Category: Review

Mark of the Lion, by Suzanne Arruda

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Literary rating: ★★★★★
Kick-butt quotient: ☆☆

markofthelionThis Jade del Cameron Mysteries series opener, Arruda’s fiction debut, came to my notice back in 2006, from reviews in the library trade publications when it was first published. I’m delighted that I finally got to read it; it definitely didn’t disappoint! It did, however, surprise me in one respect. All of the marketing for the book and series is oriented towards the mystery genre, and the reviews I read didn’t hint at any cross-genre appeal. I knew from the cover copy that it featured skulduggery which the African natives attributed to sorcery; but I assumed that, as usual in the genre, this would prove to be a “Scooby-Doo” type device, in which a faked supernatural disguise was unmasked as a cloak for natural crime. But that’s not the case here! Readers who are put off by the supernatural should be duly warned; those like me, for whom supernatural elements are a plus, will find that an added bonus!

Arruda takes the reader on an exciting ride, from the trauma and dangers of the Western front in the closing months of World War I, to the polyglot bustle of the (unpaved) streets of 1919 Nairobi, and on to the beauty, mystery and deadly danger of the colonial African bush. These settings are evoked with a skill that’s the fruit of obviously serious research (the short Author’s Notes in the back of the book cite several solid primary-source books on the Africa of that day, as well as on the experiences of WWI women ambulance drivers), but that’s integrated into the text without info-dumps or display for its own sake. The plot holds reader interest every minute, and the author’s prose style makes for a quick read.

Jade herself is a wonderful character, brave, smart, caring, tough and capable –definitely my preferred kind of heroine! She picked up her rifle skills growing up on a New Mexico ranch, where she was used to hunting (sometimes for fauna which could hunt her, like a mountain lion). Having served in the Great War as a volunteer ambulance driver, she’s not without physical and emotional damage from the war, and has a hot temper (which she doesn’t always control well); and in some respects Arruda makes her appear somewhat slow on the uptake, in not tumbling to the identity of the culprit(s) sooner. (If the book has a weakness, it’s that this is too easily guessed, despite the author’s attempts to mask it by not allowing Jade to suspect it; this wasn’t a prohibitive flaw for me, though.) But she’s a very easy heroine to like, admire, and root for all the way! The other characters are well-drawn and likeable (or hate-able!) as well.

The colonial Africa of Arruda’s literary vision is realistic (far more so than, say, Edgar Rice Burroughs’!), but it’s more balanced than either the Africa of Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, which evokes mostly its fear and menace, or of Graham Greene’s The Heart of the Matter, which tends to stress the grungier and more sordid aspects. Fear and menace are present here, as well as a sense of age-old mystery, but they’re balanced by beauty and a feeling of invitation to adventure; and the grungy and sordid is there, as it is anywhere, but we get the feeling here that life doesn’t have to focus on that unless we choose to. The wonder of the continent is captured here, at a moment in time when it was still relatively unspoiled, when the wildlife was hunted but not yet endangered, and when the native cultures weren’t totally assimilated by the steamroller of modern “civilization.” Arruda makes her native characters real people as well, not stick figures there to tote loads and wait on the whites (though they do some of that), and she gives us a heroine commendably free of race prejudice. (Jade has Hispanic –and possibly some Moorish– blood herself.) We’re not exposed to the full brutality that British rule sometimes entailed, as readers are in James Ngugi’s A Grain of Wheat; but we get glimpses of the racism of the time (happily not shared by all the Brits here!)

This is as much action-adventure fiction as it is a mystery or tale of the supernatural; and like most action adventure, it has some violence. However, none of this is graphic or dwelt on; Arruda may have one character vomit on discovering a mangled body, but she won’t make the reader join in. Bad language is relatively mild, and there’s no obscenity. (Jade herself will cuss some if circumstances evoke it, but she often prefers more creative, and sometimes humorous, expletives probably derived from the slang of the Southwestern frontier.) There’s also no sex, either explicit or implied.

I’d highly recommend this book to most readers that I know. The sequel, Stalking Ivory, is already on my to-read shelf and BookMooch wishlist; and this time, I don’t plan to wait eight years to read it!

Author: Suzanne Arruda
Publisher: New American Library, available through Amazon, both for Kindle and as a printed book.

A version of this review previously appeared on Goodreads.

Cybergeddon

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★★½
“Putting the delete in CTRL-ALT-DELETE.”

cybergeddonComputer security is part of my day-job, so I’m always amused by Hollywood’s efforts to depict it, particularly in thrillers. For the truth, which also creates the main problem with the entire “hacker” sub-genre, is that it may sound enthralling, but watching someone else type is among the most tedious things imaginable. While the effects may be very significant, the journey to get there is, frankly, dull as ditch-water. Any realistic cinematic depiction of cyberterrorism would be worse than watching paint dry. It would be more like listening to a description, of someone else playing a video-game, about watching paint dry. Here, the makers try to jazz things up by depicting cyberspace as a 3D network made up of data panels, sliding around each other like a virtual Rubik’s cube, with bad data showing red. Despite dropping buzzwords like “Stuxnet” to show the writers know what they’re talking about – or, at least, have read Wikipedia – that isn’t enough.

Yet it’s not a bad idea. The heroine is a former hacker (Peregrym) whose past was buried, to the extent she’s now a tech analyst for the government. Her name is Chloe Jocelyn – and that’s a mistake, for it immediately reminds us that there have been other federal geeks called Chloe, and this one isn’t fit to boot up the computer of that Chloe. We first see her impersonating the daughter of Russian technomobster Gustov Dobreff (Martinez) to lure him into entrapment, but that isn’t the end of the matter. For when he escapes custody, and starts his plan to bring down civilization as we know it, by hijacking a billion devices or so, he frames Chloe as revenge, by using code that was originally written in her black-hat days, thereby exposing her past. She’s blamed for the intrusions, arrested and knows that the only way to prove her innocence is to find the real culprit, with the help of former sidekick, Rabbit Rosen (Gurry). But Dobroff isn’t sitting back, and kidnaps Chloe’s mother to use as additional leverage against her.

This was originally a web series for Yahoo! and released in nine chunks of 10 minutes, which explains both the frantic pace and the strongly episodic nature. [I presume Symantec were a major sponsor, given the painfully obvious product-placement for Norton Anti-Virus, including an utterly superfluous trip to Symantec’s corporate HQ!] Despite my snark above, Chloe is actually fairly interesting, and Peregrym brings her to life well, but it’s a character which needs more development before dropping her into a scenario such as this. The story also had its share of “I’m so sure” moments: I strongly suspect federal custody is not as easy to escape as Chloe makes it seem, and I doubt they’d let a hacker keep her mobile phone either! While its brisk pace helps the flaws become too problematic in motion, and the supporting characters, particularly Rabbit, are nicely drawn, there’s nothing at all in the story which is new or unpredictable. The end result is only somewhat more fun than resetting your Gmail password.

Dir: Diego Velasco
Star: Missy Peregrym, Kick Gurry, Olivier Martinez, Manny Montana

Doha 12, by Lance Charnes

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Literary rating: ★★★★★
Kick-butt quotient: ☆☆☆

doha12First-time author Lance Charnes and I are Goodreads friends; but I bought my copy of this book, rather than getting it as a gift, and my rating wasn’t influenced by the friendship –it was earned, and would have been even if I’d never heard of the author before reading it. This is an exceptionally assured, polished, powerful and insightful work of fiction; at least one other reviewer has stated that it’s hard to believe this is a first novel, and I have to concur.

A former Air Force intelligence officer with training in terrorism incident response, Charnes sets his plot against the background of the real-life polarized and violent international conflicts in the Middle East. As our story opens, a hit squad working for Mossad, Israel’s intelligence agency, has just recently assassinated a high Hezbollah official (along with an unfortunate prostitute whom they just regard as insignificant collateral damage) in Doha, Qatar. They made it look like a drug overdose, but their hand in the matter has been detected, and the IDs they used identified. But these IDs weren’t their own; they stole them from twelve Jews living in Europe and the U.S. The Hezbollah higher-ups know these people to be innocent –but for their own twisted reasons, send out a hit squad of their own to murder them anyway. (And if that fails, there’s a back-up plan: suicide bombings designed to kill hundreds or thousands.) Our hero and heroine here, Brooklyn bookstore manager Jake and Philadelphia legal secretary Miriam, are two people on the hit list. Luckily for them, they’re also both former members of the Israeli military, with the kind of training that’s apt to come in handy here. (And it doesn’t hurt that Jake’s uncle is an inspector in the NYPD.)

A fair amount of action adventure fiction is open to the charge of having rather shallow characters, and often a simplistic world-view that eschews any kind of ethical complexity in favor of a mindless “us against them” fantasy. Those charges, however, won’t stick here. All the important characters here –“guilty” or “innocent,” Jewish or Moslem, Mossad or Hezbollah– are rounded, three-dimensional, and come across as people, not as cartoons. Yes, some may be sympathetic and some may be villains (and not all of either are on one side!); but we can see that the heroes have flaws, and understand what makes the villains tick.

To be sure, our protagonists don’t deserve to die, and our antagonists here are trying to kill them; so yes, that’s a basic line in the sand that shapes our sympathies. And the author doesn’t deliver an analysis of the whole complex Middle East situation, with a breakdown of the grievances of each side. But within the framework of the storyline, it’s made clear that both the Israeli government and its Arab adversaries have innocent blood on their hands, that individuals of both groups are prey to the temptation to dehumanize the other so they can justify anything they want to do them, and that neither hit squad’s superiors are playing by genuinely ethical rules. As we go along, we’re brought face-to-face with ethical conundrums that may not have easy answers.

If you believe you’re morally justified in fighting great injustice, and you want to do it by ethical means that spare the innocent, what exactly DO you do when you’re stuck with co-belligerents who have no such scruples? Do the ends ever justify the means? What balance do you –should you– strike between the claims of blood vengeance and the recognition that hate can hurt you more than it does the hated? Does torture become morally okay if it’s intended to get information that saves an innocent? (And will it really deliver the results we assume it will? Is lying in a police cover-up acceptable if it spares good people from unjust punishment? Is suicide ever the right thing to do? Charnes doesn’t preach, or suggest answers; he just makes readers grapple with the questions. And in the best tradition of Western literature, characters on both sides here also have to grapple with ethical questions –and may come up with answers that they didn’t expect, and that force them to grow or make sacrifices. As action-adventure fans know, this genre at its best is concerned with these kinds of questions as much as any other type of literature is; and the extreme stakes involved give the questions more force and immediacy than they may have in some other genres!

Charnes’ background shows in his obvious knowledge of intelligence procedures, weaponry, and terrorist tactics. This is an exceptionally realistic novel, and an extremely gripping one. Short chapters, each headed by location and date/time, succeed each other rapidly in setting a quick, driving pace (if I’d had unlimited time to read, I could have finished this a lot quicker than I did, because I’d have read almost non-stop!), and the author’s skill in shifting viewpoints from Character(s) A in place X to Character(s) B in place Y –often at a cliff-hanger moment!– ratchets suspense up to nail-biting intensity in places, especially near the end. Good use is made of New York City and Philadelphia geography, by a writer who’s clearly familiar with both locations.

Action scenes are done very well, and both male and female characters are full participants as equals in that area. Of special interest to fans of this site, we have not one but two formidable action ladies; both Miriam and Mossad agent Kelila are tough, gun-packing women, well trained in the techniques of lethal force and without any qualms about using it. (Readers can safely assume that their training is apt to be put to use!) The body count is high; we have a lot of violence here. It isn’t gratuitous, and we don’t have to wallow through excessive gory description; but not everybody who dies has it coming, and this can include developed characters you’ve come to like and care about. In places, this can be painful.

I have a few minor quibbles with character’s actions at times, as not being as smart as I’d expect from them; but these didn’t bother me much overall. This was a quality read from the get-go, and if it had been published by Big Publishing, I believe it would have been a best seller! Hopefully, even in today’s glutted market stacked against independent authors, more and more readers will recognize it for the gem it is. For my part, I’m greatly looking forward to reading the author’s second novel, South.

Note: There’s no explicit sex here, and only one instance of implied premarital (but not casual) sex. A fair amount of bad language (including the f-word in several places) is used by some characters, for the most part in high-stress situations. My impression is that the author employs it for purposes of realism, not for shock value.

Author: Lance Charnes
Publisher: Self-published, available through Amazon, both for Kindle and as a printed book.

A version of this review previously appeared on Goodreads.

Mary Kom

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★★★
“Firsts of fury…”

marykomThis was far from our first traditionally “Bollywood” film, but was the first such with what could be described as an action heroine. Traditionally, the women in Bollywood films are relegated to love interests for the square-jawed heroes. Not that this necessarily makes for a bad film [far from it, some are enormously entertaining], just that they don’t fall within the remit of our coverage here. This one squarely does, although also succumbs to many of the clichés of plucky underdog sports stories, shamelessly manipulating what was already an impressive story, purely to tug on the cinematic heart-strings.

The heroine is Mangte Chungeijang Kom (Chopra), the tomboyish daughter of a poor rice-farmer (Das), whose quick temper has got her into trouble more than once. Her parents try to deflect this energy into sports, but when she stumbles into a gym run by the stern coach Narjit Singh (Thapa), she realizes that’s her true calling, and begins training there with the knowledge of her mother, but not her father. When he finds out, he gives Mary an ultimatum: boxing or her family. Guess how that goes. She becomes world champion in her weight class, but then gives up the sport for marriage and to start a family. However, unable to settle down, her husband (Kumaar) convinces Mary to make a comeback, something rarely seen after becoming a mother. She’ll face obstacles, not just from her opponents, but also from her own body, the sport’s administrators and the distraction of a child’s health issues.

Wisely, Kumar avoids the traditional staged musical numbers, instead incorporating the songs which are almost de rigeur for Bollywood, into things such as multiple training montages. Some are more effective than others, and as noted, it does tend to fall into the trap of shallow stereotypes too often. I’m not sure about Chopra, who certainly is nowhere near as well-muscled as the poster would have you believe, and the fights themselves are a bit of a mixed bag. However, Chopra’s acting talents are certainly up to the task, and if the final reel is factually dubious, Kumar throws everything but the kitchen sink into its depiction and, much like Mary herself, pulls off an unlikely victory – albeit by a split decision on points. With a central character that’s not only a woman, but one from an area of India barely regarded as part of the country, credit is certainly due for pushing the boundaries of popular Indian cinema. It’s just a shame there was no such sense of adventure with the well-worn storyline.

Dir: Omung Kumar
Star: Priyanka Chopra, Darshan Kumaar, Sunil Thapa, Robin Das

Barely Lethal

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★★½
“Barely entertaining.”

barelylethalI could hear Chris’s eyebrows raising when the title here rolled: what kind of film was this? Fortunately, the arrival of Samuel L. Jackson reassured her ruffled eyebrows – and is that Sansa Stark as well? Alright, then: if you insist… It turns out to be a mash-up of two genres: the ‘teenage killing machine’ and the ‘high-school drama’, and is every bit as awkward as that sounds. Since being orphaned, Megan Walsh (Steinfeld) has been brought up as an assassin in a remote location, under the tutelage of the appropriately-named Hardman (Jackson), and with another trainee, Heather (Turner), a fractious rival. However, Megan begins to wonder what she’s missing in “real life”; after a mission to capture evil nemesis Victoria Knox (Jessica Alba), ends with Megan plummeting into a river, and presumed lost by her employers, she opts to start a new life. She becomes an ‘exchange student’, falls for the local hot kid (Mann), ignores the AV geek (Cameron) who falls for her – the usual sort of drama. After an incident at school goes viral, Hardman realizes his top agent is not as dead as he thought, and worse still, Knox has broken out of custody, and has revenge on her mind. Can Megan handle all that and still make it to Homecoming?

It’s an interesting idea, not least because Megan bases her knowledge and understanding of the world on the likes of Mean Girls and 10 Things I Hate About You. A satirical skewering of the difference between those and reality would be welcome, or even something darker in tone, along the lines of Heathers, with Megan’s lack of moral compass letting her clean out the dregs of the school with no qualms. However, the film seems less interested in satire, than going through the same cliches: it doesn’t help that Mann resembles a cross between Justin Beiber and Robert Pattinson. There’s nothing new or remotely interesting about this aspect, and it brings the film to a grinding halt. That’s something of a shame, as the action plot is nicely-handled, with some decent set-pieces. Jackson and Alba are old hands at this kind of thing, and I’d far rather have seen a film concentrating entirely on their struggles with each other, using the likes of Steinfeld and Turner as proxies.

It’s hard to say who the target audience is for this, or at least find one which would be satisfied by both aspects. Those who enjoy the school drama are likely to be uninterested in high-jinks out the back of a plane. Certainly, those who are looking for action – raises hand – will find themselves bored to tedium in the middle of this. At the end, Chris turned to me and said, “I didn’t think this would be your sort of film.” I think she has a point. I’m perhaps three decades or more, and a sex-change, from being able to appreciate this.

Dir: Kyle Newman
Star: Hailee Steinfeld, Thomas Mann, Dove Cameron, Sophie Turner

Mad Max: Fury Road

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mad max 15★★★★½
“Mad (Wo)Men”

Compared to my normal reviews, this is going to be long, somewhat rambling and by no means limited to the movie itself. Because reactions to it, are in many ways as interesting as the film itself. Often, films that generate a lot of chatter or furore don’t live up to the hype – think 50 Shades of Grey or The Blair Witch Project. So it’s refreshing to find a controversial movie that would be quite capable of standing on its own. It’s also surprising to find myself writing about the film here at all, considering that the original series, to which this is a kinda-sequel, sorta-reboot, is among the most masculine of movie series. The most feminine character of note in the entire trilogy is Tina Turner, which says… Well, let’s just leave it at “something,” shall we? So, much as I was looking forward to seeing the original director revisit his creation – the second film, in particular, is an action classic – I was hardly expecting this to qualify for the site.

mad max 06But it does. For, make no mistake, this is the story of Imperator Furiosa (Theron), not Max Rockatansky (Hardy). Sure, Max is significant, and we experience the film from his perspective. But he isn’t the hero. It’s Furiosa who drives – literally – the storyline, by leaving the complex belonging to Immortan Joe (Keays-Byrne) with five of his ‘brides’, seeking the sanctuary of the “Green Place”, an oasis Furiosa remembers from her childhood. Joe, needless to say, is unimpressed with betrayal and sends his minions in pursuit, along with support from nearby settlements, specializing in the production of gasoline and ammunition. Max is part of that chasing group, being used as a living (and now mobile) blood-bank, after having been captured. After Furiosa tries to slip away in a sandstorm – guess she must have seen Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan – Max escapes, and joins Furiosa’s group, which also grows to include one of Joe’s “War Boys”, Nux (Hoult), who switches sides to help the escapees. Their intended destination, however, proves untenable, and Max suggests their best bet is to head back and take Joe’s mountain citadel, which is now undefended.

To be clear, I don’t give a damn about a movie’s sexual politics (or politics of any kind). The films that have been given our Seal of Approval here run the complete gamut, from feminist classics such as Thelma & Louise through to grindhouse trash like Naked Killer, and even some which are both feminist AND grindhouse: Ms. 45 comes to mind. They all have strengths to be appreciated, and weaknesses that should be acknowledged, but good films are capable of making you see and appreciate the point of view from which they operate, whether or not it’s yours. In short, you don’t have to agree with a film to enjoy it. Indeed, I am inclined to look kindly on those which challenge how I see the world in some way – not taking a polemic approach, shrieking how I am bad and should feel bad, but by making their case for an alternative point of view, and bringing the audience along with them. It’s a bigger challenge than adopting the obvious stance, and is particularly subversive in genres like action movies, not normally known for such thing.

In some way, this is a a masterly piece of bait-and-switch by Miller, because no-one would have given him $150 million to tell Furiosa’s story outside the Maxiverse. Allowing for inflation, that’s about the same price-tag as 1995’s Cutthroat Island, and we all know how well that ended. Taking an established, popular genre franchise and rebooting it for a new generation is a much easier sell in Hollywood, having been done successfully with Bond, Star Trek, Batman, Planet of the Apes, etc. Now, if you were interested only in a Mad Max film, I can see this version being not what you expected. But what matters to me is not whether a movie is what I expected; it’s whether it’s good. And Fury Road certainly delivers on that aspect. The fact it has the best big-budget action heroine since The Bride? Call that a wonderful and pleasant surprise.

The flak aimed at the film has, perhaps surprisingly, come from extremists on both sides – neither of which I care much for, because I’ve found truth is rarely found in extremism of any form. On the one hand, you have Aaron Clarey on Return of Kings, who wrote the problem was, “Whether men in America and around the world are going to be duped by explosions, fire tornadoes, and desert raiders into seeing what is guaranteed to be nothing more than feminist propaganda, while at the same time being insulted AND tricked into viewing a piece of American culture ruined and rewritten right in front of their very eyes.” Firstly, Mad Max was, is and always will be Australian culture. Secondly, yes, give me explosions, fire tornadoes and desert raiders, and I’ll happily take any kind of propaganda with my popcorn. Doesn’t make me a bad person. Oh, and he hadn’t – presumably still hasn’t – seen the movie, basing his opinion on second-hand reports. At the risk of stating the obvious, this is never a good thing.

The other end of the spectrum is little better: I certainly do not care Fury Road passes the shitty, lazy Bechdel test. Or for social media troll/martyr Anita Sarkeesian, who opined sniffily “Mad Max’s villains are caricatures of misogyny which makes overt misogynists angry but does not challenge more prevalent forms of sexism. Viewers get to feel good about hating cartoon misogyny without questioning themselves or examining how sexism actually works in our society.” This would be exactly the kind of polemic approach mentioned above. as massively off-putting. As ever, Sarkeesian proves unable to separate reality from entertainment: “Sometimes violence may be necessary for liberation from oppression, but it’s always tragic. Fury Road frames it as totally fun and awesome.” Why, yes: yes, it does. It’s called escapism, dates back to at least ancient Greece, and is entirely harmless. But, of course, acknowledgment would derail Sarkeesian’s tubthumping agenda, that entertainment content e.g. video-games is the problem, rather than being (as I firmly believe) an exaggerated reflection of society.

mad max 04Enough of other people’s opinions! What about mine! Let’s start with a couple of things I really liked. Firstly, Miller does a great job of exposition through action, showing rather than telling us; outside of an opening voice-over. That applies not just the story, but also the setting and the characters, the last-named of which are defined almost entirely by their actions. This avoids the tedious grinding to a halt which might have been required, for example, to explain why Furiosa has one arm. Or how she managed to rise to become one of Joe’s most trusted allies. Or what happened to convert her from that and turn her thoughts towards rebellion and escape. Actually, I might not have minded hearing more about those; maybe they’ll do a prequel? But the ratio between talk and action is likely more heavily tilted toward the latter than any major film I’ve seen in a long while, if ever.

This could become an issue, particularly given the relatively monotonous, in the original sense, content – it is, more or less, a single, two-hour chase sequence. However, there are easily more than enough variations spun on the basic theme to provide for entertainment. I’m not sure these necessarily make a great deal of logical sense, such as the people swaying on poles 20-30 ft off the ground, or wheeling a flamethrowing guitarist around with you as part of your entourage. I guess, after the apocalypse, Rammstein will still be popular. I did have a problem with the use of CGI to enhance the practical stunt work, in what looks like a poor effort to jazz things up and justify the 3D ticket price [we saw it in 2D; Chris has found her inner-ears do not play well with 3D]. One of the great things about the original was, when things blew up, flew through the air and smashed into each other, they were really doing so. Here, while still generally the case, there seems too much stuff added for effect, such as airborne bodies  – which I found reduced the sense of reality, and hence, impact.

mad max 07It’s also worth noting the other female characters – even the heavily-pregnant bride! – are pretty decent too. Obviously, they’re no Imperator Furiosa, but on the way to the Green Place, they’re forced to dig deep and find reserves of courage which, one imagines, aren’t required in their everyday lives. As least, judging by the not-particularly feminist scene where Max staggers out of the sandstorm, and up to the truck to find the brides literally hosing each other down, in their garments from the Victoria’s Secret Post-apocalypse collection. More hardened are the all-female collective who brought up Furiosa, met at the midpoint of the journey, who seem to inhabit a strange philosophical territory where they try to lure men in, yet want nothing to do with them. They’re an odd bunch: yet like everyone else who has survived, they’re hard as nails. “One man, one bullet,” yells one as they go into battle. Inexplicably, Miller saw fit to call them the Vulvalini, which is the most wretched name for anything in a big-budget movie, since we got “Unobtainium” in Avatar.

Overall, though, it’s a solid success, and Furiosa is a remarkable bad-ass, with an appearance that is entirely unconventional in every way, yet Theron still manages to have a statuesque presence, as in all her films [well, almost all. Monster is the stuff of nightmares]. She’s actually taller than Hardy. The lack of even the slightest morsel of romantic chemistry between Furiosa and Max is great, not least because it would be hideously inappropriate in every way, given the characters’ situations. It’s still remarkable some studio exec didn’t feel the need to shoehorn it in, or at least provide some moments of unresolved sexual tension. Instead, these are two intense and focused individuals, working together for a common goal. That one of them is a woman is irrelevant – which in many ways, is how I tend to think it should be in the action genre. Does feeling so make me a “feminist”? I’ll leave the nattering nabobs of negativity online to be the judges of that. The rest of us should take in a slick, well-produced, all-you-can-eyeball action buffet, which sets the bar high for Hollywood action heroines this year.

Dir: George Miller
Star: Charlize Theron, Tom Hardy, Nicholas Hoult, Hugh Keays-Byrne

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Sword and Sorceress, edited by Marion Zimmer Bradley

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Literary rating: ★★★★★
Kick-butt quotient: Variable

swordandsorceressIn the series of anthologies of original stories which began with this volume, the late editor Bradley mines similar territory, and deals with similar strong female protagonists, as does Esther Freisner in the later Chicks in Chainmail series. The quality of writing (at least in the initial volumes) is high in both; the main difference being that Bradley’s series tends to feature tales that are more serious in tone, with less humor. (Though that doesn’t mean that they all necessarily have none of the latter; and a couple would have been at home in the later series as well.) That doesn’t reduce their entertainment value, and often makes them more compelling.

The 15 stories in this volume come in great variety, as do the settings, and the heroines. Some of the latter can be rough-edged, and may sometimes do some things I wouldn’t do, or recommend; but all of them have good hearts at their core, and earn the reader’s goodwill and respect. (Some of them, like Charles de Lint’s bounty huntress Aynber, and Charles R. Saunders’ alternate-African warrior woman Dossouye, are series characters who appear in a number of stories elsewhere by these authors.) Some of my favorites here are “The Valley of the Troll,” “Gimmile’s Songs,” “Severed Heads” (which isn’t as grisly-gory as the title makes it sound), “Child of Orcus,” “Daton and the Dead Things” and “Sword of Yraine.” But virtually all of these are worth reading; the only one here that I felt was a little weak is “House in the Forest.”

Bradley’s substantial introduction is an added benefit of the book; she provides a good historical sketch of the role of female characters in sword-and-sorcery fantasy fiction, and some really insightful comments on the appeal and value of strong, three-dimensional heroines in this field. (Her meaty bio-critical notes on each story’s author are a very worthwhile feature, as well!) She very rightly outlines an equalitarian perspective that explicitly differentiates her purpose from “feminist propaganda” and Woman-uber alles male-bashing; the female perspective here is rightly seen as an essential part of the human perspective, that includes both genders as important, needed and responsible contributors to the world and the human story.

Even so, I would differ with her on one point. Though she dedicates this volume to C. L. Moore and to “all of us who grew up wanting to be Jirel,” she faults Moore here for Jirel’s realization in “Black God’s Kiss,” (which isn’t included here) after killing her adversary Guillaume, that she loved him; Bradley thinks this weakens the character, and sends the message that “woman’s pride only stood in the way of true happiness –interpreted as surrender to a man.” Personally, I didn’t take Moore’s story that way; I interpreted it as a true-to-life reflection of the fact that sometimes underneath anger and enmity there can be a bond between two people –just as a male, too, might feel attracted to a woman who can fight him tooth-and-nail, and even defeat him. (And it’s as much, or more, Guillaume’s pride as Jirel’s that separates them.) But that’s a quibble –and one that has nothing to do with the great stories in this collection!

Editor: Marion Zimmer Bradley
Publisher: DAW Books, available through Amazon, currently only as a printed book.

A version of this review previously appeared on Goodreads.

Angel of Fury

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★★
“Never mind the action quality, feel the quantity!”

angel of furyJust to confuse matters, there are actually two Rothrock flicks by this title: in 1993, the year after this, the same title was used as an alternative name for Lady Dragon 2, starring her and Billy Drago. There is no Drago to be found in this entry. Indeed, there is not much to be found except for an abundance of mediocre action, and a surprising degree of violence aimed at children. There’s no denying the almost non-stop volume of fights and chases: however, it’s like a copious, all-you-can-eat buffet consisting entirely of vanilla pudding: you’ll likely walk away unsatisfied.

Cynthia plays Nancy Bolan, the head of security for a tech company, who is charged with delivering a special computer to the company’s Indonesian offices. No soon has she arrived than she is attacked, and the computer stolen. But that’s okay, because it turns out there are actually three computers, two of them decoys, and they have a large explosive payload which goes off if someone tries to access them without the deactivation code. They are being sought by ‘Bolt’ (O’Brian), a terrorist who wants them because…. Mumble mumble something terrorist? And he is prepared to stop at nothing, even involving the little moppet befriended by our heroine, who is taken to what appears to be an Indonesian Disneyland knockoff, featuring some guy dressed as a rat. Fortunately, there’s also Nancy’s former squeeze (Barnes), who was so attached to her, he left Nancy believing he was dead for three year. I’ve had girlfriends like that too.

This does possess some certifiably insane moments, likely none more so than Nancy riding a motorcycle straight at a car, leaping through the air, kicking the driver through the windshield which triggers it to roll over out of control, while she walks away. Sadly, is is filmed in such an amateur way, the results are nowhere near as awesome as that sounds, since it just looks stupid and unbelievable. Such is the approach for much of the rest of the movie, right from the start where the bad guys apparently do have guns, yet don’t use them when they first fight Nancy, only when they’re subsequently chasing after her boat on jet-skis. While there are occasional moments where you do see what Rothrock is capable of, these are sporadic at best, and a pale imitation of her best work in Hong Kong. Director Anwari was also responsible for Virgins From Hell, which was at least amusingly bad. For much of its running time, this is simply a large helping of that vanilla pudding mentioned earlier.

Dir: Ackyl Anwari
Star: Cynthia Rothrock, Chris Barnes, Peter O’Brian, Zainal Abidin
a.k.a. Triple Cross

The Trail

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★★★½
“God told me to do it.”

thetrailI’m not religious, and “faith-based” films normally have me running a mile, though I confess a certain guilty fondness for the more extreme, Revelations-based work [I mean, have you ever read Revelations? The things that go down are certifiably insane. This is what Hollywood should be making, not Noah or Moses stories]. But it was only at the end of this, with a final title quoting a Bible verse, that I realized The Trail likely falls into the category, as shown by the alternate title; fortunately, it’s very much understated, and can be appreciated even by godless heathens like myself. Amelia (Jandreau) is on her way to California as part of a wagon train with her husband (Brown), when they decided to split off on their own, he believing he knows a short cut. Unfortunately, they are attacked by Indians, and Amelia is left, on her own, in the middle of nowhere, to try and make her way through a vast, unforgiving wilderness.

The closest cousin is Nicolas Roeg’s brilliant Walkabout, not least because Jandreau bears more than a passing resemblance to Walkabout‘s star, Jenny Agutter: both have a similar pale beauty, and habit of opening their mouths just a smidge. The similarity is also in the relationship Amelia strikes up with a young indigenous child (Nash) she meets, that proves crucial to her chances of survival, echoing the one in Roeg’s film. However, the take here is a good deal less earthy and primitive in its themes, and Amelia is a good deal less dependent, instead being a lot more pro-active, which is why it merits coverage on this site, being equally a story of self-discovery and survival against the odds. Indeed, perhaps its main weakness is, rather too much against the odds: while there’s not much idea of the overall timeframe here, she survives blizzards clad only in a light dress (the kid is sensibly wearing furs), and doesn’t seem to do much hunting or gathering beyond a tiny fish. Maybe that’s supposed to represent the power of her faith?

Despite throwing this on late at night, it managed to hold my interest better than you think it might, considering the lack of conventional action sequences: it’s more or less 95 minutes of Amelia versus the great outdoors. It helps that the heroine is given an inner strength of character – again, I presume in hindsight, this is a religious thing – and determination to overcome any obstacle, sometimes with inventiveness, such as when she turns her wedding dress into a fishing-net. The landscapes are fabulous, and the photography does both them and the heroine justice, capturing the latter with an almost luminescent glow. As a different take on the era, eschewing the obvious characters and situations, it’s worth a look if you’re in a more contemplative mood.

Dir: William Parker
Star: Jasmin Jandreau, Tommy Nash, Shannon Brown
a.k.a. Let God

Did You Say Chicks?, edited by Esther Friesner

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Literary rating: ★★★★
Kick-butt quotient: ☆

didyousaychicksPublished in 1998, this is the second of several installments in editor Friesner’s series of original-story anthologies featuring strong, mostly warrior women in (mostly) a sword-and-sorcery fantasy milieu. Marion Zimmer Bradley’s older, long-running Sword and Sorceress series is the closest counterpart, but the stories Friesner selects are much more often on the humorous side, and relatively lighter on actual violence –the protagonists here can handle themselves well in a fight, but tend in practice to triumph more by the use of intelligence, or to be able to find common ground with potential opponents where that’s possible. (Lethal violence is more apt to be mentioned, if at all, as an event that happened before the action in the particular story.) Many of my comments in my review of the first collection, Chicks in Chainmail, are relevant here, and my overall enjoyment was similar. (I rated both books at four stars.)

There are 19 stories here, written by 23 authors (three are two-person collaborations); as she did the first time, Friesner herself contributes a story, in addition to her role as editor. Eleven of these, including Harry Turtledove, Elizabeth Moon, Elizabeth Ann Scarborough, and Margaret Ball, also contributed to the 1995 first collection. Among the authors new to the series (and to me) here are Barbara Hambly, Sarah Zettel and S. M. Stirling. (Short biocritical endnotes are provided for all of the authors.) Besides her story, Friesner also prefaces the book with a dedicatory poem to Lucy Lawless, star of the then still-running Xena, Warrior Princess TV show. In keeping with the tone of most of the stories, her poetic style is more Ogden Nash than Dante, and she doesn’t take herself too seriously (after the poem, she appends a quote from Dr. Johnson, “Bad doggerel. No biscuit!”) –but there’s an underlying seriousness of equalitarian feminist message as well. (The final selection, Adam-Troy Castro’s “Yes, We Did Say Chicks!” is a similarly tongue-in-cheek flash fiction, but it’s cute!)

Not all of the stories are actual sword-and-sorcery, or fantasy. One of the two strictly serious ones, Turtledove’s “La Difference,” is a science-fiction yarn set on the Jovian moon Io, as a male-female pair of scientists trek across a dangerous and unforgiving alien terrain as they flee from enemy soldiers bent on slaughtering them. (This is also one where the female doesn’t singlehandedly save the day; she and her male partner work as a very good team.) Laura Anne Gilman’s “Don’t You Want to Be Beautiful?” is set in our own all-too-familiar world, where females are pressured by advertising and culture to fixate on their appearance and spend vast sums on products that supposedly enhance it; and it isn’t clear if the surreal aspects of the story are really happening or are the protagonist’s hallucinations. (This is one of a few stories that women readers will probably relate to more easily than men will.) Slue-Foot Sue, the heroine of Laura Frankos’ contribution, is the bride of Pecos Bill in the American tall-tale tradition, of which this story is definitely a continuation (though it’s also one of two stories that feature Baba Yaga, the witch figure from Russian folklore). And while the story is fantasy, the title character of Doranna Durgin’s “A Bitch in Time” isn’t a woman, but a female dog –albeit one who’s trained to detect and guard against magic.

My favorite story here is Hambly’s “A Night With the Girls,” the other strictly serious tale in the group. This features her female warrior series character, Starhawk, here on an adventure without her male companion Sun Wolf; I’d heard of these two before, but never read in that fictional corpus. (I’m definitely going to remedy that in the future!) Both Moon and Ball bring back their protagonists from their stories in the first book for another outing here, to good effect. The protagonist of Lawrence Watt-Evans’ “Keeping Up Appearances” is a professional hired assassin, who approaches her chosen line of work pretty matter-of-factly, without noticeable moral qualms. But she’s also capable of genuine love and loyalty, especially towards her business partner and common-law husband, with whom she hopes to one day settle down and retire.

So when she returns from a trip to find that he’s unilaterally accepted a contract on a powerful wizard and, while trying to scout the job by himself, gotten turned into a hamster, we can sympathize with her distress, and hope she can reverse the situation. (Can she? Sorry, no spoilers here!) If you’ve read Beowulf and want to know what really happened to Grendel, check out Friesner’s “A Big Hand for the Little Lady.” And Steven Piziks’ “A Quiet Knight’s Reading” is another tale that’s close to my heart (you’ll see why if you read it!). At the other end of the spectrum, two stories I didn’t especially care for were Scarborough’s “The Attack of the Avenging Virgins” and Mark Bourne’s “Like No Business I Know.” The former story, among other things, delivers an essentially sound message, but in a story so message driven that it’s more of a tract, and with an annoyingly “PC” vibe.

As with the original book, bad language is absent or minimal in most stories. Bourne’s is the exception, with quite a bit of it, including religious profanity and one use of the f-word. Sexual content is more noticeable in this volume, with unmarried sex acts (not explicit) in a couple of selections, rape of males by females in another, and a lesbian/bisexual theme thrown into another one as a surprise. “Oh Sweet Goodnight!” is the most frankly erotic story, with its focus on the heroine’s sex life; but the male-female author team treats sexual situations realistically rather than salaciously, and the ultimate message here isn’t as far from traditional morality as some might expect. (This is also a story where magic is absent; Fern’s a sword-toting guardswoman in a low-tech society, but she could just as easily be a divorced single mom in modern America, making a living as a cop or security guard –and modern readers will find her easy to relate to on that basis.)

Editor: Esther Friesner
Publisher: Baen, available through Amazon, currently only as a printed book

A version of this review previously appeared on Goodreads.