Fish and Cherries Productions

Title: The Invisibles (The Deluxe Edition, Book 1)
Author: Grant Morrison
Artist: Steve Yeowell, Jill Thompson, Dennis Cramer, Chris Weston, John Ridgeway, Steve Parkhouse, Duncan, Fegredo
Type: Comic Book
Genre: Anarchist, Science Fiction

Dane McGowan is a British delinquent who’s just been sent to a remedial center to try and make him an upstanding citizen. When he finds out that the institution is literally removing the emotions of the inmates to produce pure conformity, he becomes embroiled in a hidden war of magic and ideologies. On the one side are the Invisibles (as in the Invisible College), who fight for freedom in all its myriad forms, including some that others may not agree with. On the other side is the Outer Church, who use their mindless Myrmidians as soldiers to enforce their idea of conformity. Taking the name Jack Frost, Dane joins a squad of Invisibles led by one King Mob in a demented journey through time and space as he faces off against insect people, bloodthirsty god impersonators, and his own doubts.

If that description sounds a little slapdash or sparse, it’s because I honestly don’t know what to make of the plot at times. The writing is very obtuse and the jumps between scenes are so jilted that it’s hard to know whether I turned over an extra page or not. I’m even willing to admit that some of the summary is either conjecture or things I looked up online. That’s really the biggest problem with the book, that it can be really hard to follow and when you add things like time travel and tangential stories that don’t entirely connect to the main plot, then things just start to make your head hurt.

Looking back on this story, I find that it’s very reminiscent of The Matrix (though this story predates it by about five years). Both feature a protagonist with a lawless background being forced to “wake up” from the world he knew. He then discovers a secret war being fought with superhuman abilities between a group of anti-authority rebel cells and a controlling force that can insert themselves into the everyday population. What it also seems to draw inspiration from is the graphic novel Sandman, one of the most critically acclaimed comic books of all time. This comes through in the nonlinear narrative and tangential side stories focusing on minor characters and other Invisibles. However, where those two had a lot of wonder, artistic experimentation, and nuance going for them, these just get very confusing and sometimes unpleasant. One that comes to mind is a story told out of order about a soldier who turns into an abusive husband, but in the end it turns out that he was one of the mooks that King Mob killed in the beginning of the story. I’m honestly not sure what the point was of all that.

I can’t really say that the characters themselves are very compelling either. All of them act understandably, to be sure. It’s hard to blame Dane for wanting to cut and run from the group after getting partially mutilated on a mission gone wrong, but he doesn’t have to be such an asshole about it. King Mob and his crew seem intriguing, but I don’t learn quite as much about them in the book as I’d like and this book is the first twelve issues of the comic’s run. That’s an entire year that readers would have had where they learned next to nothing about their main characters. Even the side characters are confusing; I still don’t get the nature of the Invisibles’ enemy or what their motivation is. In fact, I’m pretty sure one side character turned evil, but it was really hard to tell.

In conclusion, this is a very confusing body of work. The writer Grant Morrison dips into the surreal and outlandish frequently in his pieces, but I think he went too far for this one. Maybe I’m just not seeing what he was trying to get at, but I felt that this first volume was a lot of lead up with not a lot of explanation. Should you get it? Should I continue with the series? I have absolutely no idea. It’ll definitely scratch your itch for something trippy, surreal, and on the fringe, but I think you’ll be out in the cold if you can’t get past the experimentation.

Das Boot: Director’s Cut is a movie well deserving of all its accolades. However, its greatest enemy is its running time, which clocks in at three and a half hours. The interactions between all the characters were great and I appreciated the sense of camaraderie during wartime, but it was about the halfway point where I realized that I didn’t remember any of their names and that was really distracting for me. They were likable, but after the fifth time I checked my watch, I really wasn’t that invested.

And that’s a shame because the tension aboard the u-boat is really great, especially near the end. I wrote a piece a few months ago about terror coming from people being trapped in environments that will kill them if they’re exposed and this definitely takes advantage of that near the end. People have also commended this film for its accuracy of depicting life and perils serving on a u-boat. I can’t really comment on this because I wasn’t alive when u-boats were in service, but if it’s true, that’s certainly great. Come to think of it, this movie really is a masterful work of art. The only problem here is me. I don’t always have the patience for long movies that move slowly, so who am I to dismiss something just because it doesn’t smash my own personal hurdles? Conclusion: it’s a great movie, just not for me. I’ll probably see it again if other people are watching it, but it’s not one I’ll seek out on my own.

21 Jump Street was a damn funny movie, even if it became tripped up by the tropes it was trying to parody. It’s odd because you wouldn’t think that a remake of such an old and obscure property would warrant such high praise. But with the writers of The LEGO Movie on board, we get a really clever and really funny send-up to buddy cop and high school coming-of-age movies. True, they unfortunately have to go through the clichés of the third-act break-up between multiple parties and the hero’s reward kiss, but the film plays with them enough to not make them too insufferable. I’m not sure what else to say other than it was a really funny movie worth a watch and I’d be happy to check out the sequel.

Wait, there is one other thing. A criminal is not released from custody just because they weren’t read their Miranda Rights! That is complete crap invented by Hollywood for tension just like the one phone call rule! The event that kicked off the entire plot is complete bullshit! There, I’m done now.

Divergent Series: Insurgent was a huge jump up from the previous movie. While Divergent dragged in quite a few places, Insurgent seemed to fly right by. Part of it was that Triss and her companions actually had a goal that the audience could get behind, which was to put a stop to the killings and crimes against humanity that the council was committing. Also improved were the special effects, which go to absolutely ridiculous degrees in Triss’ mind simulations.

The plot is also cleverer, throwing out a lot more twists in the story and giving us more insight into the world. One of my big complaints with The Hunger Games is that we’re only given a bare outline of the other Districts and are not made privy to what it’s like for people there. Here, though, you get to see how people live in the factions that weren’t touched upon in the last movie and the setting felt richer for it. For all my praise, though, I have one big gripe; the arc of Caleb, Triss’ brother, was very confusing and I was seriously at a loss in figuring out why he was doing what he did. It’s a huge shame too, because a different character who was a heartless piece of crap in the last film got a really brilliant arc with some great payoff.

Overall though, unlike last time, I’m really excited to see where the series goes after this movie. It’s broken away from feeling so derivative and I give it a glowing recommendation, even if that means you have to watch the average first movie to get context.

The following was viewed at a special screening and was in no way obtained illegally.

Serenity 2: Still Flying was a massive breath of fresh wittiness as Joss and the Firefly cast reunited for another trip into the Verse. Admittedly, the recasting of Jayne as Chris Hemsworth was a little jarring at first, but considering Adam Baldwin’s involvement in starting the #GamerGate scandal and Whedon’s own feminist views, it’s easy to see how conflicts would have forced a change. Also, Chris’ Southern drawl is quite convincing once you stop asking yourself when Thor ever spent time in the sticks. On the subject of returning faces, however, not only do Wash and Sheppard Book return in a brilliant scene where River is forced confront her own tortured psyche, but in the form of Adelei Niska, coming right off of the Firefly series to provide a chilling antagonist.

What’s really amazing is that after all these years, the cast still feels so natural together and can work off each other so well. There’s a scene involving Mal, Zoe, Simon, two angry clients, and a coffee maker that I won’t dare spoil. In lesser hands, this scene would have fallen flat, but the actors and Whedon’s writing work so well together that the entire audience, myself included, were rolling in the aisles. That said, it is a Whedon film and even though we were all prepared to get our hearts stabbed, nothing could have prepared us for who died here. If you played the Red Wedding scene from Game of Thrones twenty-seven times in a row, it still wouldn’t compare to the emotional gut wrench that scene provided. Suffice to say, this comes highly recommended. Fans will surely get a kick out of it, but newcomers will not only find it accessible, but incredibly engaging. Buy your tickets soon when it comes out because I’ll bet my life that they’ll sell out fast. It’s funny, some people at the special screening remarked how they weren’t sure that people would be interested in this universe continuing, that it was too old for people to latch onto. But it’s like Kaylee says in a line that’s sure to be famous on release, “The ship keeps stalling, but she’ll never stop flying.”