pharmaceutical company dealing with diminishing returns from a decreasing human stock.  You can continue this process to craft a decent and consistent enough story.  And for about half the movie they do a reasonably average job of doing this.

Then they screw it up by ignoring two or three of these axioms altogether.  Because these axioms get ignored characters start acting unlike how they did at the beginning; the plot frays apart.  You get an ending which makes positively no sense.  In fact they spend about two-thirds of the movie on axiom #4 only to reveal that the original axiom has a few corollaries that would otherwise change the calculus of the entire movie.

There is, actually, an elegant solution to this movie’s problems of course. It’s pure math: if (spoiler alert) drinking blood from someone cured of vampirism makes a vampire also cured of vampirism then the quickest, easiest way to spread the cure would be to hook up the protagonist to one of the blood bank machines.  The infrastructure is all there to infect the rest of society with the cure, and yet none of the characters even think to use it?  This creates a noble sacrifice, the movie has a bitter sweet ending that the characters are forced to earn instead of kind of falling into a successful result, and it creates a nice arc between the protagonist at the beginning of the film and at the end of the film.

Perhaps the shortest review of a movie I will ever make featuring The Warrior’s Way, now in theaters:

Cowboys, Ninjas, and Geoffrey Rush. ★★★★.

Nonzero: The Logic of Human Destiny by Robert Wright, speaker of two of my favorite TEDTalks, is a book arguing that nonzero action is the driving force of History.  The tract, a limited game theory analysis of cultural evolution, is incredibly well researched and thought out.  There isn’t really a strong mathematical component; quite a lot of the logic is intuitive rather than formal — which is not to say you couldn’t formalize the logic it just is outside the purview of what is a journalistic polemic rather than a mathematical one.  In many ways this is like Robert Axelrod’s The Evolution of Cooperation.

One of the reasons I like this book is because Wright thinks quite a lot like I do.  For instance, while discussing possible distinctions between different social groups’ relative change in technological progress he discusses two functions of population density.  The first is a result of ease of trade and communication (it’s quicker to spread knowledge and to trade surplus goods if your market is closer rather than further from you).  While reading the first I had the thought, “Wouldn’t another function of pop. density be that the percent chance of inventions would increase?” and within the next two pages Wright is discussing that thought as part of his “Invisible Brain” hypothesis (to be compared to the “Invisible Hand” of Adam Smith).

My major problem with the book is a pedantic one; instead of using footnotes — which I prefer for non-fiction books — he uses an overly arcane endnote system that uses daggers (†) instead of actual superscript arabic numerals.

And when was the last time you invented something as clever as the boomerang?

Logicomix is a essentially a biographical graphic novel of 60 years of Bertrand Russell’s life, spanning his birth to the beginning of World War II. It follows his work on trying to use logic, and eventually set theory, to create a formal foundation for mathematics that both uses few or no assumptions and is logically consistent.  It discusses his collaboration with Alfred North Whitehead on the Principia Mathematica, the first and only volume of their work to meet these goals.  This is contrasted with his fear of madness — an alarmingly common trait of logicians — and his blunders in his personal life.  It also contrasts the great quest to find bedrock principals for math with the debate over going to war against Nazi Germany (Russell was himself a militant pacifist in World War I but declared that war against the Third Reich was the lesser of two evils).  There is also an apt comparison to the greek tragedy Oresteia.

It also discusses the contradiction of looking for fewer and fewer axioms for math while simultaneously taking 362 pages to prove “1+1=2.”

I do have a few issues with the book. For one thing it, like many math histories obsesses over the “Great Men” who were involved. And certainly it is true there were great men in mathematics but collective obsession over it is something of an annoyance (For instance, the Pythagorean theorem predates Pythagorus in many cultures including those of China and India).  Additionally the history is perhaps too short to be a complete history of logic.  By essentially turning von Neumann into a punchline by ignoring the rationality of game theory and the practicality of the computer it has essentially come away with a negative impression of logic and logicians, a fact the book rightly notes.  In fact logic was not damned and continues in computer science, economics, math, law, and a host of other subjects. Gödel’s incompleteness theorem only damned the further study of the foundations of math and to imply otherwise is a disservice to the reader.

However, I was surprised that any of the concepts of both logic and math that Russell’s work concerned itself with were actually involved in the book and that they take the effort to rigorously explain these concepts.  In addition, the artist(s) of the book did some pretty impressive things with non-standard panels and an especially good page where Russell attempts to explain to Whitehead’s son about death.  Overall it was a very good read, and one that I think.  I leave you with this lame attempt at a math joke:

For:
Anyone who loves comics, set C
Anyone who loves math, set M
Logicomix is the perfect read for C∩M.

Thank you, good night. Tip your waitresses and try the veal.

Machete is a spin-off movie from the great 2007 double feature Grindhouse. In Grindhouse we got to see a great “fake” trailer for Machete before director Robert Rodriguez’s Planet Terror.  Well, they decided to make it real, and this is the result.  Machete is not a movie you take seriously. If you do, you will end up on Fox News and claiming that latinos want to kill white people in their sleep.

Here’s the thing though. It’s just like the Grindhouse movies. Crazy yet awesome things happen. In Planet Terror they stick a machine gun on lead Rose McGowan’s leg. Bruce Willis killed Osama bin Laden and was dosed with zombie gas! Sayid from lost collects testicles! In Death Proof, Rosario Dawson puts her boot through Kurt Russell’s face. These are things that are not going to happen. Similarly, the idea that a Mexican drug cartel is pulling the strings of a rabid anti-immigration Texas state senator who uses his free time to shoot border crossing illegals is a farce.  We all know that the rabid anti-immigration supporters are backed by the private prison industry that incarcerates illegal immigrants.

Look. If you didn’t enjoy Grindhouse, you’re not going to enjoy this film. If you did, you still may not. But if you like the idea of a crazy action movie throwback, go watch it because it won’t disappoint.

“Be careful. These guys — they play rough. Their administration has been born in controversy, national shame, and illegality — and it is my bet that’s the way they’ll go out.”

The Special Relationship is the third and final movie in Peter Morgan’s Blair trilogy which included the other awesome movies The Deal, and The Queen.  Once again Michael Sheen takes on the role of Tony Blair, and again he just works perfectly as Blair with all his triumphs and faults.  Dennis Quaid plays Bill Clinton, more as a caricature than anything else.  The real scene stealer is Hope Davis as Hillary Clinton. She often sounds like Hilary, and she’s pretty spot on especially when the film covers the Monica Lewinsky crisis. In many ways it’s not as good as The Queen or The Deal, but it’s a fitting end to the Blair Trilogy.  Really it’s just sad that this didn’t get the theatrical release it deserved in either the United States or the United Kingdom.

Chernaya Molniya or Black Lightning is a Russian superhero movie.  Liberally borrowing from American flicks like Spider-Man, Iron Man, and Herbie (sort of), the movie is about a boy and his beat up GAZ-21 Volga.  He’s got less money than his best friend, is in love with his best friend’s girl, and his car has an experimental fuel source and flies. His father is killed by a mugger in an incredibly bad Spider-Man retread. He decides to fight crime.

Also there’s an oligarch trying to drill for diamonds under Moscow and for some reason he needs to use the Volga’s power source to drill through some seismic shelf.  This drilling will, for whatever reason, destroy Moscow.  He enlists the original design team to build a new Black Lightning (made out of a modern mercedes-benz and using some left over backup fuel transformed by the GAZ-21 Black Lightning. Also air-to-air missiles).

The film is incredibly uneven.  The bits with the love interest don’t seem to make any sense, and the villain switches from megalomaniacal card-carry villain to evil capitalist pig.  There are bits that are taken straight from popular American movies, like the mugger-killing-parental-figure storyline from Spider-Man to the way he defeats the villain which is taken straight from the first Iron Man movie. Some of the more interesting, but criminally underdeveloped, parts of the movie are the places where the protagonist is dealing with class and what it means to be rich in modern Russia.  There’s also an incredibly funny bit between the protagonist, his flower-selling boss, and one of the henchmen sent to find the Black Lightning.

Leviathan by Scott Westerfeld is a ridiculously fun book.  It takes place during an alternate history World War One between the Darwinists and the Clankers.  The Darwinists use biological creatures, engineered thanks to Charles Darwin’s discovery of evolution and genetics, to wage war.  The Clankers use mechanical machines of war; diesel and gears, lumbering mechs, airplanes and zepplins.  There are two narratives in this book, Prince Alek, son of assassinated Archduke Franz Ferdinand, who must escape from the conspiracies of the German Government, and Deryn Sharp, a young girl masquerading as a boy in order to join the British Air Service.

This book is essentially world-building at its finest. You get a lot of technical details about both Clanker technology and Darwinist science, but it’s a little thin on coherent narrative.  What is probably the main thrust of the series is still shrouded in mystery, which is not necessarily a bad thing. It definitely makes you want to read more, and that’s a good thing.  It’s a fun book with lots of imagination and characters you can empathize with.  It’s also a very quick read, which is always a good thing, in my opinion, since I read few books for fun.

A sequel, Behemoth, will be out this October.

I really liked Misfits. Sure it didn’t have much in the way of plot or originality, but it was fun and that’s definitely important. The basic plot is that there are these five miscreant teens with community service who gain superpowers after a freak storm. Kelly can read minds. Curtis can turn back time. Simon can turn invisible. Anyone Alisha touches wants to have sex with her. Nathan can….wisecrack really well?  He doesn’t exactly have a power (that’s revealed anyway) until the last episode. And boy is it a fun reveal. Anyway, the teens end up killing and covering up the killing of their insane social worker and the plot gets running from there. It’s a really fun show and I certainly recommend it. Also the last scene of the last episode is just damn funny.

Also, there’s Alex Reid as their second social worker. Which, ya know, is always a good thing to have.

If you could just see yourselves. It breaks my heart. You’re wearing cardigans!