Cut: Movies in Fifteen Minutes, Cleolinda Jones

Johnny Cannon, Les Clark, Frenchy de Tremaudan, Joe D'Igalo, Norm Ferguson, Blue Rhythm

(July 28) My heh-ing muscles are worn out. Every page of this book made me heh-heh-heh aloud.

So these are capsule parodies of 10 blockbuster movies of the '90s and early 2000s, and they are brilliant. They are excellent summaries -- sometimes... often, actually... they impose more sense and logic than the movie in question ever had.

But they are also very funny, especially when you know the movie, and even when you don't, since Jones pokes affectionate fun at the generic clichés of movie-making as well as the ones specific to the franchises. From "Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Sorcerer's Philosopher's Stone in Fifteen Minutes," for example:

Dinner in the Great Hall

DUMBLEDORE:I would like to announce that I am absentmindedly beneficent.

NEARLY HEADLESS NICK: I'm a ghost!

HERMINONE: I know everything, because I read it in Hogwart's: A History!

NEVILLE: I'm completely hapless -- OW! MY FORK IS IN MY EYE!

NEARLY HEADLESS NICK: I'm a headless ghost!

SEAMUS: I'm a half-blood! Has my water turned to rum yet?

RON: Dude, and possibly a burgeoning alcoholic.

SEAMUS: Yeah? Well, you're POOR.

RON: SHUT UP, I KNOW.

NEARLY HEADLESS NICK: I'm a disgruntled headless ghost!

PERCY: I'm overweeningly officious, which will be important four books from now.

THE FAT LADY: I'm a painting!

THE STAIRCASES: We're fickle bitches!

NEARLY HEADLESS NICK: PAY ATTENTION TO MEEEEEEEEE!

Even the scene titles are funny:
Gandalf's Cart of Exposition (from "The Fellowship of the Ring in Fifteen Minutes")
Hissyfit Chamber, Imperial Palace (from "Gladiator in Fifteen Minutes")
The Planet Seattle Kamino (from "Star Wars: Episode Two -- Attack of the Clones in Fifteen Minutes")

Ah, it's hard not to just quote the whole book.

Interview With the Vampire, Anne Rice

Richard Westall, Lord Byron

(July 22) Polar opposite of Dead Until Dark and about a beelyun times more profound than Twilight. Rich, complex, totally compelling on the poignancy of death. Dark, occasionally repulsively so; not as sexual as I expected from the hype, but extremely passionate. Louis is irresistible. True literature: all the characters are vivid and multi-layered; the settings are feasts for the senses; the passion is real and enthralling.

Amazon.com review by Patrick O'Kelley: "It is that rare work that blends a childlike fascination for the supernatural with a profound vision of the human condition." Iggziggly.

It was like a real home-cooked meal after the bland fast-food of Dead Until Dark.

Still, that's it for me with the vampire fiction. Too much gratuitous and lingered-over killing.

Dead Until Dark, Charlaine Harris

Alien Figure Running With Beer Mug, from the PSB Gallery of Thrift Store Art

(July 8) Yuck. This is one of those books that make you feel dumber for having read them; I finished it only to see if Harris ever lifted it out of the dime-store-romance bracket. She did not.

The concept is a wacky mishmash -- DUD mixes the romance novel with the murder mystery, hewing closely to all the conventions of both of those "gendres," then adds a thin veneer of sci-fi (vampirism and shapeshifterism) and a thin veneer of fantasy (telepathy).

Harris could have been so creative with this, but instead put in the barest of minimum efforts. The characters are one-dimensional and often incoherent, both the romance and the mystery are predictable, the telepathy device is vaguely sketched out and seems to come into play only when convenient, the vampirism is cursory as well.

Worse, Harris is careless with the "craft" of telling her story, which is kind of insulting to the reader in the end. DUD is supposed to be a first-person narrative, but other characters' points of view crop up randomly, even when the narrator isn't mind-reading; there are lots of lazy writing shortcuts, like "he said nostalgically" and "he guessed softly," and some downright ineptness, like "'Sure,' I said, after a notable pause"; there are lots of continuity errors -- for example, at one point, a vampire gives a talk at a historical society meeting, which turns out to be scheduled for 7:30 p.m., but the rest of the time during this one-month period this same vampire can't be out and about before 10 p.m. because it's summer and the days are long. There's an unmistakable atmosphere of cranking it out to get the book up to 300 pages and paycheque time.

I was totally shocked by this -- since it's the basis of the beloved TV show True Blood, I thought it would be at least as good, and probably better than, Twilight... but, believe it or not, Twilight somehow leaves it in the dust.