Category: Reviews

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Book Review: “H.I.V.E.: Higher Institute of Villainous Education” by Mark Walden

Let’s say there’s a secret school populated by a secret subculture of people living in a world alongside ours. Let’s say there’s a kid who has no idea this subculture exists, but he’s been doing things that would bring it to his attention. Let’s say that, one day, he’s accepted into this secret school, where he’s the smartest kid in his year, naturally good at everything, and has some sort of special connection to the head of the secret school.

You’d think you’d know what the story’s about and how it ends, wouldn’t you. You’d think you’re reading Harry Potter, or The Magicians, or Percy Jackson.

But let’s say the secret school is the place where the next generation of super-villains learns everything they need to know about the future of world domination. Changes things a bit, doesn’t it?

Umm… maybe not.

H.I.V.E.: Higher Institute of Villainous Education, by Mark Walden, is the first in a (so far) seven-book young-adult series of novels that borrows from the well-traveled genre tropes that gave us the three books I mentioned a few paragraphs ago.

H.I.V.E.‘s main character, Otto Malpense, is a white-haired thirteen-year-old British boy with the uncanny ability to comprehend everything he reads and understand the underlying principles of everything he sees. In general, he’s more a pragmatist than a villain — he came to the attention of H.I.V.E. not because he did something evil for evil’s sake, but because he was trying to save the orphanage that was the only home he’d ever known. It just so happened to involve making the British Prime Minister look like an idiot.

Otto’s contemporaries can be picked out of most any genre lineup:

  • Wing Fanchu, an Asian boy who’s good at martial arts and is very honorable.
  • Laura, a Scottish girl good with technology.
  • Shelby, an American cat burglar.
  • Nigel, the kid who’s there because his father was a super-villain and is only good at one class — go on, guess which one*.
  • Franz, an overweight German kid who only talks about food and is also not very good at most classes, although he takes quickly to the ones teaching students how to use politics and economics to take down the good guys.

Other than Nigel and Franz, Otto and his classmates are not happy to be at H.I.V.E. They think they’ve been kidnapped by the school’s headmaster, Dr. Nero, and all they want to do is get home. But to do that, they’ll have to fight off another genre lineup, this one comprised of schoolteachers:

  • The headmaster who “takes an interest” in the main character.
  • The absent-minded technology professor.
  • The drill sergeant who teaches physical education.
  • The one who was turned into an animal.
  • The second-in-command who also can control your mind.
  • Professor Sprout**.
  • The ninja.
  • The artificial intelligence/computer system that sees everything and knows everything, but really just wants to be human (and if it starts performing Shakespeare or tries to hold Commander Riker hostage in one of Dr. Crusher’s plays in a future novel, I’m hanging it all up now).

So far, I’ve given H.I.V.E. a lot of grief over its use of genre conventions, but I hope I’ve done it good-naturedly enough to keep you from being put off the book. I mean, it’s YA; it’s sort of YA’s job to use genre conventions to make characters relatable and understandable. And the story itself is something most kids can understand: being taken from your home because you’re special, but once you get away, all you want is to go back again. I mean, come on, how many of us (when we were kids***) have thought “I’m smarter/better/awesomer than this life I’m currently leading; when will I get to go to that secret school for wizards/villains/demigods?” I mean, you wouldn’t believe how hard I wished to be pulled 300 years into the future so I could go to Starfleet Academy.

It didn’t happen, obviously****. Hence my love for genre fiction (escapism) and a fondness for stories using the genre plot we see in H.I.V.E.

The storytelling is pretty good. The characters are well-rounded and often funny. The adventure is… um… adventurous. If anything is poorly-done, it’s the occasional forays into Dr. Nero’s world — we need them to forward the plot and explain whatever couldn’t be infodumped by the Contessa (Professor McGonagall) during the school tour, but they take away from the important part of the story, which is Otto and his friends. When Rowling did it in the Harry Potter novels, she confined it to the first few chapters, sort of a “meanwhile, back at the Hall of Justice” thing before we got into whatever adventure Harry is facing in the current book, and I could handle that. But the whole point of third-person-limited is that you only see things through the eyes of your main character, and I think that, by using the Dr. Nero scenes to explain important plot points, the story misses out on the opportunity for more adventures or further characterization of our heroes. For example, they could’ve overheard Nero’s staff dinner because Laura was working on an extra-credit project or something, instead of the author just showing us said dinner.

Of course, that could also have just been a homage to your old-school heroes-vs-villains TV shows and movies where the hero’s journey is briefly put aside to show what the bad guys are doing right now.

I rather enjoyed H.I.V.E., to be honest. I think the storytelling moves at a good clip, the characters are funny, and the idea behind the story is novel enough that I’m interested in reading more books in the series. As a YA book, it reads quickly enough, and is short enough, that you can probably squeeze it into a week’s worth of lunch breaks. I’m not sure how the “intended” audience — young adults — would actually like it, but I know that I got a kick out of it, and I think you will too.

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Note to Parents: Because it’s a YA novel, H.I.V.E. doesn’t contain anything truly objectionable. There’s some bullying and some violence, but nothing more explicit than, say, Prisoner of Azkaban. So, if your kids can handle that, they can definitely handle H.I.V.E.. Of course, you should use your own discretion when it comes to your children.

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* If you said “Herbology”… err, that is, Botany, give yourself a pat on the head.

** The one who is fairly nice and takes care of students who don’t feel like they belong. Also, she teaches Herbology. I mean Botany. Oh, whatever, it’s Professor freaking Sprout from the Harry Potter novels. Just go with it.

*** Or, you know, right now. Either way.

**** OR DID IT???

Oct 02, 2011 | 2 comments View Post
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Music and Magic: The Harry Potter Soundtrack Retrospective — Part 8 of 10: Deathly Hallows 1

This is the eighth article in a ten-part retrospective of the Harry Potter soundtracks. You may wish to refer to the previous entries in the series for more information.

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Keen-eyed Facebook users may vaguely remember a group created shortly after Half-Blood Prince called Draft Nobuo Uematsu to Score Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. Uematsu, you may know, is the composer of the Final Fantasy series of video games, and if you’ve heard his work, you know he’s perfectly capable of doing an entire film.

Well, we didn’t get Uematsu. Instead, we got Alexandre Desplat, well-known in France for many films with French names, and in America for The Golden Compass, The King’s Speech, and, for some reason New Moon. The studio hired Desplat to score the final two films — a good idea, given that they’re really just one four-and-a-half-hour movie with a little extra exposition in the middle — and he created. Because there are two separate films, I’ve separated the review into two separate articles. (Lots of separation there, I know.) This one focuses on Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 1.

The score begins with “Obliviate”, a perfect musical backdrop to the beginning of the film, especially when Hermione casts the spell. It contains two themes: the four-note theme of the film (heard in almost every track in some form) along with a more-sweeping eight-note extension of same. The two themes are clearly heard throughout the film. Immediately after “Obliviate”, we get the four-note theme again, but this time descending instead of ascending, indicating that evil is afoot — and, I mean, it’s “Snape to Malfoy Manor”, so, yeah. Evil. And then we get another theme — a happier one — in “Polyjuice Potion”.

Clearly you can see why I enjoyed this soundtrack. The composer is fully aware of the whole point of using a theme throughout the movie. He did leave off “Hedwig’s Theme” until the end of the third track, but with so many other themes, it’s rather like what I said about Patrick Doyle’s Goblet of Fire soundtrack. He does rather adeptly mix “Hedwig’s Theme” in with his own themes in “Sky Battle” — probably the most exciting part of the film, and the music reflects that.

Other tracks I enjoyed include:

  • “Ministry of Magic” — This little sequence got its own “wizards doing wizard stuff” theme, although much more sinister, with the use of wooden clicky instruments (imagine several people hitting drumsticks together at the same time; I don’t know what they’re called) and a percussion part that’s like a ticking clock. Of course, now that we know the Ministry isn’t exactly doing their part to defeat Voldemort, the theme makes perfect sense.
  • “Lovegood” — Suitably weird, for use with all Quibbler publishers and Deathly Hallows enthusiasts. In the next paragraph, I do complain a little about the technique Desplat uses in this track, but in this particular track, I felt the effect worked well.
  • “Farewell to Dobby” — Let’s be honest: very few people who only saw the films probably appreciated Dobby. Even in the books, he was annoying. In fact, only Ministry of Magic managed to make me care about him with their song “Evanesco Dobby”. But as a cut to basically end the film, this track contains all the themes and all the foreboding that is necessary to close out the first half. A very nice track (despite the violin fugue at the end).

I was a little less impressed with the middle part of “Harry and Ginny”, which gives kind of a strangely-tempo’d and uncomfortable balletic violin hit to a nice piano rendition of the happier theme from “Polyjuice Potion”. He uses a similar tempo technique in “Dobby” that felt a little out-of-place. Then there’s the obligatory use of chorus to indicate “holy crap, danger for our heroes in the first act, which means get excited although none of them are going to die” (“Fireplaces Escape”); choral parts get overused, I think, in film scores. And, in “Ron Leaves”, the soap-opera-y violin part over the top is… well… over the top. And I think that’s the only major issue I have with this soundtrack: Desplat has an annoying tendency to put another instrument playing a fugue or sustain over the main part of the orchestra. I counted at least four tracks it happened in within the first half of a 29-track album.

I also didn’t care for “The Exodus”, but mostly because it was a montage of Harry, Ron, and Hermione going camping a lot and negative memories of that part of the film and book probably affected it. Also, the violin part annoyed my ears (though, if you listen carefully, you can just barely hear a John Williams-like musical phrase last heard in Chamber of Secrets… you’ll have to listen really hard, though, because it’s hidden pretty deeply in the orchestration).

Overall I was very pleased with Desplat’s soundtrack for the first half of Deathly Hallows. I was leery at first, but the studio really came through with a good choice for the film’s score, and I was quite looking forward to what he would do with Part Two. He proved he can do films, he can do homages, he can hint ahead at future tracks… basically, everything that I praised Patrick Doyle for — and, as I said, he wrote my favorite soundtrack of the series. But this one’s pretty good too.

Sep 26, 2011 | 0 comments View Post
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Music and Magic: The Harry Potter Soundtrack Retrospective — Part 7 of 10: The Half-Blood Prince

This is the seventh article in a ten-part retrospective of the Harry Potter soundtracks. You may wish to refer to the previous entries in the series for more information.

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After the — in my opinion — lackluster step backward that was the soundtrack for Order of the Phoenix, I was greatly disappointed to learn that Nicholas Hooper would be scoring Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince. The book remains my least-favorite in the series (only narrowly edged-out by Deathly Hallows), and the fact that a composer I didn’t really like the last time he got a shot at the series was doing it again only added to my personal conviction that I wouldn’t like the film.

Fortunately, Hooper redeemed himself with the soundtrack for Prince, and I think it’s much better than his last outing.

Prince begins immediately with “Opening”, a track that gives us themes we hear several times through the film. I’ll call them “pensive”, “reverse Hedwig”, and “quick”, and I’ll be referring to them as I discuss this soundtrack. In this case, Hooper immediately rectifies, at least in my mind, the major issue I had with his previous soundtrack: that there was no really clear theme tying everything together. So that’s a plus. I mean, in this one, even Slughorn gets his own theme, and you actually hear it in all the scenes he’s the major player in.

Other standout tracks include:

  • “The Story Begins” — Right away we get the “quick” theme woven through this track, which deals with the introduction of Slughorn. See, Mr. Hooper? You can tie everything together!
  • “Ginny” — “Pensive” theme, “Hedwig’s Theme”, and even a riff on “Hedwig’s Theme” that manages to keep us in the mood despite the “quick” theme running in the background.
  • “Ron’s Victory” — The “quick” theme again, but riffed a bit so that we get the urgency of Ron playing Keeper and actually being, you know, victorious. There’s also a slight touch of “pensive”.
  • “Into the Rushes” — I actually really liked this scene in the film — it wasn’t in the book, but the screenwriter made a good choice in adding it to give a little more action during a slow part of the story. Hooper chose to reuse his “Death of Sirius” theme over the “quick” theme of this film. Plus we get another listen to “reverse Hedwig”, which hits in a big way later on.
  • “Dumbledore’s Farewell” — An excellent use of “reverse Hedwig” mixed with “pensive” (though mostly “pensive”). Hooper didn’t have to do much with this part, as the director handled it well with the wands-up-and-blow-away-the-Dark-Mark sequence.
  • “The Friends” — By this point in the film, we know that nothing will ever be the same and that Harry is going to go off by himself to find the horcruxes and kill Voldemort. In the books, it works very well as an Empire Strikes Back ending, but unfortunately someone made the decision that we had to have, if not a happy ending to Prince, at least one that wasn’t either totally depressing or directly leading into a sequel (think Back to the Future II). Hooper handles this well, although he doesn’t hit any of the main themes other than a heavily-disguised rework of “pensive” (well, three notes of it, anyway).

The sequence of Harry and Dumbledore going to the cave and finding the horcrux is also tied together by all three themes as well as by mood, and there are callbacks to other tracks like “Into the Rushes” and even “Dumbledore’s Foreboding”. After re-listening, I thought of it as more of a single piece of music with three movements — arrival (“Journey to the Cave”), Harry’s part, and Dumbledore’s part. The digitized, strobed voices in “The Drink of Despair” weren’t, to my mind, the best choice, but the “pensive” theme is used to great effect as Harry forces Dumbledore to drink the drink. Then, with “Inferi in the Firestorm”, other than the (to my mind) rather unnecessary use of a chorus and Khan-putting-Ceti-eels-in-Chekov’s-ear violin stylings, we get the “pensive” theme in full force, similar to “Finale” in Azkaban as Dumbledore destroys the inferi.

The Biography special about the music of Harry Potter took a few minutes to talk about Nicholas Hooper’s musical decisions in “Harry and Hermione” and “When Ginny Kissed Harry” — played mostly on classical guitar, which Hooper seems to be pretty adept at, I found them to be much more subdued than Patrick Doyle’s “Harry Potter’s Love”, although somewhat out-of-character with the rest of the film despite their use of all three themes. “When Ginny Kissed Harry” has a particularly touching musical phrase that’s repeated several times, and it does stick with you. Throughout the film, Hooper makes interesting instrumentation choices such as the classical guitar — we hear fiddles, jazz beats, pianos, and other instruments, all in the forefront in unexpected ways. It doesn’t always work for the mood of the film (see “Farewell Aragog”), but there’s 28 tracks. Dude’s got to stretch his wings somehow, right?

Despite a relatively good soundtrack, we did unfortunately have to deal with such… um… gems… as “In Noctem” — I’ve never, ever been a fan of soundtrack cuts that were just choruses singing with music behind them. “Living Death” was another lead-you-by-the-nose track, but given what was happening on screen at that time, I can forgive it. I can’t forgive it for reusing several themes from Order of the Phoenix in a way that really would’ve worked better in… well… that film instead of this one. But other than that, I didn’t really have a lot of bad things to say about specific tracks, although I will say that Hooper seems to have decided we needed a lot of counterpoint-style high notes (see “Snape and the Unbreakable Vow”) to offset the heavy, moody nature that many of the tracks required. And, speaking of heavy and moody, I was pretty disappointed by “The Killing of Dumbledore”* — it was mostly just “build, build build build build BUILD faaaaaaaaaaaaaaade”. Of course, it wasn’t a really great interpretation of the pitched battle in the novel, but when the director and screenwriter don’t give you much to work with, you do the best you can.

I also want to mention that there was only one use of “Hedwig’s Theme”, although the rest of the soundtrack, as with Doyle’s Goblet, made up for it in such a way that I really didn’t notice.

Oh, and I would be remiss if I didn’t mention “Wizard Wheezes” and “The Weasley Stomp”, which were pretty cool, but… well, they sounded more like what Michael Giacchino did in The Incredibles and really didn’t fit the mood of the film or its soundtrack**. Think “The Knight Bus” in Prisoner of Azkaban. “The Slug Party” was a more subtle version of the same musical style (though much more jazzy), so I have less of an issue with it than with the other two.

Overall, I think the Half-Blood Prince soundtrack was by far the better of Hooper’s two outings into the Potterverse. While I didn’t like the film almost at all — I’d put Deathly Hallows 1 at the bottom of the list, and this film just above it — I definitely got some enjoyment out of the soundtrack. It’s a solid piece of art, despite its overuse of bells and choruses, and it provides what I felt to be an excellent companion character to the film.

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* And what is it with this guy naming tracks after the deaths of major characters during climactic moments?

** I also didn’t like the choice to put “The Weasley Stomp” at the end of the soundtrack. It really detracts from the feeling Hooper engenders with “The Friends”.

Sep 19, 2011 | 0 comments View Post
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Music and Magic: The Harry Potter Soundtrack Retrospective — Part 6 of 10: The Order of the Phoenix

This is the sixth article in a ten-part retrospective of the Harry Potter soundtracks. You may wish to refer to the previous entries in the series for more information.

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Explain something to me, if you would: how does a soundtrack with some truly cool pieces of music that even to this day I find myself humming or whistling fail to end up even in the top half of the soundtracks for the Harry Potter films? At least, on my list?

Because it’s not a complete work of art.

After the excellence of Patrick Doyle’s Goblet of Fire soundtrack, I was really looking forward to what he had to give us on the next film. Instead, we got Nicholas Hooper, who, other than the two Harry Potter films he scored, hasn’t really done any scores I recognize (according to Wikipedia). Maybe that means something.

In any case, Nicholas Hooper scored Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, my least favorite of the eight Harry Potter soundtracks. Unlike Goblet or Chamber, Order really is nothing more than a collection of individual themes and cues without, to my mind, any real attempt at creating an organized theme throughout. Contrast that with the previous two soundtracks, which, as I noted, really felt like complete works of art with a beginning, middle, and end.

I did catch a very slight attempt to tie everything together, but it was really done with moods instead of cues and musical phrases. I guess you could say the “Professor Umbridge” cue was used for that, but it’s not really replicated or played with enough for me to consider it as the film’s overarching theme or musical phrase — it doesn’t appear in enough tracks, especially the big ones. Not my favorite style. Also, the soundtrack itself isn’t presented in the order in which the tracks play in the film, which makes it difficult to mentally play the film as you listen. (Or, at least, as I listen.) Also, this soundtrack felt to me like a return to the original John Williams score, which really tried to lead you around by the nose and make you feel things, instead of making the music its own character in the film.

Lest you think I abhor this soundtrack, here are some cuts I enjoyed:

  • “Fireworks” — More or less the Weasley theme, this is a rocking jig that is most enjoyable.
  • “Professor Umbridge” — The string hits in the song actually seem to be saying “Professor Umbridge”. Clever.
  • “Dumbledore’s Army” — A worthy successor to the “wizards doing wizard stuff” cue heard in the first two John Williams soundtracks. I wish it had been used more.
  • “The Sirius Deception” — The ending really redeems what was, up until about 1:30, a pretty lackluster track. Again, there’s a series of cues that would have been better served as more of a unifying theme for the soundtrack.
  • “Death of Sirius” — First of all, you can’t put the major climactic twist of the film into the song title. That’s just dumb. Now, for the actual music itself, I was pretty impressed — for a Boss Fight, it was pretty darn good, though again it would have benefited from being somehow tied into any of the other themes.

I’d like to also call special attention to two tracks that I really loved on this soundtrack, though I think you’ll find an underlying theme to my commentary:

  • “Flight of the Order of the Phoenix” — Possibly the best cut on the album, this is the song that played as Harry and the Order flew through London. It’s only a minute and a half long, and I so very wish there was an extended version because it’s really, really good. Skip ahead to about 30 seconds in.
  • “The Ministry of Magic” — We’ve heard about the Ministry for several films, but only now do we get to actually see it. Hooper gives it a grand theme with this track, although again I wish the actual good part was longer.

As for “Hedwig’s Theme” — the very theme of Harry Potter himself — I was only able to catch it clearly in two tracks. The first is “Another Story”, which isn’t even the first song on the album (although it is the first cut in the film). It pops up for just a moment in “A Journey to Hogwarts”, but really, that’s it except for vague snippets here and there. A disappointment.

Other tracks I didn’t really care for:

  • “Dementors in the Underpass” — The chorus sounded way too electronic. It was distracting.
  • “The Hall of Prophecies” — Poorly placed in the track list. Also, the first half is too quiet and moody, while the second is fairly standard “enemies chasing heroes” music, with quick-tempo strings and lots of large drums.
  • “Possession” — More choruses, more strings, and an attempt to evoke the feeling of “Finale” in Chamber that never really panned out.
  • “The Room of Requirement” — Despite a really catchy theme, I just did not appreciate the repetitiveness of this track. It was quite a long montage that it had to cover in the film — Malfoy, Filch, and the others trying to get in — and it was another one that leads you along by the nose instead of complementing what’s on the screen.
  • “The Kiss” — Aural wallpaper that gets a little overblown toward the end.
  • “A Journey to Hogwarts” — The beginning of this track was really, really promising, and I think that Hooper could have made what he did with “Hedwig’s Theme” into a true theme for the film. But I was left disappointed. The track is almost redeemed at the end, but there’s sort of a “French romantic comedy” feel to it that didn’t do it for me.
  • “Loved Ones and Leaving” — Again, a track with a lot of promise and a lot of potential for overarching themes, but almost none of them were used earlier in the film. Plus, I wasn’t a huge fan of the flute used in the crescendo. It seemed unnecessary and a little trite.

Overall, I think Nicholas Hooper is a talented composer, and I found several tracks I was able to enjoy as singular pieces of music. However, I thought the soundtrack of Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix was a step backward in terms of soundtrack-as-character and soundtrack-as-complete-work-of-art. There was a lot of promise shown, and it was shown in may of the tracks, but I just didn’t feel like Hooper delivered on it. That’s why I say it’s my least-favorite of the Potter soundtracks, and why I was disappointed again that Hooper was chosen to compose the music for the sixth film. But, as you’ll soon see, my worries… well, they were pretty short-lived.

Sep 12, 2011 | 0 comments View Post
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Music and Magic: The Harry Potter Soundtrack Retrospective — Part 5 of 10: The Goblet of Fire

This is the fifth article in a ten-part retrospective of the Harry Potter soundtracks. You may wish to refer to the previous entries in the series for more information.

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After John Williams’s work on the first three Harry Potter films, who would the studio get to step up and take on the mantle of the fourth, and longest, and biggest-in-scope: Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire?

Well, I for one had never heard of Patrick Doyle — though apparently he had done films I’d seen, including Dead Again, Exit to Eden, and Gosford Park. Most recently, he’s scored Kenneth Brannagh’s Thor and the new Rise of the Planet of the Apes. Apparently the guy had the chops to be considered.

And he pulled off what I think is the best of the eight Potter soundtracks.

From the very beginning — “The Story Continues” — we’re told that this film is going to be darker and scarier than any of the others, despite what we know to be several action sequences and Harry’s first foray into romance. Astute listeners who are also fans of Family Guy will hear that the main “sinister” theme of the film sounds a lot like the phrase in the show opening that goes “lucky there’s a Fam-i-ly Guy…” It’s also heard again very prominently in horn form in “The Dark Mark”, which incorporates it along with some cues that sound very similar to ones heard in Star Trek: Nemesis.

I’m going to go ahead and call it the “Family Guy” theme from here on out.

Other standouts include:

  • “The Quidditch World Cup” — Ireland and Bulgaria get their own themes, with the latter to become Krum’s theme when he reappears at Hogwarts. The Bulgaria theme is particularly good at making you think all the Bulgarians (and therefore Krum) are evil.
  • “Foreign Visitors Arrive” — All three schools arriving: Hogwarts, then Beaubaxtons, then Durmstrang. Beaubaxtons has a theme that is particularly well-suited to them, but it also sounds like “oh, these characters are going to be completely useless in the finale”. It does, though, very neatly segue to the appearance of the Durmstrang ship.
  • “The Goblet of Fire” — Doyle weaves together three distinct versions of the same theme for the choosing of the names.
  • “Golden Egg” — I cover this a bit later, but this track gives us the first instance of the film’s “triumphant” music cue, and in similar fashion to other techniques Doyle has used to this point, he’s still weaving in the main theme of the film — “Family Guy” again. I was slightly disappointed that there wasn’t anything of “Hedwig’s Theme” in it, but I can forgive it. The same theme is repeated in slightly-less-bombastic form in “The Black Lake”.
  • “Cedric” — Although the music behind Amos Diggory as he realizes Cedric is dead is a little too overblown, it does the work that the film couldn’t do (but the book did) in making you care about Cedric enough to react to his death the way the author wanted you to.
  • “Another Year Ends” — A sweeping melody that really encapsulates the friendship of the Golden Trio. It’s a bit too positive, given that war has just begun, but I guess the point is to show you that, hey, despite all this ugly stuff going on, love still prevails — which, as we all know, is Dumbledore’s main point throughout the books (the importance of love).

I was a little less impressed with the “Hogwarts March” and “Hogwarts Hymn” — both had their place in the film, but they seemed to break up the soundtrack a little more than I personally would’ve liked. There were also the waltzes — Neville’s and Harry’s — which were completely in-place in the film, but when listening to the soundtrack they do make me put my head on one side just a bit. They’re placed in the soundtrack when they occur in the film, but they also provide a little break from some pretty heavy musical numbers.

“Rita Skeeter” kind of harkened back to the John Williams days in its leading-you-by-the-nose orchestration of “yes, this character is mean, but she’s also the comic relief, and she’s not really evil”, which to me made it a weaker track. “Sirius Fire” went a bit too heavy on the mood music, especially with the violins around 1:30. But the compositions themselves are good. And, for a 9:40 cut that’s supposed to underscore the graveyard fight with the Final Boss, “Voldemort” comes off pretty uninspired for the first few minutes — it fits with the theme and mood of the rest of the soundtrack, but coming right on the heels of “The Maze”, it was almost like there was too much mood, as if Doyle was trying to hammer into your head that “HOLY CRAP VOLDEMORT!!!!!!!!!!!!!” was about to occur. (At 4:20, there’s a nice musical phrase that I enjoyed based off the “Family Guy” theme, but by far the best part is about 8:00 in, when Priori Incantatem occurs and we hit the sad-triumphant theme which I found to be really well-done.)

Doyle’s strength with this soundtrack was to create a series of cues and themes — the “Family Guy” theme, the music and mood he used for the Voldemort sequences, the waltzes and love themes — that feels, for the first time, like a complete piece of art. He also “teases” upcoming tracks, such as the shift from “Harry Sees Dragons” to “Golden Egg”, which I find to be a really cool technique — basically priming you to hear more of what you just heard without thinking “oh, hey, here’s a new gigantic bombastic piece of music you’re totally unprepared for”. It happens again with “Neville’s Waltz” and the repeated themes from it heard in “Harry Potter’s Love” — a wonderful love theme and one that I occasionally find myself humming when I’m not paying attention. And then they both come together for “Potter Waltz”.

Though there are a few songs peppered in here and there that I personally didn’t care for, for the first time in the series, we’ve got a start-to-finish soundtrack that I can sit back and enjoy without occasionally asking myself what just happened. I was extremely disappointed that Doyle wasn’t brought back to score more of the films, but I’ve yet to be disappointed by any of his work, and this soundtrack is part of what makes Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire such a great film.

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In addition to the orchestrated part of the soundtrack, a band was created to perform three songs under the name “Weird Sisters”. It featured members of Pulp, Radiohead, All Seeing I, and Add N to (X), and was fronted by Jarvis Cocker. The three songs they performed, including the one that ran during the credits, are at the end of the soundtrack. I’m not going to review them, except to say… they’re okay. Nothing good or bad to say about any of them.

Sep 05, 2011 | 0 comments View Post
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Book Review: “The Magician King” by Lev Grossman

Please note: this review contains spoilers for Lev Grossman’s previous novel, The Magicians.

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In The Magicians, Lev Grossman introduced us to Quentin Coldwater, an intelligent, callous, callow youth who was picked for the entrance exam to Brakebills, a secret magical academy in upstate New York. Because this is a fantasy novel, I think we all knew he’d make it in. He spent several years learning magic, and learning that it was nothing like Harry Potter. But what made Quentin different is that he also believed in Fillory, a Narnia-like world created by an English novelist. He never expected to actually find it.

Now, a couple of years later, Quentin is one of the two Kings of Fillory. Joined by his Brakebills cohorts Eliot and Janet, and his high school friend Julia, the four of them rule the strange, magical kingdom. But Quentin is getting bored, and what do kings do when they get bored?

They go on quests. And Quentin’s quest takes him right back to where he started: Brakebills. Among other places. Along the way he meets up with his friend Josh and Josh’s new cohort, a dragon-ologist named Poppy. Then Quentin meets a dragon and he learns that his quest might affect the future of magic as he — and everyone in all the worlds — knows it.

As with many sequels, it took me a few chapters to really start enjoying The Magician King. The sense of wonder and discovery from the first novel isn’t quite as evident, although Quentin’s bone-dry sarcasm and asshat-like behavior certainly are. However, the discovery returned when Grossman started layering in flashbacks to Julia’s life — for Julia, unlike the other three rulers of Fillory, did not come up through Brakebills. No, her journey to magic was much rougher, much more “street” — think of those annoying teen films where the from-the-streets dancer has to fit in with the classically-trained ballerinas — and while nothing really new happened, it was still interesting to learn how the other half of witchcraft lives. And judging from what Julia went through at the hands of a trickster god, perhaps it would be better to not have learned magic at all.

But Julia’s journey does introduce us to some interestingly-named characters, such as Pouncy Silverkitten and Failstaff, even if parts of it are quite cliche and technologically silly-sounding (especially the bits with the text-to-speech forum reading software). And, as each layer of Julia’s journey is revealed, so too do we get a little closer to figuring out why Julia acts the way she does in Fillory.

One of the better points of The Magicians was that the book attempted to subvert most of the common tropes of magic-school fiction — either that, or hang such a hugely-kitschy lampshade on them that readers can’t help but wonder how they ever worked in other books. The Magician King does some of the same with Fillory — the random kids who just show up and become kings, the silly-named islands that are actually pretty boring, the constant references to Fillory’s peculiar moon. The seagoing parts of the book directly draw from CS Lewis’s Voyage of the Dawn Treader — as I said before, all of Fillory draws from Narnia — although here again Grossman hangs massive lampshades upon pretty much everything, at least until the story gets serious.

Since the world of Fillory is intended to be Narnia-esque, the author pretty much has to depend upon characterization to fulfill my personal “must have good worldbuilding and interesting characters” requirement. Quentin, while interesting, is quite annoying in his world-weary way; at least Eliot is a little less hipster-mage in this book. He really bugged me in The Magicians. The main characters, though certainly well-rounded, are in their own way fantasy tropes, but again Grossman’s subversion and lampshading of the standard fantasy fiction toolbox makes them worth getting to know. From Benedict the emo-cartographer to Bingle the extra-awesome swordsman, from the talking sloth who won’t shut up to the holier-than-thou of Penny, even from the irrepressible sidekick humor of Josh to the let’s-see-it-through-her-eyes characterization of Poppy, the people (and animals) who populate this book are exactly where they should be.

The overarching plot of the novel felt a bit forced to me — “complete this quest or all magic will go away” — but Grossman manages to pull it off by keeping Quentin’s character consistent. Though Quentin does change as a result of what he goes through, he’s still the same old ennui-filled Quentin. Also, the whole “the hero pays the price” angle didn’t seem like much of a price to me. Still, I enjoyed reading the book, and there were a lot of clever and funny things to keep me interested until I got to the next plot point. And, unlike the first book, The Magician King clearly sets up another sequel. I’m not sure how much longer Grossman can keep up this particular style of storytelling, but I’m on board for book three.

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Note to Parents: This book contains adult language, violence, adult situations, and sexual situations — one of them very violent. I would not recommend it to any but the most mature teens. Of course, you should use your own discretion when it comes to your children.

Sep 04, 2011 | 0 comments View Post
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Book Review: Fade to Black by Josh Pryor

I imagine that it can be difficult to sell big-idea hard-science-fiction books. How do you elevator-pitch a story about the virus that may have been the catalyst to turn humanity from people living in caves to the society we know today?

If you’re author Josh Pryor, you do it by adding a trip to Antarctica, a little cannibalism, some commandos who do CSI, and a whole cast of unsympathetic (or, at least, unlikeable) characters.

In Pryor’s Fade to Black, the story shifts back and forth between the two main characters: Ethan Hatcher, who commissioned a research mission to Antarctica to study hydrothermal vents, and Claire Matthews, a community college science professor with a whole host of psychiatric issues and a rather novel theory on the disease that killed a Russian expedition almost 30 years ago. Oh, and the two of them used to sleep together, just to add a little extra tension.

Ethan and Claire, along with a team of the military’s finest CSI guys and a couple of civilian contractors, are sent to Antarctica to figure out what happened to the rest of Ethan’s team. What they find horrifies even the hardiest of men — and Ethan definitely isn’t one of those. It’s the disease Claire’s based her publications on..

And it’s spreading.

Outside of the big science ideas, the early section with Alan and his team, and some of the The Abyss-like expedition sequences (albeit on the ice shelves of Antarctica instead of hundreds of fathoms deep), I had a lot of trouble liking Fade to Black. While the main characters were extremely well-rounded, they seemed to me to be almost too detailed — we learned literally everything about Ethan and Claire in a series of infodumps that really turned me off to the characters. Ethan was supposed to be unsympathetic, but to my surprise, I really disliked Claire as well. I think that’s because there were too many “damaged female character” tropes crammed into this one person. It allowed her to have internal monologues full of fretting and fear, but those monologues just kept… on… going. Even through the climax of the book.

Meanwhile, the military team seemed a bit too caricature-y for me — they each had one or two distinguishing characteristics, and seen through Claire’s eyes we got a very Anita Blake-esque rundown of their physical features, but in the end I was again seeing a bunch of smart, capable military guys that were pretty much interchangeable. The same with the Russians — and the trope was taken one step further by having their base be kind of a dump while the American base was neat and tidy. But of course Ethan was boinking the one woman on the Russian crew, just to cement his status (established earlier) as the kind of guy who does that sort of thing. We did get Sergeant Price, who was the best-written of all the secondary characters, but even with that his behavior seemed a little too forced, as if to keep telling us that he’s super-studly-soldier-guy.

Fade to Black is a short book — my reader put it at 248 pages, including cover, copyright, and whatever you call those blank pages at the end — but it’s densely packed with descriptions, science, and internal monologues. I definitely got a feel for the locations where the action took place, and the frozen hell of Antarctica was quite capably written, with the right amount of mood and reaction. But the characters were either too full of tropes or too full of details that I really could’ve lived without, and the hero of the book was someone I just didn’t like. Not that I absolutely need to like the hero/protagonist, but I was actively disgusted by a lot of her characteristics and all of her whining. Look, I understand a lot of bad stuff happened to her and she’s reacting to that, but I don’t know that we needed her to have that much stuff in her past. The problems with her parents (together and separate), the history with Ethan, the issues with Eric… it was just too much.

And speaking of Eric, the last time he appeared in the book, I was completely stymied as to exactly what had happened, even though I went back and read it three or four times.

I will say that the book ends in the best tradition of “the surviving good guys are rescued from a bad situation, but then *dramatic musical sting!!!!!!!*”, although to me it felt a tad abrupt.

If you like science, CSI, stories that take place in Antarctica, or lots-of-people-crammed-into-a-small-space-slowly-going-mad, then you’ll enjoy Fade to Black. Those really aren’t my preferred genres, though (except for the science part), and I felt there were too many other issues with the book — most notably the unsympathetically-annoying main character that we were all supposed to like — for me to say I really enjoyed it. I could have overlooked one or two, but not all of them.

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Special thanks to Red Hen Press, the novel’s publisher, for providing a review copy.

Sep 02, 2011 | 2 comments View Post
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Book Review: River of Gods by Ian McDonald

River of Gods coverThe average science fiction novel takes one or two interesting ideas from recent history and modern science and extrapolates them forward for fun and enlightenment. In River of Gods, however, Ian McDonald found a place for a little bit of everything in the caldron of India’s future. Artificial intelligence, climate change, extreme body modification, alien artifacts in space, alternate realities, and cyberpunk-flavored digital warfare all have their place in this enthralling work of near-future science fiction.

One hundred years after its founding, the now-Balkanized nation of India is facing both the emergence of superhuman artificial intelligence and a war over water. Being one of the only nations that has not banned advanced AIs, they also find themselves in the unique position to translate the output of an artifact that the Americans have found in outer space. River of Gods covers the events of August 15th, 2047 — the day when these factors (and others) come together and everything explodes.

River of Gods was published in 2004, and has a more action-movie feel than McDonald’s most recent novel, The Dervish House. Like The Dervish House, it tells the same story from the perspectives of many different people — a vicious street criminal, a cybercop, a genderless fashonista, a politician, a lonely housewife, a pair of naive computer programmers, a reporter, a comedian, and a prophet. Through their eyes, McDonald draws a picture of a future India that stands on the edge of a technological revolution, but has not yet finished its struggle with poverty and religious bigotry.

One of McDonald’s thought experiments is the character called Tal. Tal is a neut — short for neuter and neutral, a self-described noncombatant in the war for genetic survival. The description of what Tal went through to achieve this state is simultaneously frightening and fascinating — the ability of an individual to choose that level of body modification could have been the core of its own novel. Instead, McDonald has Tal embody the emotional and social consequences of this technology. In my opinion, McDonald does a masterful job in drawing a character that is neither male nor female, but still human and relatable. Tal’s fall and redemption is one of the most compelling plot arcs in River of Gods.

Seeing the same city in India through ten sets of eyes can be overwhelming for the reader, particularly given McDonald’s dense and image-rich prose. Car chases and judiciously-placed explosions help to hold the reader’s interest. As the book progresses, the cuts between perspectives come faster and faster until they literally converge in an anime-style ball of white light. For me, the end of River of Gods is not as strong as The Dervish House. I felt like the book reaches for a science fictional twist and leaves many of the characters — whom the reader has, by this point, been seduced into loving — spinning off in poorly-defined directions.

Despite my (slight) disappointment at the ending, I do recommend this book. If you, like me, miss the glory days of cyberpunk, you’ll find something to love in River of Gods. If you enjoyed The Dervish House or if you are looking for some high-concept science fiction combined with war robot action sequences, political intrigue, and heart-tearing drama, pick up this book. River of Gods is complex, beautiful, and a lot of fun.

Aug 30, 2011 | 1 comment View Post
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Music and Magic: The Harry Potter Soundtrack Retrospective — Part 4 of 10: The Prisoner of Azkaban

This is the fourth article in a ten-part retrospective of the Harry Potter soundtracks. You may wish to refer to the previous entries in the series for more information.

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So, I’m just going to come right out and say it: of the three John Williams Harry Potter scores, Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban was the best of them. After the juvenile nature of Stone (music-wise) and the gradually-growing-more-serious nature of Chamber, audiences had grown enough with the character and the franchise for director Alfonso Cuaron’s dark treatment of what was, to date, the most serious of the Potter stories. I think that, when Williams saw just what direction Cuaron had gone with the bulk of the film, he felt it allowed him to make a more adult soundtrack, although it did still have departures from the general feel for the humor sequences.

The soundtrack begins with “Lumos (Hedwig’s Theme)”, a much more mature version of the iconic musical phrase. It feels more sinister than ever before, even though that part of the movie is just Harry trying to teach himself lumos maxima. (And why did he never use that spell again, exactly?) And then, with “Apparition on the Train”, we are introduced to the Dementors with music that intensifies their creeping evil-ness. At that point, we still haven’t hit the film’s signature riff, but it’s not a problem.

Other standout tracks include:

  • “Buckbeak’s Flight”, which I’ll cover later. The frenetic drumbeats notwithstanding, it’s a great one.
  • “The Werewolf Scene” — great ambiance and use of established themes from within the film.
  • “Saving Buckbeak” — very understated in the beginning, to underscore the need for Harry and Hermione to avoid being seen by anyone once they’ve gone back in time.
  • “The Dementors Converge” — there are two parts to this track; this is the first one, when Harry is trying to fight off the Dementors as they attempt to kill him and Sirius. You hear hints of the patronus theme and the triumphant theme throughout, and when listening to the soundtrack you almost want to go back and hear this one again after you’ve heard “Finale”, just to pick up on what’s happening.
  • “Finale” — and now, the second part, when Harry finally knits together the tenuous logical threads that lead to this point and figures out that he’s the one who has to expecto that patronum all over the clearing to save the souls of himself and his godfather. Williams absolutely nails the triumphant theme with this one in a very understated fashion — just a lone brass and the chorus/synthesized “aaaaaahhhhh” underneath. Then he ends with a reprise of “A Window to the Past”, when Harry says goodbye to Sirius and Buckbeak.
  • “Mischief Managed”, a mega-mix of the entire soundtrack that, in the film, was played over the ending credits. I really like these sorts of tracks. I wasn’t hugely impressed with the gigantic orchestral sting at the end, but otherwise it was cool.

Owing possibly to just how heavy the film gets toward the end, there are several humorous sequences throughout, and Williams takes the opportunity to stretch out. “Aunt Marge’s Waltz” perfectly captures the feeling of Harry blowing up his aunt, and the acid-jazz of “The Knight Bus”, while feeling very out-of-place amid the rest of the music, nonetheless fits the moment as it was presented in film (the book didn’t fill the Knight Bus scene with quite as much levity). There’s also “Double Trouble”, which introduces both the Hogwarts chorus and Flitwick’s magical transformation from a gray-haired old wizard to a young-ish bespectacled black-haired wizard. I have no idea why a chorus was included, but there you go. I guess the students of Hogwarts also needed some extracurriculars beyond Quidditch, the Gobstones Club, and Dueling.

If the soundtrack has a weak point, it’s “The Whomping Willow and the Snowball Fight”, and only for the latter part. I think it was pretty clear that we were supposed to get a good kick out of Malfoy and his friends being snowed under by an invisible Harry (Emma Watson’s fake hysterical laughter notwithstanding); the music was almost too much. I also didn’t much care for the latter portion of “Secrets of the Castle”, which was too heavy on the higher-register wind instruments. I don’t even remember hearing some of that music in the film; it may have been spread out across several scenes.

As for the signature musical phrase in the film, its first major appearance is “Buckbeak’s Flight” (it’s just barely recognizable in “Apparition on the Train” but I don’t really count it because you only catch it at the very end). In the film, you hear it when Harry and Buckbeak hit the air and Harry realizes that he’s not going to die a horrible death by falling. It’s suitably poignant and triumphant, a powerfully-written theme for a film that had more “bad” moments than any of the others. There’s also a secondary signature phrase, first heard in “A Window to the Past”; it’s evocative of Kamin’s theme in the Star Trek: TNG episode “The Inner Light”, mostly because of the wind instruments but also because it gives you a chance to relax and recover amid a pretty heavy series of compositions. And, finally, there’s the occasional use of “Double Trouble”‘s riff, although it’s not strictly Williams’s composition so much as his interpretation in that case.

While the Prisoner of Azkaban soundtrack isn’t my overall favorite of the entire series, I definitely mark it as my favorite of the John Williams scores. It’s the most mature, most serious one of his three, and the signature cues he introduces are ones that I find myself humming every now and then. While Stone gave us the main theme of Harry Potter, I think it was Prisoner that really showed us how the music of Harry Potter can make us feel.

Aug 29, 2011 | 0 comments View Post
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Book Review: Low Town by Daniel Polansky

Low Town by Daniel Polansky Low Town by Daniel Polansky wants to be an action-packed noir mystery novel set in a fantasy world. It succeeds at some of these things. While Low Town gets off to an awkward start with a summary of the grim and gritty world and our grim and gritty protagonist, it earned its first laugh on page ten — at the same time the first dead body turned up.

This is Daniel Polanksy’s first novel. He has a talent for writing fight scenes, and Low Town’s protagonist gives him plenty of opportunities to show off. The protagonist, Warden, likes to solve problems with his fists because he thinks he’s less likely to kill people that way. When he means to kill someone, he straps on his “trench blade” — the weapon he took from a fallen enemy during the Great War.

Warden was a soldier, and then Warden was a cop, but when we meet him he’s been stripped of his rank and makes his living as a mid-level drug dealer in Low Town — what they call the local slums. Unfortunately, he can’t bring himself to ignore the disappearance of a little girl, or her dead body when he finds it on the street. When a second child is abducted, he commits himself to finding the culprit and delivering him, if not to justice, then at least to his next incarnation.

The mystery aspect of Low Town is the book’s primary weakness. I had to watch Warden stand in a room with a metaphorical gun on the wall and then watch him spend the next three hundred pages ignoring that metaphorical gun. Near the end, the book winks halfheartedly at the audience as various characters tell Warden that he’s not a very good detective. An alert reader will already know that, because the alert reader will already know who killed the kids and have a decent guess as to why. If the reader is anything like me, they will spend most of the book shouting at Warden to figure it out already.

There are, by my count, approximately three female characters in the first half of Low Town. One of them is dead, one of them cooks breakfast, and one of them is a crazy lady. The lack of women is so exceptional that I began to wonder how the people of Low Town managed to breed. By the end of the book, the first three have been joined by whores of various classes, a few grieving mothers, and the Ice Bitch. The book doesn’t even have the excuse of being set in a medieval world, because it explicitly isn’t: There are references to large-scale shift work in factories and trench warfare, in addition to a tiered system of police departments.

Very little of the fantasy aspect of Low Town is laid out in clear prose. The reader must figure out the world through hints and suggestions (which will lead the reader to pick up on things that the protagonist misses; see above). The world hangs together well enough. The unexplained bits aren’t relevant to the narrative, and would slow down the action. It will be a disappointment to readers who enjoy a bit of expert world-building in their fantasy, but will help hold the interest of readers who are bored by exposition.

As in any good noir story, no one wins. If you like books where the hero comes out on top, avoid this one. Our protagonist isn’t a hero; Warden does some things that, in my opinion, take him from dark to actively hateful. The lack of a compelling protagonist combined with the failure of its twist ending made Low Town an unsatisfying read overall. Readers who are looking for grit and well-paced action might enjoy this book, but those who love mysteries should give it a pass.

Aug 27, 2011 | 0 comments View Post
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