Holy Terror
by Frank Miller
Frank Miller is God.
A generation ago, Miller reinvented Batman not once but twice, with Batman: Year One, reshaping the origin story, and The Dark Knight Returns, about Batman at the end of his crime-fighting career.
He wrote the greatest Daredevil stories ever and then invented a whole new depraved universe in Sin City. The release of Holy Terror last year, a one-off book like 300 before it, is a reminder of Miller's incredible artistic talent but also shows a growing tendency towards lazy writing.
The art is, as usual, spectacular and riveting, as aggressive and relentless as ever before but these characters are too familiar to anyone who has read Miller before.
This book is overtly political, portraying Muslim zealots launching a huge deadly attack that only The Fixer can stop, using deadly force and creative torture.
Miller is cagey, though, and gives clues that this simple-minded, jingoistic tale of revenge is really an indictment on the cowboy Bush era, starting with the name Empire City, and a superhero who proclaims that the only way the world gives him peace is when he's at war.
It's nowhere near his best work but it's Frank Miller, so it's always worth a look.
Reviewed by Neil Godbout, communications coordinator at the Prince George
Winter's Bone
Jennifer Lawrence is a superstar with The Hunger Games now in movie theatres.
She's only 21 but Lawrence already has an amazing track record in front of the camera, including a stint as Mystique in last summer's hit X-Men: First Class.
The movie that got Hollywood's attention to Jennifer Lawrence was Winter's Bone, which won best picture at the Sundance Film Festival and her a Best Actress nomination at the 2011 Academy Awards.
Just 20 at the time, she was the second youngest nominee ever.
In Winter's Bone, Lawrence plays Ree Dolly, a 17-year-old girl left to look after her two younger siblings and her incapacitated mother in their shack in the woods in rural Missouri.
She has to keep the family together while trying to track down her deadbeat dad, who has skipped bail and disappeared but not before leaving the house and acreage as
collateral.
If she can't find him, the family will lose the property and be split up.
A fateful, terrifying ride in a canoe finally gives Ree the answers she needs, while also showing the depths she's willing to go to keep her younger brother and sister at her side.
Reviewed by Neil Godbout, communications coordinator at the Prince George.
