These notes were made from a couple of viewings of the pilot movie that was released on DVD in 2009. Some scenes have apparently been re-shot or added for the broadcast pilot, which I haven’t seen at the time of this writing.

The futuristic backdrop of Caprica City.

It’s significant that we are now posited to be the direct descendants of these people, rather than a parallel society — the 13th tribe — which transforms some portion of the cautionary tale into an escapable conclusion. That’s dramatic, but is it the kind of dramatic that I like? I’m waiting to see the series before I make up my mind.

With this show we get a weird and wonderful hybrid, part Rome and part Gattaca. We get the escapist fantasy of futurism in design and effects, and the provocative, mysterious historical fantasy of glimpsing a vanished culture that’s eerily familiar but does things different from us. The alien ancestors. We get the culture shock that comes from watching people arrive at a similar, but meaningfully different, mix of conclusions about the universe, humanity, and what’s important in life than we’ve arrived at now. The only other show I can think of that recently played itself actively for culture shock as a source of drama — for generating conflict not between characters but between the show and the audience — was the intriguing but underutilized Kings.

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A few years ago, Rian Johnson gave us the high-school detective noir, Brick. I’m a fan of Brick. It was the kind of indie debut that begged one to wonder what that director’s next gig would look like.

Johnson’s next gig is the screwball con-man yarn, The Brothers Bloom — big enough and wise enough to snag a great cast in Rachel Weisz, Adrien Brody, Mark Ruffalo, Rinko Kikuchi, Maximillian Schell, and Robbie Coltrane. Brody and Ruffalo play the titular flimflam siblings, Bloom and Stephen. Weisz plays their eccentric and wealthy mark, Penelope Stamp.

When The Brothers Bloom debuted, critics were quick to make Wes Anderson references, for good or ill, and that’s a fair comparison. Adrien Brody’s brotherly angst and train-bound antics show immediate (if shallow) comparability with Darjeeling Limited, I suppose. Both directors have somewhat similar visual voices, too — old-school zooms, charmingly composed ensemble shots, steady looks of measured action, dry comedy, carefully managed palettes — but I think critics implying that Johnson is aping Anderson’s style are limiting the field. We have room enough for both directors to maneuver without having to dedicate the yard to Anderson. Put another way, the comparison is apt and in Johnson’s favor; he’s made a good-looking and witty picture here. (Props, certainly, to DP Steve Yedlin, too; everything from the one-hat burg to Jakarta at midnight looks lovely.)

Faulting The Brothers Bloom for its obvious influences implies that the likes of David Mamet and The Sting should not be influential; as if being influenced by them was somehow problematic. That’s crazy talk. In fact, let me pay The Brothers Bloom the compliment of saying that it doesn’t just reveal the influence of Mametian gamesters and classic con-man pictures, it wears its love like a badge. Ricky Jay’s voice is that badge.

The Brothers Bloom is a sometimes classy, sometimes silly swindler’s fable told with dry wit and handsomely disheveled aplomb. It gets its suits made at the same shop as some other films, but it’s a good-looking suit so what do I care?

(Thinking about it now, by the way, Rian Johnson’s oeuvre to date seems to be a terrific portfolio to take with him on an audition for the gig directing Michael Chabon’s Yiddish Policemen’s Union. I’d be just fine if the film adaptation of that book landed at the intersection of Brick and The Brothers Bloom — it’d do well to be a mix of hard-boiled visual jargon and eccentric charm.)

That’s the review for those of you who haven’t seen the movie. What follows is what occurred to me while watching the movie, and is rife with spoilers. Fair warning…

Beware Spoilers »

Looking back at my review of Finch, I realize that I left out a lot of my actual feelings on VanderMeer’s work building the world of post-war Ambergris, and building Finch’s story. Here’s what I didn’t say.

Finch is sometimes hard to read if only because it is so unflinching in its depiction of a battered and oppressed city. If only because it is sometimes so grim in its dread for the future and regret for the past. VanderMeer treats Finch, the main character, terribly, hurting or humiliating him at almost every opportunity.

We go with Finch through the city of Ambergris in search of information, and VanderMeer measures out our servings with an incredible control — we so often get morsels when we want to feast. I was hungry to know more about the city, more about Finch, about the past and the future and the day-to-day lives of Finch’s cohorts and contacts, and VanderMeer offers enough to keep the pages turning and the story moving. Sometimes we’re right at the dangerous edges of reader knowledge. Too far this way and we feel stymied, too far that way and we get ahead of the detective. Either way makes us impatient.

VanderMeer steps on the borderline a few times, but he’s always in control when he does it, I think. He’s daring us to get ahead of Finch sometimes, and wonder what might be real in this new era of Ambergris. Some of us have read more fantasy fiction than Finch is forced to live in, so we make jumps and accept facts that Finch wrestles with.

I was so sure I had the case figured out, except that I didn’t trust Ambergris — VanderMeer’s city is a cruel and many-faced thing. I wasn’t sure if the mystery would be more literary or more fantasy, and I knew that solving the mystery wouldn’t end the story. But I had no idea how big the book would end up making the truth. Finch is no detective yarn, no episode in an imagined police series. It’s a big story seen from over the shoulder of a man living as a detective, a man who reminds us as he reminds himself, I am not a detective.

I doubled back through the book again and again, looking at it as a pivotal piece in the history of a fantastical city, looking at it as a commentary on foreign policy and tribal relationships, looking at it as a character study, and it works as all those things.

But it’s worth noting that I was able to escape the book to do that backtracking, that I was looking to take the pressure of life in Ambergris off of myself, that I didn’t always want to move forward with the story as much as I wanted to move laterally through Ambergris, to explore. Following Finch, the man, was sometimes sweet agony.

When reading Finch, look at how often things are described as being two things at once, as smelling sweet and foul, as being both red and blue, as being both present and absent. Things aren’t easy to reconcile in Ambergris.

VanderMeer knows that when we visit Ambergris with him, we can see only what he shows us, and he’s often offering us agonizing glimpses of more. It’s not meant to be an easy tale. But it’s a good one.

Finch by Jeff VanderMeer

The LA Times review of Finch spoiled the hell out of the book. I’m not going to do that. I’m not a big believer in writing reviews that summarize. That said, this review summarizes the setup of the novel and, I hope, gives a sense of how much I enjoyed poring over the choices the author made with the language in the book. Writing spare, fractured prose isn’t as easy as Finch makes it look.

I should also let you know that I was gifted a copy of this book by the author.

I read the first third of this book three times. Just to study the language. Just to get my hands on the machinery of Jeff VanderMeer’s world-building approach and puzzle out how it worked. VanderMeer’s uncharacteristically spare language summons up a rich vision of a city past the brink — Ambergris — and explores a handful of characters razed and remade by the city’s bloody history. He uses simple prose to create rich, textured visuals and nuanced, emotional characters with just a few deft encounters. It’s good.

This third (and final?) outing to Ambergris casts the city as a post-war wreck reminiscent of The Third Man’s Vienna, full of shadows and lies, or modern Baghdad, layered with centuries of conflicts political, ethnic, existential.

It’s all seen through the lens of detective John Finch, who insists he’s not a detective. Finch works for alien and mysterious fungus-people called the gray caps, which have control of the city via a brutal and Byzantine architecture of occupation. Finch travels through Ambergris, tangling with spies and nefarious thugs, not because he’s a brilliant detective (he isn’t), but because the gray caps will snuff him out if he doesn’t make daily progress on his investigation.

The case? A human and a gray cap are found dead inside a city apartment, bent and broken as if they’d fallen from a great height.

From that beginning, with a literal handful of clues, Finch follows arcane sigils, secret passwords, and fungal technology from one harrowing encounter to another. At every step, as Finch wises up, he gets more and more beaten down. His tale is sometimes nasty, sometimes beautiful, and always right on the edge between the mundane and the insane. It’s a great and surreal odyssey through a fantastic world.

This is my new favorite VanderMeer book, I think.

Don’t fret the earlier books in the Ambergris cycle if you haven’t read them yet, though — this story plays fine on its own. Think of the previous two books — City of Saints and Madmen and Shriek: An Afterword — as historical fiction set in the same city, if you want. Finch is a fine place to start.

Originally published at McSweeney’s Online as a Review of New Food.

A lady at the grocery store was giving out free samples of these. My wife tried one, then brought home a bag of them. She said they were so rich, so ridiculous, that a single one of these seasonal treats could be a dessert. I must have eaten six of them just now, while proofreading this.

They’re new, but I’m not sure they’re food. Though these are Hershey’s candies, they’re not chocolate at all. Each dollop, though, is presented in the shape of a gnome’s hat, wrapped in crinkled foil, so I guess they qualify as Kisses. Each little candy is a compound of orange outside and, on the inside, where the almond would be in an almond Kiss, white stuff. The package includes a little cutaway schematic. Depending on ambient lighting, the orange may seem to be the exaggerated peachy flesh tone of a crayon or the cartoonish pallor of a woozy Oompa-Loompa.

They are weirdly soft. Instead of chewing them, try pressing the candy with your tongue to the roof of your mouth, forming a spread. Imagine that each is a dose of pasty homeopathic medicine prescribed by a witch, a bit of Halloween doled out to heal the need for holiday sweets.

To be sure, a Pumpkin Spice Kiss is sweet, but also subtly savory. Pumpkin spice, it seems, is any combination of cinnamon, clove, allspice, ginger, nutmeg, and mace (which isn’t what I thought it was; it’s the sheath the nutmeg seed comes in) or anything that tastes like any combination of that stuff.

My wife put one at the bottom of her coffee, to make a knockoff pumpkin-spice beverage, and it sort of melted into a dose of autumn flavors, but it also transmuted into a waxy, oily slick across the coffee surface.

Still trying to puzzle out this mix of old-fashioned flavors and newfangled paraffin-like substance, I offered a couple of friends some free sample Pumpkin Spice Kisses. One of them stopped in midchew, her face contorted, unsure how to get away from the thing in her mouth. “I feel like I ate a candle,” she said.

Click for the podcast via iTunes

If you dig The Lord of the Rings as the stories they are, and appreciate (or want to appreciate) the way that they’re told, you might well enjoy Professor Corey Olsen’s newish podcast, “The Tolkien Professor.” (That website could use some work, though.) Tune in to hear him go through the works of Tolkien, starting with The Hobbit (which we’re still on), and analyzing them as literature, chapter by chapter. He’s looking at Tolkien’s works not as allegories but as straight-up literary tales, and he’s doing a fantastic job of it. I’m finding each episode of the show to be eye-opening or refreshing or both. If you dig literary fantasy shop-talk, these are recommended.

He’s also recently started answering listener questions about Tolkien’s works in general — from Tolkien’s vision for Orc culture to just what was up with Smaug’s role as the “last” dragon — which is equally fun. If, of course, you’re a big nerdy geek like me and think the idea of a lit theory class on Tolkien sounds like fun.

We’re shown that Jacob is flesh enough that he eats food. He catches a fish in a trap, prepares it, and eats it. He also offers some to the Man in Black (presumably Esau) who refuses it.

Later, Ben says to Locke, “I’m a Pisces.”

[In lieu of a proper review, but while there's still time before the rest of you catch tonight's episode, here are some comments I made on last week's BSG over on the Whitechapel forums.]

Two things that got me about this last episode:

1. The Chief can spot Boomer immediately but Helo can’t tell his wife isn’t his wife? I mean, granted, she’s not even in the same body she was when they first fell in love (she switched hides when she went off to rescue Hera, remember?), but… really, Helo? And should we read something either Cylon-y or meaning-of-love-y into that?

2. If the BSG writers had decided early on that jump drives created a dangerous wake when they were activated, the tactics of the Fleet might have been wildly different. You mean every civilian ship with a jump drive could’ve made its escape and done damage to enemy ships at the same time… all this time?

Or more nit-pickingly, the Galactica is supposed to be able to withstand another jump or so, but it cannot survive the aftereffects of a tiny ship jumping nearby? Uh… This would bother me less if the next episode didn’t seem to stem dramatically from this technobabble-inflicted wound.

Maybe they can use Roslin’s secret Cylon wig technology to transform the follicles of mutineers’ corpses into materiel to fix Galactica.

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From the review of Andrew Bird’s Noble Beast, which appeared in Paste magazine (issue #50):

The lyrical confusion doesn’t end there. Some words aren’t even definable (Hobis-hot?), and chinless men are scratching their beards, and someone’s “wearing nothing but a onesie and a veil,” and eggplants are dreaming, and people are having “fake conversations on nonexistent telephones.” It’s not merely challenging—it’s a real gluteal throe (pain in the ass).

[via]

Does reviewer Kate Keifer finds no joy in language whatsoever? Her argument seems to be: Lyrics should not make use of surrealism. Actually, that’s not fair — she’s clearly saying that too much is too much, but I honestly don’t understand what sort of mixture of surreality and plainspokenness she must think is appropriate for surrealism before it ventures too far. What’s the magic number of melting clocks?

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The writers at the round-table at Tor.com seem bent on Gaeta getting a painful death for his actions in Friday’s episode of BSG, called “The Oath.” Annalee Newitz’s thoughtful review at io9 declares Gaeta a bad guy. These writers seem to have forgiven the Cylons for trying to annihilate humankind, though. So mutiny is worse than genocide?

// Spoilers after the jump.