Not so great and pretty blah

Finished The Magus today. It was fairly disappointing, even more so because everyone else who's read it worships it like a golden cow. It's very much closer to an ordinary cow, one that tips over like the Titanic once you've eaten half of it. The book builds up a nice momentum of mystery and suspense, and then suddenly halfway through, swerves into ridiculousness. If Spiderman and Count Chocula suddenly showed up, it wouldn't make the book worse. Kidnappings on even pages, "is this real? Wait, what is real?" on odd pages, and an occasional full-out Halloween dress-up parade thrown in for good measure. The book eventually cops out with a sort of "oh, everyone except two characters don't actually have souls - that's why they can assume every personality, as well as none." The ending is of course inconclusive and unsatisfying, unless you stay until after the credits, and hear Samuel Jackson's parting Latin peroration. The line literally translates to: "Male Romantic Lead and Female Romantic Lead #6 eventually get back together," but really says: "you've just wasted some time you could have spent rereading Catch-22. Sucker!"

Saw Hellboy II: The Golden Army to clear my head. After 600 pages of golden cow, it was like going to the bathroom after a hot-dog eating competition (pure relief, not pure shit if that's what you were thinking). The plot is devastatingly simple: There's some dude who hasn't gotten a tan in thousands of years, and that REALLY pisses him off. To get revenge, he's summoned a bajillion gold-plated T1000's from the future. All he now needs is the golden party hat which allows the wearer to make the T1000's do his bidding - dance, play fetch, kill everyone on the planet - the usual. Hellboy finds this poor bastard, rips his face off, rips his head off, rips out his arms and legs, and enslaves his family. Now that's good old American fun.

Oh, forgot to tell you, this is a split-screen movie. While all this is happening on one side of the screen, Selma Blair showcases booty-shorts and full-coverage panties on the other. Booty to ass-kicking ratio is shamefully low, but hey, that's what the Internet's for.