Back to the Basics: A Review of Choices of One

I'll come out right out and say it: Timothy Zahn is easily the best Star Wars writer. It's not just because he writes the movie characters in a very authentic way, it's not just because he creates excellent new characters, and it's not even just because he writes excellent stories. Other writers in the SW EU also do these things, and mean, for instance, that the X-Wing series is probably my favorite set of books in the SW universe. However, I say Zahn is the best "Star Wars" writer in that he is by far the best at capturing the spirit and feeling of the movies, making his novels feel quintessentially Star Wars-y, beyond just having droids and the Force and all that.

Therefore I was very pleased to hear he was releasing a new SW book, and not only that, but one set during the original trilogy era, specifically between New Hope and Empire. A while back he released Allegiance, another book set in the same time period, and I thought at the time it was a one-off. This it technically still true, but I discovered Choices of One takes place immediately after Allegiance and features much of the same cast of characters; the lack of an overarching plot between the two prevents me from calling it a true sequel.

A big problem that arises when you work in a time period in between already established events (in this case, destruction of the first Death Star and the attack on Hoth) you're obviously limited in some ways: any pre-established character isn't only unkillable but also immune to anything permanent, lots of events just cannot happen, and you have to move towards a certain goal. Another big tendency in SW is to make every event involving Han, Luke, and Leia into the biggest crisis since yesterday. Fortunately, Zahn manages to avoid both problems in Choices; they're definitely doing stuff, and it's important for the Alliance, but it's not critical to the survival of the everything ever or anything like that.

Alongside the main trio, we also get the triumphant return of Mara Jade, longtime fan favorite, as well as Thrawn, my personal favorite Imperial of all time (sadly he did not get as much screentime as I would have liked). Additionally, the Hand a Judgement, a rogue stormtrooper squad introduced in Allegiance, makes another appearance. Many other characters make brief appearances, such as Palpatine, Darth Vader, Generals Cracken and Rieekan, and so on.

Overall the book goes very smoothly and drew me in quite quickly, which resulted in me finishing the book surprisingly fast. There was only one glaring issue that bugged me, namely that in past books it was firmly established that Mara Jade had never seen Skywalker prior to Jabba's Palace, and they end up very briefly meeting towards the end of Choices. It's a relatively minor detail, and it's definitely debatable, but all signs point to that Mara would not randomly forget a guy with a lightsaber.

Beyond that, Zahn does a good job of telling his story and filling in small details that factor in to the later books chronologically. I don't think it's the best book he's written for the universe, but it's still a very enjoyable read, especially if you're looking for a book that very closely emulates the feel of the original trilogy. I don't think it's necessarily the best Zahn book to start with, since the important of a lot of characters and events will be lost otherwise. With that said, it's an excellent addition to the Star Wars library, especially compared to some of the other recent works.

-HTMC

The Crafting of Worlds: The Free Cities of Bann, Pt. 1

[As some of you may know, I am currently working with Matt on creating the world on which our fall D&D4e campaign will occur. We're still roughly in the initial stages, but making excellent progress, and I would naturally like feedback when possible. However, given the semi-public nature of this blog, I can only post things that would be potentially be ok if the PCs saw. Hopefully you will enjoy what I do post though, and I'd love any kind of feedback you can give. 

The world is a tidal-locked, low magic world, more in the style of GRRM than Tolkien. There are 3 major countries, and 3 major religions (those three sets don't necessarily map onto one another). 

The following is two of the 5 major cities on the continent-state of Bann, known collectively as the Free Cities. As usual, any feedback is most welcome!]

A Personal Apocalypse: A Review of Cloverfield

I'll admit I initially avoided Cloverfield due to a big element of the film being the "shaky-cam" style of footage, as the film is supposed to be a home-recording of "the event" by someone with a handheld camcorder. I'm not usually prone to motion sickness, but the latest Bourne movie at the time had the distinction of the only movie I've ever seen in theater that made me feel physically ill. Understandably I passed up Cloverfield with barely a second thought. A few years later though and it came up, for whatever reason, in casual conversation, and Matt told me he really enjoyed the film. For this reason I decided to finally watch it, and was happily surprised.

To address the large concern, the film definitely is shot as if by an amateur cameraman with an unfamiliar camcorder (and in fact some of the shots are apparently from footage taken by the actors with such devices). However, instead of action shaky-cam prominent in movies such as the Bourne series, I'd classify the majority of the film as "unsteady;" exactly what you get on home movies. Of course there are some scenes which definitely fall under the classic shaky-cam style, the majority is just 'unsteady.' This combined with watching it on a television rather than a movie theater screen meant I suffered no problems, although I can't say this would be the case had I watched it in theaters.

To move onto the actual content, I'll admit I was expecting a monster film horror/thriller type film, in the vein of Jaws. I quickly had to revise this opinion, and by the end of the film I was actually unsure of where to place the film genre-wise. It featured a giant monster, naturally, but most of the film it was more of a backdrop rather than a centerpoint. It definitely has thriller-esque moments, but again they're surprisingly seldom and for me were not particularly tense. The military provides a few action scenes, but once again they're almost always in the background.

In fact, having taking a cinema class and being at least elementary familiar with film techniques, I was shocked when they right out showed the monster fairly early on the film, and extremely clearly at that. I thought it was a huge mistake, since this was a the key reason, for instance, the initial showing of Jaws bombed so badly with test audiences. However, as the movie progressed, I had to quickly shred the aforementioned genre expectations. I'd classify the movie as exactly what it seems like: a personal account and recording of what, for the people in Manhattan, is essentially the apocalypse. If that was the film's goal, it does an exemplary job of showing what would happen to an ordinary group of people in a catastrophic situation. They don't find the weak-point of the monster, they don't heroically band together a group of survivors and escape, and in fact they have no impact on the larger situation period. Instead we see exactly how the situation affects this small group of people, how they react, and what ramifications their choices end up having. The point-of-view framing makes this sensation very strong, and adds a strong degree of realism to the scenes that I think would have been lacking with traditional filming methods.

Beyond this, the acting is good enough and the special effects as well done as you'd expect (the monster itself seemed a little weaker, but it wasn't a huge deal). Although all these other aspects weren't spectacular, they weren't lacking, and in my opinion were all secondary to the story the film was attempting to display.

All together I don't think Cloverfield achieves a personal top spot for me, but I was highly impressed with the story it managed to convey and the way it went about it. The fact that it manages to tell such a compelling tale in only 80 minutes (the length of a standard residential cassette) is all the more impressive, and makes it a quick, enjoyable film to enjoy. I definitely think it's worth checking out if you get the opportunity, if only because it's quite different than the standard Hollywood blockbuster (not so much as many indie films, admittedly, but still moreso than comparable films). Now I'd just like to see a zombie movie in a similar style and I would quite pleased, or at least I think I would be.

-HTMC

Substance without Spirit: A Review of GTO (Live Action)

Readers of my reviews may recall that Great Teacher Onizuka, oftentimes known simply as GTO, is one of my favorite manga series (technically my #1 favorite manga series based off that list I made). I had always known that an anime series existed, and was also dimly aware that a live-action adaptation existed, as weird as that sounded. I was finally able to get ahold of both, but having recently re-read the manga series, figured I would go for the version that didn't follow the manga quite as closely: the live-action. It also helped it was technically the shorter of the two, being 12 hour long episodes instead of 43 twenty-minute ones.

I naturally had some misgivings from the start, if only because the thought of transmuting a comic into something live-action sounded weird. However, the show was apparently amazingly well-recieved in Japan, the manga is actually mostly realistic, and the recent string of super-hero movies proves that comics can sometimes transition well to physical actors.

Trials and Tribulations: A Non-Spoiler Review of A Dance with Dragons

-HTMC