Guest Movie Review - Bryce Moore on Pacific Rim

I went to see Pacific Rim with JABberwocky client Bryce Moore, the author of the award-winning YA novel Vodnik, and since we both blog we decided to exchange guest reviews of the movie.

After you've read Bryce's review, but sure to check out Vodnik, check him out on his own blog, and follow along with Bryce on Twitter.  And click here for my review of Pacific Rim, over on Bryce's blog.


Movie Review: Pacific Rim -- by Bryce Moore

While I was at ConnectiCon, I had the chance to catch a viewing of Pacific Rim (as you already know, if you read my response to some of the robot names in the film). Setting aside my response to the name choices, what did I think of the actual movie?

Honestly? I loved it.

This is what I'd wanted Michael Bay's Transformers to be like. It's a movie about giant robots fighting giant lizards. If that sounds like something you'd be excited to see, you'll love this film, too. It is, hands down, the best robot vs. lizard movie you could think of. I guarantee it.

Yes, there's a premise. Yes, there are huge gaping plot holes throughout the movie. But if that upsets you, let me remind you what you paid to see: a movie about giant robots fighting giant lizards. Did you really expect Chariots of Fire? (Maybe if it were "Chariots ON Fire", right? Someone make that movie. Please.)

Before I saw the film, I had some reservations about Del Toro. He makes some truly stunning visuals, but sometimes I feel like his visuals take center stage, leaving the plot behind. It's one of the reasons I was relieved somewhat when he left The Hobbit. Would this be another example of that?

Pacific Rim makes me wonder what we would have gotten if Del Toro had been able to stick with The Hobbit.

The visuals are wonderful eye candy. The plot has some issues, but because the tone is so darned light and fun, you just don't mind. Yes, there are cliches left and right. But it doesn't matter. This is a movie about giant robots fighting giant lizards.

There was plenty of humor, and Ron Perlman has an outstanding cameo. None of the acting jobs were really noteworthy. They didn't need to be. This isn't a movie about closeups and lingering shots. It's about action. Destruction. Fighting. Where Man of Steel was the same fight scene over and over, this one kept you constantly on your toes, with new awesome coming down the pike every five seconds. See it big if you can. I saw it in 2D, and I kind of wish I'd been able to see it 3D, instead.

It's also pretty much completely clean--so much that I'm considering taking my 9 year old son to see it. There's fighting and action, but no swearing or sex. This is the sort of movie I was have adored as a 9 year old. (And still adore today) It's the realization of every awesome Saturday morning cartoon you've ever watched.

Oh---and a note for all you people who just leave as soon as it fades to black: stay at least halfway through the credits, people. There's more.

What do I give a movie like this on a star rating? Can a movie about giant robots fighting giant lizards really be worthy of 4 stars?

Yes my friends, it can. It didn't change my life. It didn't make me cry or think about things in a new light. It just did what it came to do, and it did it perfectly.

Four stars.

See it.

--Bryce Moore

closing time

News is trickling out here and there of bookstores that are set to close after the holidays or even before.

Here in New York, there's a big flagship Barnes & Noble by Lincoln Center that will be closing after a 15-year run with the expiration of its lease. A fashion discounter called Century 21 quickly leased the entire space.

Joseph Beth booksellers has filed Chapter 11, and will be closing half its stores. They owe millions of dollars to Ingram, hundreds of thousands of dollars to Random House, and more. This is a real shame. I went to Pittsburgh a few years ago when Brandon Sanderson did a signing at their store in Pittsburgh that will be closing. It was a great store with great staff.

Joseph Beth shares some lineage with Borders. In the dawn of time at Borders in the 1980s, Borders licensed its inventory system and may have even done warehouse fulfillment for some independent bookstores in the midwest, and if memory serves Davis-Kiss was among the chains they were doing this for. Joseph Beth purchased Davis Kidd several years ago and a DK location is among those closing as a result of the bankruptcy filing.

And in Charlotte, NC both a Joseph Beth and a Borders will be closing.

Besides Charlotte, I'm sad to see that the Thousand Oaks, CA Borders which was my 200th visited is closing down. Word is also coming out of store closings in West Windsor/Princeton Junction NJ and Bloomington IN. Their store on Chicago's Michigan Ave. will close, but this is one year later than originally planned after a last-minute lease extension. One write-up in Publishers Marketplace said Borders may be closing two dozen stores, but I'm not finding that many with the news already out.

The early and mid 1990s were peak times for opening superstores, so with 15 year leases from 1996 and years of declining sales, no real surprise Borders has real estate that it can't justify keeping. But it's sad.

On a happier Borders note, Borders does have 25 "pop-up" Borders Express stores in place for the holidays, full list in their press release here. This is a very good idea, to take advantage of the peak holiday shopping season and empty space at the local mall to broaden reach profitably.

With the Thousand Oaks Borders closing, good news that a nearby Barnes & Noble in Calabasas, CA that had been threatened with closure ended up having a new lease agreed upon. That has the same landlord as the B&N in Encino, CA, where the neighborhood protested its replacement by a CVS. This may be the B&N where Alan Ball found a copy of DEAD UNTIL DARK while waiting for a dentist appointment, so I'm particularly saddened that a historic site may be going. There's a store in southern Ft. Worth that appears to be on the way out. Will that help the Borders that's up the street a bit, i.e., can some of these store closings help those that remain or are we all doomed? And also a B&N in Hobart, IN, and one in Fremont, CA that is across the street from a Borders that could no doubt use a business boost.

And updating this on November 19 2010, thanks to a report in Publishers Marketplace, they have gotten confirmation from Borders that approximately 17 stores will be closing. They don't yet have details on all, but have confirmed additional locations in Marlton, NJ; Westwood, Santa Barbara and Carlsbad, CA; and Overland Park, KS. According to the Borders website, the Overland Park store was #23 and had been around for over 17 years, so likely similar for Marlton (#26). The Santa Barbara store was #123, so that would also have been around quite a while. I'm going to do a separate post about the Borders in Westwood.

...As Once Upon a Time They Were

So concludes one of my favorite reads of all time, John Crowley's Little Big.

Which is the current selection of the AV Club book club, which has inspired me to give it a quick shout-out.

I discovered John Crowley when I was a wee lad, courtesy of Orson Scott Card, who offered great praise to Crowley's Engine Summer, subsequently repeated in an F&SF review column of Card, where you'll see that Card and I did not agree on Little, Big (nor, for that matter, on Crowley's later novel Aegypt).  But nonetheless, just like Card's praise for Brandon Sanderson's Mistborn trilogy in recent months may have sent a few readers Brandon's way, Card's praise for Engine Summer got me to reading John Crowley.  I quite liked Engine Summer, which is a post-apocalyptic novel whose derelict roadways stick in the recesses of my mind more than anyone else's.  I went on to read The Deep and Beasts, perhaps not as good but certainly interesting.  And then Little Big appeared in the summer of 1981, which is the Joshua Bilmes version of The Summer of Love, when I was on my own in Cambridge and Boston for several weeks, haunting the second floor sf/fantasy shop a few blocks down from Harvard Square and Wordsworth and the Million Year Picnic and Sack Theatres.  And there was some good buzz on Little Big, and I eagerly anticipated it, and my recollection is that I laid out quite happily and eagerly for it when the Bantam trade paperback arrived in the new release section at Wordsworth.

And I loved it.  If there is one book I'd love to find time to re-read, it is this one.  I don't know, maybe I'd be disappointed and wonder whatever I saw in this at that age.  But all these years later, the last paragraph of the novel still holds resonance for me.  I think of the book when I show off the whispering well at Grand Central.  There's this image of an octagonal house that I can summon up, which I remember being from here.  It was a fantasy.  It was a love story.  It was well-written.  Maybe it's just that it's a type of book for which I had a soft spot in those years (Richard Adams' Girl in a Swing), but I don't think so.

So I smiled when I noticed that it was being featured in the AV Club this month.  

For many years, Little Big struggled to stay in print.  There was a mass market edition, and it would go out of print, then Bantam would think of some excuse to do a Signature Special Edition or some-such that would last for 18 months.  There was another Harper edition before the current, which seems to have settled in at long last to a sales pace that will keep it around.

The literary success of Little Big turned Crowley into a darling of the literary community.  His newest book has been reviewed respectably in all the right places.  But as he's become more and more the darling of the literary community he's become of less interest to me, and I don't see myself rushing into the arms of his new Four Freedoms.  But if you're inspired to read Little Big, let me know what you think. 

How I Spent My Summer Vacation

For the first time in a long time, much longer than I can remember and this is probably not a good thing, I took four days off where I did not once check e-mail and tried to minimize the amount of time I even spent thinking about the job. I did have around 100 e-mails waiting when I got back, but the world and JABberwocky seem to have survived.

This was to Connecticut to visit with my family. My parents came up for a few days, and the entire family (less one niece in Israel) got together Saturday afternoon for a seven-week preemie celebration of my mother's 80th birthday. I got her the 40th birthday card I neglected to obtain for her the first time around; that's the kind of guy I am.

My mode of transport to CT is usually Metro-North Commuter Railroad to New Haven then Amtrak to Hartford. I could take Amtrak from Penn Station in NY, but Penn Station is such a pit of existence while the New Haven train station is so nice that I'd rather have time to kill in New Haven if need be. If I have lots and lots of time to kill in New Haven and my luggage isn't too heavy to walk with, I can walk a mile over to the downtown/Yale area. It adds a little time to the trip, but not necessarily a godawful amount, especially since it's slightly quicker for me to get to Grand Central to catch Metro North. And sometimes it's quicker as when on the way back Sunday night the connecting train from Boston to New York was running very very late.

I visited my 73rd and 74th Whole Foods Markets. #73 is in Glastonbury, CT and I was visiting just shy of its 4-month anniversary. It's a "just right" location, big enough for the prepared foods to have some specialness but not so big (like the one in Columbus OH I visited with Tobias Buckell) you wonder where all the customers are supposed to come from. This store has its own in-house bake-house, and while I was there they were taking a big huge disk of dough that looked like some monster from a science fiction movie and turning it into cranberry pecan (I think) rolls. I sampled a four-cheese sourdough bread that was really yummy, and if I thought my younger brother and his family were more the types to enjoy artisanal bread maybe I would have gotten some. The store also makes a sublimely delicious white chocolate brownie that is so good it almost makes me want to move to Glastonbury so I can fatten myself up. The 74th I count with reluctance since it's an old Wild Oats location that was one of the first to be rebranded as a Whole Foods post-merger. Apparently the merger is still a work in progress; I was told by the Prepared Foods Team Member who dished up my small dish of Pete's Ravioli that there's talk of a renovation but who knows when, and that since the store looks the exact same as it did only the contents of the shelves are different that people don't really know if it's a Wild Oats or a Whole Foods or a what. It was very quiet on a summer Sunday while the "real" Whole Foods two miles away in West Hartford center was bustling when I shopped there an hour or two later. Part of me says I shouldn't count the Wild Oats as a Whole Foods, but the sign says Whole Foods and the food on the shelf is Whole Foods, and as I visit other parts of the country (like Denver for WorldCon) I'm not going to know which are conversions and which are real and as they do more renovating the gaps will close. So I'll count them.

Trivia note that Bishop's Corner had one of the earliest B&N superstores before they built them quite as super. It's now closed. There's a new store in West Hartford Center in the Blue Back Square development, and one right across the street from the Borders in Farmington that is always very very quiet compared to the Borders. The staff roster for that B&N on Sunday had only 4 bookseller/cash wrap people on it, so they weren't expecting a throng.

I dump a lot on Borders in this blog, but here to dump on B&N a bit: can anyone explain why the Glastonbury and West Hartford locations of B&N do not have a model on and are not carrying Brandon Sanderson's MISTBORN? This is inexcusable. The publisher will tell me how B&N loves Brandon and sells tons and blah blah blah, and I don't want to hear it. The time they spend trying to justify this for B&N, I'd wish they would spend getting on B&N's case, that, like, in case they haven't noticed, Brandon is one of the top-selling fantasy writers in the country these days, in fact THE WELL OF ASCENSION was Tor's top selling fantasy mass market two weeks ago according to Nielsen Bookscan, and I shouldn't have this overhanging my vacation. Sad to say, this isn't something unique to Tor. There's a form of regulatory capture that takes place in the dynamic between the sales reps at the major publishing houses and the buyers at the major chains just like between the airlines and the FAA. So don't get me started. Today it's B&N, Tor and Brandon, a couple years ago Penguin, Borders and Charlaine Harris, somebody else tomorrow, and some people who've spent time with me know that I can go on about these stupidities at very great length.

The Pizzeria Uno at the WestFarms Mall has closed. This was one of the earliest of the Unos I visited, a fixture on visits to the CT area for me for many many years. PF Chang's is taking over the spot and I'm sure will make the Mall feel much happier with itself, but I will miss the Unos. Happily there is still one by the Buckland Hills Mall in Manchester on the other side of Hartford. There is a general feeling of ennui toward Friendly's amongst my family. Smaller scoops of ice cream, inferior food, not like we remember it. But is it them or our memories that are faulty?

I attempted to play things on a Play Station and did not do very well. Too many buttons. I'm not fast-fingered enough on the quiz game. The karaoke game doesn't do it for me. I did better at Wordigo, which is a word game I would recommend. It's a kind of multi-player solitaire word game.

The blueberry picking wasn't up to snuff. Most years I've been up closer to the 4th of July when the blueberry patch is just opening and there are clusters and clusters that are ready to fall into the bucket. A little harder to find those two weeks in to the season. Lots of fun, still, and it's not like the berries were bad, but it's definitely worth keeping in mnd for next year that earlier in the season is better.

Bradley Airport in Hartford is looking rather shabby. There are some transit systems that use letters for buses and some that use numbers and some that use both, so why does CT Transit think their Hartford bus system will be much the wiser for their expense of converting from letters to numbers?

So them's a few musings inspired by my vacation.

World's Bakka-est Bookstore

So I'm just back from Toronto, where I was a guest agent at Bloody Words. Toronto is my kind of place. Urban. Walkable. Good mass transit. TImbits on every corner, chocolate glazed and cherry and original and apple fritter and duchie timbits and more timbits when you've finished those. Timbits, timbits, timbits!

But I digress, for this post is supposed to talk about two of the best Toronto treats, known respectively as The World's Biggest Bookstore and Bakka Phoenix Books.

The World's Biggest Bookstore is not actually the world's biggest by square footage, though it is very big, and when it first opened almost 30 years ago may even have been. Regardless, the name is I believe trademarked by the current owners, the Canadian bookstore chain Indigo.

But the important thing to me is that for many many years it has clearly been the case that the World's Biggest Bookstore does indeed have the biggest selection of new books of any bookstore I've been in. It is sometimes a struggle because it is part of a big chain and does kind of have to fight upstream against what the chain is supposed to be doing, but it's given just enough support to keep its reputation intact, in part because of the excellent staff it has. Morticia (a "stage name," if retailers can have) is now part-time but has been working the sf/fantasy section for years and years and years. The past several years it's always been a treat to see Jessica Strider when I visit the store. She's the full-timer in charge of keeping the selection and the endcaps in good shape. She's moonlighting with her own scififanletter blog, and if you read my blog I encourage you to check out hers and show her blog some comments and love because she's the kind of bookseller every author dreams of finding in every bookstore.

I gave Jessica a bit of a hard time on this visit. Over the course of 2008, I think it's possible the very best book superstores in the US may somewhat routinely start to have around 100 JABberwocky titles on the shelves, but it's still not entirely uncommon to find closer to 65 than 105. Last year, World's Biggest had around 115, so I was expecting to see more this year, and after a quick visit to check if there were any Evil Librarians or a Wolf Pack lurking in the kids section upstairs I returned downstairs to check out the mystery section with my title count over 120 and every confidence of getting to 130. But for some reason the Charlaine Harris section was sadly lacking. Well, I told Jessica in no uncertain terms that it wasn't acceptable for her store to have only 50% more of my title than good US superstore. No, not acceptable at all! Well, talk about quick action. I went back two days later with Violette Malan, a reorder had come in, and the World's Biggest count was up in the range of 140 titles. Almost twice the typical US superstore, 50% more than the next best Indigo outlet I visited (the store at Eglinton & Yonge Sts., with an amazing 90) and three times the worst of the Indigo stores I happened upon (Yorkdale, around 45). The only bookstore in the US that consistently comes close to ballparking the selection at World's Biggest is the main branch of the University Bookstore in Seattle (thanks, Duane!), though I confess there are some specialty shops like Borderlands in San Francisco which maybe I would give credit to were I able to visit them more. It truly is the World's Biggest. It's located very close to downtown, just north of the Eaton Centre mall. I worry a bit that its building is low density in an area that is becoming more and more high density. There's a used bookstore with an excellent sf section next door, with lots of older/op JABberwocky books, making it a bibliophile's paradise.

But Toronto doesn't have just one amazing place to buy books. Just off the intersection of Queen St. W. and Bathhurst, one finds Bakka Phoenix Books. Which had been on Queen St. W. a little less west, then on Yonge St. a klick north of World's Biggest, and now back on Queen St. W. in a neighborhood on the verge of getting a Starbucks and a Home Depot.

This is the kind of sf specialty shop that hardly does exist any more. It's got a loving staff who are thrilled to hand-sell and also do right by authors. In fact, a great many sf/fantasy authors have worked at Bakka at one time or another, including Rob Sawyer, Tanya Huff and Michelle West, who's still part-time on occasion. Ben the owner and Kris the manager are great people to talk sf with. New books, used books, shelf-talkers, signings, everything. I spent so much time talking that I didn't have the time to do a title count, but it would have been big. There were plentiful copies of the new Brandon Sanderson and the new Tanya Huff and the new Tobias Buckell, and Jim Hines aplenty from his visit to Toronto a few months ago (as also the case at World's Biggest). It was especially gratifying to see the hold shelf behind the registers, since just about everyone with a hold pile seemed to be eager for Tanya's Heart of Valor in paperback. The store has a Live Journal blog.

I was very happy for Bakka when I saw them prominently mentioned in a recent NY Times travel article about Toronto. Maybe Bakka won't be so much our secret, but the more customers they have the happier I will be.

No trip to Toronto can be considered complete for the sf/fantasy fan if you haven't visited both. World's Biggest may have a better selection but it is a chain bookstore with long hours and you may not find Jessica to talk to all the time. Bakka has both new and used, you're almost certain to find someone to talk sf/fantasy with whenever the store is open, and for an author that the chains haven't totally caught on to yet Bakka is going to be your better bet.

Of course, all that time I can spend talking to booksellers when I'm in Toronto does keep me away from my timbits.

One final bookselling note in Toronto: There is a Chapters in Runnymede just steps from the west entrance to the Runnymeded stop on the Bloor/Danforth line. It's in a gorgeous old theatre building with much of its ornamentation intact, the children's department in the balcony and magazines on the stage. It's weak in sf/fantasy, but I love going just to admire the building.

Car Trouble (Wildsidhe Chronicles #6) by Myke Cole

Memorial Day weekend reading; 2 slithy toads

I'd come across this book at the Padwolf Publishing table at I-Con in late March and was immediately intrigued. I recognized the author's name for his work in one of the Writers of the Future anthologies and from magazines like Small Wars Journal but had not been aware of his work in young adult literature. After several weeks of good intentions I was pleased to finally make this my train reading on the way back from Balticon.

It was a little bit awkward. This is the 6th book in the Wildsidhe Chroncles series, I had not read the first five of them, and I don't know if I can recommend starting in the middle. The basic premise is that three kids from Pennsylvania are captured by some spell and taken to the Wildsidhe. I did feel as if a smoother approach could have been taken to filling in a new reader on the series background. And there's a Gilligan's Island problem. As a kid it didn't bother me so much that the castaways never could find their way off the island, but as an adult you do. And here, it looks as if these kids are destined to have some of the same trouble finding their way back to Pennsylvania as the castaways to Hawaii. Also, I as an adult in publishing have come across many variations on the parallel world fantasy theme in children's fantasy novels, and I may not have the same patience for another variation as a less experienced writer. On balance, my rating for this book is a kind of blended rating, where it should maybe be a toad lower for an adult and a toad higher for the target YA audience.

In this particular book, the area of the Wildsidhe that is occupied by our heroes is attacked by dwarves. This leads to a series of trade negotiations with the dwarves, the title arising from the intense interest the dwarves have in obtaining cars. One can see why Cole was interested in this storyline. Do the kids fight the dwarves, or give them a car? Do we fight Iran over its nuclear program or try to entice it to the negotiating table? This carrot/stick, negotiate-or-not, appease or avert question is timeless. Witness the prominence given the appeasement word in the back-and-forth of our current presidential campaign. And if the kids are stuck in the Wildsidhe for long enough, will they get to be 18, and will they find some way to obtain an absentee ballot?

There are clear mixed messages in this volume. "We got lucky here. Without proper manpower on the fence line, it's just a matter of time before they get in ... nothing is more important than our security here." (pp 62-3). But after the victory: "the Wildsidhe is giong to be our home for a long time now. It's about time we started making it a place that we can stand living in. With the Braag as our allies, we'll be twice as secure as before, which was pretty damn safe, considering all the fine work you've done. Wayne smiled uncomfortably, tryiing to do his best to adjust to what was apparently a new order." Five years later, would Cole want the same kind of new order for the Wildsidhe? Other sections of the book clearly show the author grappling with the question of whether Saddam Hussein should have been deposed after the first Gulf War, which question is kind of skirted in the debate over whether to ally with or vanquish the Braag. Yet for all the effort taken throughout to use the WIldsidhe as a prism with which to view geopolitics in the 21st century, this book never achives the allegorical brilliance of Kafka's Metamorphosis or Orwell's 1984.

Regardless, the battle with the dwarves is written with much more verve and passion than the opening chapter depiction of a Wildsidhe baseball game complete with a pixie-driven scoreboard. Pixie driven scoreboard? Well, as noted above, parts of this book will clearly appeal more to kids than to their parents.

Would the dwarves have attacked at all if the ballpark in the Wildsidhe had a better bottle law? Good fences make good neighbors and good prohibited items policies at baseball games might just make the difference between a new Pax Americana in the 21st century and an end of the American empire.