movie: Hellboy

 Yes, this is my first time seeing this.  Yes, I've been meaning to since it came out.

It takes me a while to get to things sometimes.

Anyway, Hellboy (based on comics I also haven't read) is about a giant red guy with sawed off horns and a samurai hairstyle who likes cigars.  He came into being back in WWII when Rasputin, some scientists, and some soldiers (and moar Russians) opened a doorway to Hell.  (Or a hell.)   The Rasputin got sucked in and the hole spat baby Hellboy out.  Cut forward to a few years ago today, and Hellboy works for the US government fighting monsters.  With a few other "freaks."  But then Rasputin's girlfriend resurrects him and they go and bring in moar monsters.  Because that's what sorcerers who spent 50 years in hell do.

All this within the first 20 minutes.

I had much pulpy fun, but have little substantial to say.

I must ask, though:  Is stalking his love interests a Thing of Ron Perlman's?  Or at least, when he's playing inhuman characters?  (It's less odd, though, if you think of him as being perpetually 10, and Liz is the best friend who moved to a new school and he can't take it...especially with all his "She belongs here with the other freaks us, not out there!" talk.)  Ron Perlman was awesome, BTW.  But then, I expected him to be.

Also, why are all the male "freaks" monstrous in some physical way (even Rasputin had the eye thing) but the female ones are all normal and pretty.  I count Rasputin's girlfriend, as that woman did not look 80~.  I mean, I'm all for cool freaky looking guys and pretty girls both, but it's a pretty noticable division.

( on a similar, slightly spoilery note... )

And is Abe really male?  I ask because, while they identify him as male, he struck me as more androgynous.

Random question:  While I was watching, I remembered seeing some complaints about how they did the Hellboy/Liz romance.  Is it less romantic in the comics, dynamic changes, etc?  I actually wouldn't care much, except that I know I'll be trying to remember until I know.

Eeh...this probably sounds fairly critical, but I think I'm just nitpicking after a long day.

It has a giant, red Ron Perlman carrying half a Russian zombie on his back with the aid of a noose and fighting a giant tentacle monster.  What more do you want?

(no subject)

 You know, if you look at the driver's side of my car, it's a bit dirty but in great condition.  If you look at the passenger side, both windows are taped shut and large chunks of paint around the back tire are missing.

And for theoretically obvious reasons, the bit of money (and then some) that I had aside to get the windows fixed is gone.

Now I need to decide which to get fixed first.

(no subject)

 Flipflopping between Chaucer and Sayers in your reading while operating on about 2 hours less sleep than you usually have because someone called and woke you up early is kinda...interesting. 

ETA:  prozacpark!  The bit in the Chaucer you mentioned yesterday, was it right after Panadarus laid the guilt trip on Criseyde?

The Five Red Herrings by Dorothy L. Sayers

This was, in some ways, a bit jarring after the last Wimsey novel. Set in Galloway, it focuses on the seemingly accidental death of a painter. The police are perfectly willing to dismiss the death as an accident with little or no investigation, but Wimsey says that something in painting proves that it was murder, without explaining what the something is.

Unlike Strong Poison there’s no emotional attachment to the case for Wimsey. The victim, by all accounts, was an unpleasant person, and the six suspects are all decent people. His main motivation here isn’t to save an innocent or, it seems, even to punish the guilty, but to keep the innocent suspects from living under a cloud of suspicion. No mention is made of the fairly major changes in both Wimsey and Parker’s lives in Strong Poison, unless it was a passing mention that I missed. Unless you count Galloway being a popular place for artists at the time, there’s also no strong evidence of Sayers’s tendency to address social issues and movements of the time, or of Wimsey’s mental problems. None of this, incidentally, is to say that any of that is bad. The book seems to have been written for fun, which the foreword supports. (That, and being written because a friend wanted her to set a story there.)

Most of the book actually isn’t told from Wimsey’s point of view, and there are stretches where he’s completely absent. Instead, we spend more time in the heads of the various investigators looking into the case. For most of the book, the reader doesn’t know much more than the narrator at the time, and usually less than Wimsey does, even more so than usual. In some ways, the book is set up more to make the reader the detective than Wimsey. When theories are put forth, the only information provided is what the reader has seen given before, and the reader isn’t given anything extra to fill in the holes, or anything to help guide conclusions, just a lot of possibilities. No helping hand is offered until Wimsey reveals all. In a lot of ways, it’s probably the purest “Who done it?” of the series. So far, at least.