Myths and Monsters

The last book in the Percy Jackson series, The Last Olympian is out and it's quite good. It manages to wrap things up while still leaving the author lots of room to play in. The only real question is, will we get more stories with Percy and crew, or will it be the "next generation". As the book is still pretty new, I won't go into great detail, but this one is certainly action packed (almost a little too much so) and manages to tell a pretty unique story. There's not as much cribbing from older mythologies this time around, so that's nice. Give it a read.

Monster volume one, by Naoki Urasawa is mostly setting the stage for the story to come, but it does a pretty good job. Part hospital drama, part crime thriller, we follow Dr. Kenzo Tenma a brilliant young neurosurgeon that seems to have it all. He's engaged to the Director's daughter and has a promising career ahead of him. Until he runs afoul of hospital politics. Deciding that all lives are equal and that he's going to operate on a young boy that's come in ahead of the city's Mayor (in direct violation of the Director's orders) Kenzo loses everything he had. He saves the young boy but the Mayor dies. The Director makes it his mission to put Kenzo in his place and his fiance leaves him realizing his fate is sealed. That might be enough to get things going, but the real twist comes in when years later, now actually running the hospital, Kenzo finds out that the boy he'd saved is now going around killing people. And so the chase begins. Looking forward to seeing where this one goes.

JCVD is a rather brilliant little movie. It follows Jean Claude Van Damme as he gets stuck in a hostage crisis. Much like My Name is Bruce, the film plays with audience expectations concerning the main star and puts the hero in a situation they've dealt with theatrically a million times. Only now it's for real. There's a lot of humor here and some heartbreak. Good on Van Damme for playing the part.

And that's about it for random review time. In other news, we had a nice little game of San Juan last night with the letter 'r'. I rather like that game. And cheeseburgers on demand season is officially open. Gotta love the grill. I think we'll try ribs this week.