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Sean Has a Cold: 11/6/04

Sean has a cold. He brought it home from day care. The combination of a cold and a growth spurt have made this a perfect laze around the house day. We did briefly go to the Hayward Library were I picked up some lovely first edition Pearl S. Buck novels and Sean got two children's books. But mostly we just stayed home while Sean napped.

Mask of Loki

When I wasn't working on Moon Walking (my contribution to NaNoWriMo) I was finishing up The Mask of Loki by Roger Zelazny and Thomas T. Thomas (what sort of name is that?) and found the book rather disappointing.

This is a book from the nadir of Zelazny's life and career as a writer. It's a much better book, though still heavily flawed, if the chapters with the flash backs are skipped. The flashbacks are written out of chracter for Zelazny's usual style of writing so I can only guess that they are Thomas T. Thomas's contribution to this book. The story itself isn't much different than the second half of the Amber series, namely that of Merle and his semi-sentient computer. Zelazny usually doesn't bother with a lot of back story and in his better pieces, Tom Gurgen would have known by about page 30 that he was somehow tied to Loki. He'd have his powers and be trying to figure out why he had them, who wanted them and who he should aly himself with. But here the pacing is off and all the really typical (and good) Zelazny stuff doesn't happen until the last thirty pages of the book!

Hellboy:

We also watched Hellboy while Sean napped and it has to be one of the worst films I've seen in a while. It's so bad to almost be funny which is a shame. The pieces are there to make a good film. The writer/director is Guillermo del Toro who did Cronos and it stars Ron Perlman (who also starred in Cronos), a film I quite enjoy. Hellboy suffers from two things: erratic pacing (tedious exposition and anticlimatic fight scenes) and overly elaborate sets that don't make any sense (the gear trap hideout of Rasputin comes to mind). Of course having not read the comic I can't guess the extent to which the problems are inherrited from the comics. Regardless of what I think of it, it obviously did well enough because Hellboy 2 has been announced with a screen date of 2006.

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