[REVIEW] Dragon Rising
I can be stubborn when it comes to reading books that don’t come easy. I don’t like to quit reading something, even if it’s difficult or just plain bad, and if I set it aside one time chances are good I’ll feel bad about it until I try reading it again.
Take Dragon Rising, a novel by pseudonymous author Wade Barker. I’ve owned the book since 1985, and despite repeated attempts to finish it I’ve always put it down before reaching the end. But I never got rid of the book and I never stopped trying. Finally, 25 years after I bought it, I’ve completed the book.
It’s not that Dragon Rising is a particularly thick book. And it’s not a difficult read. In fact, now that I’ve done with it, I’m not sure what kept me from finishing it all these other times. The book is action written for people who were, at the time of its publication, fully in the grip of the ninja craze. Its biggest drawback is that it’s a follow-up to a relatively obscure series that didn’t have the best reputation even then.
Dragon Rising is the first of four books collectively titled The Year of the Ninja Master. The Ninja Master in question was the star of a series of eight action novels that first started publication in 1981 at the very beginning of the Ninja Era. These books were, to put it delicately, not very good. But don’t take my word for it: check out a few installments of Bullets, Broads, Blackmail and Bombs over at Bookgasm and see what I’m talking about.
So The Year of the Ninja Master plays off this previously established character which, I think, is the weakest part of Dragon Rising. We’re supposed to know these characters already, like the Ninja Master himself, Brett Wallace, and his faithful sidekick Jeff Archer, love interest Rhea Tagashi and ninja operative Hama. The book doesn’t waste any time acquainting us with them and casually refers to adventures they had together in the other novels. Someone picking up Dragon Rising cold (like I did way back when) isn’t going to have any idea what’s going on, and that’s a serious problem.
10 more icons.
Since people seem to be mildly interested in these things, I went ahead and made the next 10 Ninja Assassin icons I threatened to. Enjoy.
These are not great, just like the other 40, but I figured I’d give it a shot. I’d love to see what one of the better iconographers at LiveJournal could do with these images, or with screencaps of their own.
Iconic Ninja Assassin
I started off my blogging days at LiveJournal and stayed there for a couple or three years before deciding I wanted more control over my content. Obviously I now blog with WordPress, but there is one thing about LJ that I continue to like: icons. Iconography on LJ has become something of an art form and while I don’t consider myself at all in the same league as the best (or even the middling) icon artists, I do like to try my hand at it.
So I decided to make some icons for Ninja Assassin. The first 23 are taken straight from promotional stills, the poster and so forth, while the remainder of the set of 40 are screencaps I made. Hopefully you will like them and, if you happen to use LJ for your blogging needs, you’ll use one or two of them. That would make the effort feel worthwhile.
[REVIEW] The Hunted
The Hunted, which came out in 1995, was something of a throwback: a ninja movie long after the ninja boom of the ’80s had come to a close. Starring Christopher Lambert to bring in the white audience, the movie was really about samurai and ninja battling it out in (then) present-day Japan and all the best stuff involves the Asian cast.
The Hunted starts relatively slowly, introducing us to Paul Racine, an unlikely American played by Lambert, on a business trip to Japan. In the first of a good number of huh? moments, Racine is in Japan to sell microchips to the Japanese. That’d be a first.
At any rate, Racine ends up encountering a beautiful woman (Joan Chen) in the hotel bar and the two enjoy a nice evening out together. Eventually she invites him to her room for some torrid lovemaking in a big soaking tub, but rebuffs any suggestion that they spend more time together. The reason for this becomes clear in short order, as Chen’s character is put to death at the hands of a ninja named Kinjo, played by John Lone. Racine witnesses the killing, is badly wounded by Kinjo’s accomplices and then left for dead.
I wanna be a ninja.
Because of my ongoing fascination with all things Ninja Assassin (I got hold of the screenplay today, too), I’m going to put a new ad up at PBeM2.
What’s PBeM2? Well, it’s a successor to the now long-defunct site PBeM.com, where those folks interested in doing roleplay via email or message board — it’s more of a collaborative writing thing than roleplaying in the classic sense — could place ads for games they wanted or games they wanted to run. After PBeM.com abruptly quit doing business there was nowhere at all to go, until finally someone hit upon the idea of PBeM2: a wholly automated site that serves the same functions as the old clearinghouse.
So what am I posting there? This, under the title Ninja Assassin:
They are made of shadow and mystery and their history spans centuries. They are masters of body, mind and weaponry. They are ninja and they are unstoppable.
Rational men will say the ninja assassins vanished long ago, but these men would be wrong. The ninja are still here, training in techniques handed down from one generation to the next from the days of the samurai. Where some would use bullets, the ninja uses blades. Where some rely on technology, the ninja has only the power of ki.
— Fear not the weapon but the hand that wields it. —
For those not in the know, Ninja Assassin is a film that serves as an amalgam of both the “classic” 1980s ninja movies starring such luminaries as Shô Kosugi and modern filmmaking styles influenced by The Matrix. The idea of that mix has inspired me to seek out a PBeM or PBP experience that might approximate it.
