Simon's Fifty Fifty Challenge

Mission Accomplished

I’ve found it difficult to get started on this summing-up post, and now I’ve just jumped right in, I’ll probably forget a few important things I wanted to say.

First of all, I enjoyed the challenges a great deal, including my two personal extra challenges. I read 55 books last year - 75 if you add in the graphic novels - and that’s quite a lot more than I’d estimate my usual average to be. And while 50 films didn’t seem a lot, I think that’s way above my usual rate, too. It’s surprising how hard it can be to find time to watch a movie during a working week. So, yes, I’m glad I took part, and I’m glad I was able to meet the targets.

I’m a little sad that I didn’t really take advantage of the community aspects, here on Tumblr and elsewhere. Due to my inexperience with Tumblr, I didn’t set up this blog ideally for following others: it’s a secondary blog, which means my “username” would be my other, abandoned, blog, and any followed feeds would appear there.

Am I going to do it again in 2013? I don’t think so. I feel like there are areas I’ve had to neglect because of the challenge - TV series boxed sets, cast/crew commentaries, and longer books. I think I’ve been tending to go for short books for the challenge, and as a result there are several longer works I want to read this year, and they’ll slow me down. The book I started immediately after Second Foundation is longer than the whole trilogy.

I did like keeping the blog, though, so I’m going to create a new one for my future reading - maybe I’ll drop the movies and games - and I’ll leave this blog as a complete document of my 2012 challenge. I’ll report back when I’ve set up the new blog.

Best of luck to everyone attempting the challenge in 2013.

Film 50: Zack and Miri Make a Porno (2008)

I wanted to finish on something classy. Something a bit art-house. Maybe foreign.

Then I noticed I had Zack and Miri Make a Porno on my DVR, and well, those art-house films can be hard work.

I used to be a big fan of Kevin Smith. Latterly, that has slipped a bit, but I’m pleased to say that I thought Zack and Miri was something of a return to form. Which is to say it is incredibly rude, funny and kind of sweet. My favourite Kevin Smith film remains Chasing Amy - also rude, funny and sweet - but Zack and Miri Make a Porno is very much in the following pack with Clerks and Mallrats.

The story is that Zack and Miri are two friends who are down on their luck, flat broke, and unable to pay their bills, and they hit on the idea of making a porn movie to solve their financial problems. Only it turns out that maybe they aren’t just friends after all.

I feel I should give a special mention to Elizabeth Banks, who is brilliant as Miri. She’s very funny, and really sells it. She seems way too beautiful for the role, to be quite honest, but that’s Hollywood.

The main reason I never bought this on DVD was that it appeared to lack a Kevin Smith commentary, and those are usually worth the price of admission alone. I was kind of waiting for a special edition, but as far as I know, one never appeared. Oh well.

And that’s the fiftieth movie. All my challenges are complete.

Comic 20: From Hell

Well, it looks like I made it. I had to put some hours in, but I managed to finish From Hell with a whole day to spare.

The embarrassing thing here is that I hadn’t finished it years ago. I have certainly had it for a long time. I found an Ottakar’s security token tucked between the pages the other day, and Ottakar’s were bought out and closed down over six years ago. And it’s almost eight years since I moved away from the branch I used to shop at. I had read a couple of chapters, and then presumably been distracted and set it aside. I had to reread them when I came back to it because it had been so long.

Anyway, I don’t think it’s my favourite work by Alan Moore. It’s a dark, sexually explicit, occultish take on the Jack the Ripper murders, with appropriate scratchy black and white art from Eddie Campbell. The insight into the lives of the poor of Whitechapel was perhaps the part that I was least familiar with.

I guess my main problem with it was that there weren’t really any surprises. The story is set up in the first two chapters, and then unfolds from there with a certain inevitability. It’s a classy piece of work, though.

And most importantly, it completes my comics challenge for 2012. Hooray. I had to cram a lot into December, but I’ve read some great graphic novels over the year. I can’t think of a real dud in the whole set, and some of them have been really outstanding.

Book 55: Second Foundation - Isaac Asimov

I wanted to try to get this one in under the wire, and finish the trilogy I started in January. Second Foundation is the third book in the original trilogy (which is not really a trilogy at all, just a three volume collection of shorter pieces, but never mind.)

I liked this one a bit more than the last. There are only two longish stories in Second Foundation. The first was disappointing, but I mostly liked the second. I still don’t really get what everyone sees in it. I realise it has great significance in the development of science fiction, but I don’t think it has lasted well. I’m kind of glad I’ve got it out of the way, to be honest. It feels like I’ve filled a hole in my SF education. It’s just a shame that I still have Foundation’s Edge to read, as a Hugo winner, and that doesn’t have the virtue of shortness that the original trilogy has. We’ll see what I make of that next year. At least Asimov was a better writer by then.

I think I can now safely say there won’t be any more books this year. I’ll start something long, just to make sure I don’t accidentally finish anything else.

Film 49: Confucius (2010)

I must admit, I was hoping that Confucius would be a little less faithful to its source material than it appears to have been.

It looks great, but the overall story isn’t very dramatically satisfying. Most of the best bits happen early in the film, and the end is not very climactic. The tyranny of facts.

This is another blu ray I picked up fairly cheaply, some time ago, and have only just got round to watching. I didn’t love it, and I didn’t hate it. It seems to be a reasonably good attempt at a biopic of the great man, in the troubled China of 500BC. That means it’s not exactly a Hong Kong action film, which I admit is what I was hoping for, perhaps unrealistically. Although there are some good battle scenes early in the story.

It makes sense (which is not something to take for granted if you watch a lot of Hong Kong action films), and tells the story it was meant to tell, it’s just that it wasn’t the story I was hoping to hear.

Film 48: How to Train Your Dragon (2010)

I thought there would be plenty of films on TV over Christmas, and that I’d have no trouble getting the three I need to complete the challenge, but in fact pickings have been slim, and How to Train Your Dragon is the only film I’ve watched so far.

It’s really not so long since my main interest in computer animation was technical. I was fascinated by the technical aspects of CGI special effects, from Tron and The Last Starfighter, to Babylon 5, to Terminator 2, to Jurassic Park, and including the birth of the full computer animated movie in Toy Story. You could see the progress happening before your eyes, as the techniques developed for reflections and skin and water and fur and so on; and a lot of it looks incredibly primitive now, but the truth is, it’s hard to notice the technical aspects any more. The technology is so accomplished that it is just a movie.

What that actually means is that I probably shouldn’t keep watching these kids’ films, now I’m a middle-aged man.

That said, I quite enjoyed How to Train Your Dragon, for all that it had the most disappointing “be nice” message since Monsters Inc. It’s about vikings, who fight dragons, and the not-very-vikingy viking, HIccup, who, well, doesn’t. The action is good. The humour is not bad. It’s another very decent outing from Dreamworks.

Comic 19: Building Stories

Now that’s a graphic novel.

I didn’t know a lot about Building Stories, going in. I’m not familiar with its author. It was the physical form of the thing that initially drew me in, along with a a few positive mentions which made me willing to part with the asking price. It comes in a large box, looking somewhat like a board game, containing 14 separate pieces ranging from strips of card to hardback books (and including a large foldout piece of thick card that looks very much like a game board.)

So yes, it was the novelty that drew me in, but it was the content that really makes this something special. It’s a mature and sophisticated work of great depth and subtlety. Awe-inspiring.

The loose binding factor is that it’s about a Chicago apartment building, and the inhabitants of its three floors. The bulk of it is about the woman in the top flat, both before, after and during her residency, but the others get a fair amount of coverage, too.

There’s no particular order to anything. The 14 physical divisions seem somewhat arbitrary - there are short disjointed episodes bound together in many of them - but it all comes together into a striking whole. It’s about loneliness, dreams, relationships, love, sex, loss, parenthood, youth, age. It’s about life.

The art is precise and diagrammatic - not normally the sort of thing I’d go for - but it works beautifully, and it does things words could not.

This is the “longer work” I’ve been reading for a while, during which I’ve also read the last three comics. It’s also the nineteenth of my twenty comics. I have another long piece picked out for the final entry. I only hope I can finish it in time.

Comic 18: Nelson

This was great. It could have been terrible, or extremely mixed, given the nature of the concept, but I don’t think there was a weak link in the chain.

The recent winner of the Best Book at the very first British Comic Awards, Nelson could hardly be more representative. It’s a collaborative work by 54 different creators, putting together a biography of the main character, Nel, using a single day from each year since 1968. (Erm, I’m guessing some years had two days.) Every year has just a handful of pages, and then the clock moves on and the baton is passed to the next artist/writer.

It’s a lovely high-quality book, in full colour on good paper, and the wide variety of art styles makes it a feast for the eyes. The story - well it was never going to be cleanly focused, covering a life from 0 to 43 years old - but although it jumps around a fair bit, there are some through-threads which hold it all together, and it was a joy to read. Recommended.

Book 54: War of Honor - David Weber

This one’s a call-back to the very first book in the blog, which was a short story collection set in the Honor Harrington universe, or Honorverse. War of Honor is the tenth novel in the main series, and I was reading The Service of the Sword back then in order to fill in some missing background information. It’s only now that I’ve managed to get back to it and pick up where I left off in the series.

And what a disappointment. I’ve always thought of the Honor Harrington series as a guilty pleasure, and this book came close to removing the pleasure side of the equation. It has quite a lot of work to do, to get the pieces into the right places, but it’s flabby and slow and very very long, and the action isn’t even all that exciting when it finally arrives.

More than anything, I’m relieved to have got through it. Two separate spin-offs start from here, and I can only hope that those and the remaining main series books are better than this one. Judging from their length, I should probably be worried.

Comic 17: Concrete 5: Think Like a Mountain

I’ve been off the grid for a couple of days, visiting family, and have a bit of catching up to do. Not only does the lack of internet access stop me from updating, but it also mysteriously gives me more time to get things done.

This is the third appearance of Concrete in the blog, and I must admit that, although I like the art and the writing, I feel a bit like I’m into diminishing returns. The truth of it is that the character Concrete is not a central part of the message in Think Like a Mountain, which is essentially an extended ecological plea, and all the more depressing because it’s fairly old now, and not a lot has changed. I think I might have enjoyed Killer Smile more because it didn’t even try to put Concrete himself front and centre.

I’m not sure how many more collections there are, but I am in danger of losing interest. This was the last one I had stored up, and while I did mostly enjoy it, I don’t really see why Concrete had to be in it, and I’m not sure I would have read it without him (which might be an answer to first question, but isn’t a very satisfying one.) I guess that’s a failing of series characters in general. They end up telling all kinds of stories which aren’t really about them.