The only negative about this movie is that it doesn’t follow the Mo Movie Rule. This is offset by the fact that the female member of the heist team is present because of her brains and skill, not her cleavage, and while pretty in a well-scrubbed Midwestern sort of way, is not a model and is not there to provide a romantic subplot for the hero.
It’s so nice to watch a movie that has a well-written script, addresses potential plot holes and deals with exposition intelligently.
I would have read it eventually since it’s by China Miéville, but since Bryan recommended it I moved it up the stack – even though I was a little concerned it would be even more baroque than The Iron Council.
Miéville, darn him and his talent, has written a police procedural, set in a city that lies alongside another city. Beszel and Ul Qoma are interlinked in places, sometimes even overlap, but they are separate nations – calls between them are mentioned as “international calls” – and the separation is enforced by Breach. Crossing over, or even perceiving, the “topolganger” city next door invites terrible punishment, and the citizens of both cities have developed an entire, almost subconscious culture of mannerisms, dress, colors and styles to tip the other off to “unsee” or “unhear” what is going on next door.
And he does this while hitting on many of the familiar tropes of police procedurals: a body found in a park, a police inspector pushing an investigation past mysterious and sudden bureacratic resistance, traveling to another country to team up with his foreign counterpart, and even a (rather pulse-pounding, actually) chase scene – which are all different, and fresh, because of the way they intersect with the separate doppelcities.
Highly recommended.
So in the wake of RaceFail 2009, John Scalzi rethinks his reflexive “no way am I putting my hand in THAT blender” position, and invites Mary Anne Mohanraj to write a guest blog post. Which she does in a thoughtful, kind, non-blaming, We Can Work It Out sort of way full of linky goodness.
And damn if the thread doesn’t immediately get clunked on by people who amaze you only by their ability to type with fingers jammed firmly in their ears, going OMFG U CALLED ME AN OPPRESSOR!! and “Racism? That’s so twentieth century, darling” and “But shouldn’t we wait for people of color to come to us before we acknowledge they have a role in SF?”
Oh Internets, just once, I would love you to surprise me.
The Queen’s birthday is this week. Still a teenager, and increasingly rolling her eyes at me when I have not heard of something on the Internet (“you’ve never been to 4chan?! I mean not that you’d want to go there but…”) or when I try to interest her in the quaint pastimes of my childhood–
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