Cherie Priest

* I was going to do a post singing the praises and posting the pictures from a Team Seattle Girls’ Night Out and the Mark & Caroline Henry BBQ Spectacular, but Richelle has beat me to it. I love it when she does that. And on the subject of Team Seattle — I think it’s very much worth noting that I feel uncharacteristically lucky to have fallen in with them. Sometimes I’m afraid they’ll figure out what a goober I am, and either throw me out of the circle or start charging me dues.

* My pal Naamah Darling is trying to find a TEMPORARY home for three cats belonging to a friend of hers. Long story short, there’s an abusive relationship situation and Naamah’s friend has finally gotten a chance to flee … but she’s having a terrible time placing her cats in a foster environment. She has every intention of reclaiming these cats, so this is truly a plea for a TEMPORARY holding spot somewhere in the Perry area just northeast of Lansing, Michigan. Go here for details and contact information if you can help. (Note: the departure date has been pushed back a couple of days, so ignore that “Wednesday the 16th” bit.)

* Hellboy II — It lacked the shinier, sharper edges of the first one while simultaneously being prettier to look at and a little more awkward. Even so, there’s much to love about this franchise, not least of all the over-the-top modern steampunk done with verve and a very big budget; but I know I’m not the ONLY person who quietly wondered about the sheer geometry of Liz and HB being a couple. This is not to say I had a problem with the “coupley stuff,” because I didn’t. I merely wondered about the actual mechanics of their love life, and I kept picturing an event not altogether unlike a fly on a windshield.

* Hancock — Is just plain difficult. The first half is charming as hell, and it poses real questions about the nature of heroism vs. the nature of a hero. It also takes a look at loneliness and the redemptive power of optimistic expectations, and there’s much to recommend it. But then, somewhere around the mid-point, the story takes a hard left turn into what can only be described as distinctively lazy writing. It’s as if the storytellers felt they’d reached the end of their narrative rope, but they still needed another 40 minutes worth of content … so they started smoking the blue crack, and as we all know, that’s never the right answer. The saddest and most frustrating part (to me, as someone who writes stories for a living) is that it would’ve been so very easy to fix. But I can’t discuss that without resorting to major spoilers, so click below if you want to read it … or don’t.

OMG seriously? In a staggeringly dumb incident of “me too!” SHE turns out to be his long-lost immortal wife? I don’t care if it was “physics” or however she wrote it off, that was really too much of a leap for me. That was the kind of storyline I’d expect from HANCOCK if it was a long-running comic book series and somewhere around year twenty, when everyone is all out of ideas and Hancock has already explored his sexuality and teamed up with Wolverine and then died at least twice, or whatever, THEN, MAYBE, I could excuse such a thing. But you can safely bet I’d roll my eyes and bitch about it.

All they needed to do to save the movie and still keep all that suspended belief aloft … was introduce a TOTALLY UNRELATED supervillain. I thought for a minute they were going to do it with the one-handed bank robber, and that would’ve been fine. It would’ve been fitting. It would’ve worked. But to wrap the story back around on itself and introduce a whole crazy mythos? UNNECESSARY. I was happier not knowing.

I liked Hancock better when he really was a louse who, with a lot of help, hauled himself out of a funk and redeemed himself as a human being first, and a superhero second. When it turns out that he’s been the good-guy victim all along, it undermines the entire set-up and makes his recovery cheap.

Anyway. That’s just my opinion and you can take it or leave it, but HANCOCK needed to be either a comedy/action flick or a darkly tortured superhero flick with an urban fantasy sensibility; and the awkward meshing of the two completely deflated the emotional impact of both.

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