The James Logan Courier

By Yari Nieves-Rivera, Courier Entertainment Editor

In the book, Sold, by Patricia McCormick, Lakshmi is a Tibetan girl who dreams of a big city and has only recently become a woman in her culture. Her father died when she was young, so her mother had to remarry in order to take care of her daughter. Since then, she had a son, Lakshmi’s little brother, which makes ends harder to meet for them. At the age of thirteen, Lakshmi is expected to get married to a boy her age and she’s supposed to leave home, but when a terrible drought comes that destroys the family’s crops and her step-father spends away their money on gambling, her dowry has to be sold to pay rent and keep her and her little brother healthy.

Then, her step-father meets a woman who is offering to take Lakshmi to the Big City, only a myth to Lakshmi. She tells Lakshmi to call her ‘Auntie’. Then, her step-father, for some reason, gets some money from the woman, more than Lakshmi had ever seen. Lakshmi goes with her in order to go to the city, and the woman promises to send back money to her family while she works in the city.

By Billy O'Keefe
McClatchy-Tribune (MCT)

If there's a story-driven third-person shooter checklist for "Max Payne 3," rest assured every box is filled. In terms of gunplay and presentation, it's bloody, beautiful, cinematic and all kinds of refined.

But for those who loved the first two "Max Payne" games because they dared to be weird and were proudly unrefined in exactly the right ways, the polished but mostly disposable "MP3" may ultimately amount to little more than a bloody, beautiful, cinematic and refined bucket of cold water.

By Ben Fritz
Los Angeles Times (MCT)

LOS ANGELES — The Men in Black are invading theaters this weekend with a mission that others have failed to achieve: knock "The Avengers" off the No. 1 box-office perch.

Sony Pictures' big-budget 3-D sequel "Men in Black 3" is on track to gross about $250 million worldwide over the long Memorial Day weekend, most of which should come from overseas markets.

In the U.S. and Canada, the film is expected to generate about $80 million over the four-day holiday period from Friday through Monday, said people who have seen pre-release tracking surveys.

By Nedra Rhone
Atlanta Journal-Constitution (MCT)

Vanessa Williams could have easily written a memoir at several points over the last 30 years.
In 1984, when she became the first African-American woman crowned Miss America; when nude photos surfaced, leading her to resign six weeks before her reign ended; when she reinvented herself four years later as a successful R&B singer, and later, an actress. And so on and so on.
Instead, Williams, starring on the final season of ABC's "Desperate Housewives," opted to wait until now. Not only has she finally written a tell-all memoir, she co-wrote it with her mom, Helen Williams. The result, "You Have No Idea: A Famous Daughter, Her No-Nonsense Mother and How They Survived Pageants, Hollywood, Love, Loss (and Each Other)" (Gotham Books, $28), hit stores in April.

By Carolyn Kellogg
Los Angeles Times (MCT)

FADE IN: A car idles in the foggy pre-dawn, pointed at the end of a cul-de-sac. Inside, an attractive 30-ish couple, DAMON and AMY, are worn from travel. She is dark-haired, pale-skinned and tense, and she leans against the passenger window. Behind the wheel, he carefully watches her mood as they evaluate the appearance of an owl in front of them. Good omen or bad? They can't decide, and continue on, lost.

This is the opening scene of "Rain Dragon," the second novel by Jon Raymond, who earned devoted fans with 2004's "The Half-Life." Since then, he's gone into screenwriting, earning an Emmy nomination for his work on the 2011 HBO miniseries "Mildred Pierce."

By Billy O'Keefe
McClatchy-Tribune (MCT)

From its core out to the fringes, "Prototype 2" has a lot — arguably too much — in common with "Prototype."

But the one significant change — outside of a new main character, and more on that in a bit — is a good one. This time, all that's good and fun about "Prototype 2" isn't completely torn down by the horrifying A.I. and difficulty balancing meltdowns that made its predecessor one of 2009's most obnoxious games.

Conceptually, it's business as usual. As James Heller, you're still taking on both military and mutant forces. And despite filling a new set of shoes, you're still a superpowered one-man army who can jump 50 feet per bound, sprint up the side of a New York City skyscraper, throw a car like a baseball and fully consume other people to shapeshift into them and acquire their memories and abilities.

By Randall Roberts
Los Angeles Times (MCT)

LOS ANGELES — Tom Gabel, the lead screamer of Florida band Against Me!, has come out as transgender and plans to undergo sexual reassignment surgery, according to excerpts from an interview published Tuesday night on the website of Rolling Stone magazine. The singer, 32, founded Against Me! in 1997, and over the course of the past 15 years it has risen to become one of the most successful of a new wave of punk rock bands.

According to Rolling Stone, Gabel, who is married, will soon begin the process of becoming a woman by taking hormones and receiving electrolysis treatments. He will take the name Laura Jane Grace.

By David L. Ulin
Los Angeles Times (MCT)

I've long admired Toni Morrison as a moral visionary, but her fiction, not so much. Of her nine novels, three — "Song of Solomon" (1977), "Beloved" (1987) and 2008's "A Mercy" — are masterpieces, yet the others, particularly the post-Nobel books "Paradise" (1997) and "Love" (2003) can be so stylized as to veer dangerously close to self-parody. Anyone who's read her in any depth may understand what I'm referring to: those stentorian rhythms, the biblical cadences, the characters who function more as archetypes than flesh-and-blood.

I say this not to minimize her achievements — three masterpieces in a lifetime are three more than most authors produce. Still, more often than not, her stature (the most recent American Nobel literature laureate, she was named last week as one of 13 recipients of this year's Presidential Medal of Freedom) prevents us from seeing her as a writer, which is to say as fallible, prone as all writers are to the excitations and limitations of, in Faulkner's phrase, her "own little postage stamp of native soil."

By Billy O'Keefe
McClatchy-Tribune (MCT)

On the precipice of a full-scale "Devil May Cry" reboot, Capcom has given in to another popular trend by rereleasing the series' three Playstation 2 entrants in high definition.

Or rather, it kind of does that, if you don't count the parts of "Devil May Cry" and "Devil May Cry 2" that remain in slightly blurry fullscreen. The standard-definition content is relegated to menus and cutscenes, and all gameplay in all three games is presented in widescreen with aged but HD-friendly graphics. But the strange first impression this oversight gives is an unintentional sign of things to come if you fully plunder "Devil May Cry HD Collection's" depths.

By Michael Phillips
Chicago Tribune (MCT)


CHICAGO — Timing is everything, and when it comes to the mysterious quantum physics of comic timing, it's really everything.


No moviegoer on the planet plans on buying into "The Avengers" this weekend for a lesson in light-fingered comic delicacies. It's a machine, and in the 10-ton franchise genre, a pretty good one. Yet writer-director Joss Whedon's machine contains one particularly funny sight gag, a capper to one of its many climactic battle sequences within the extended climax.

By Alexa Ceja, Courier Staff Writer

"In the school run by gangs, staying out was harder than joining. We knew who our friends were, and were careful what we said. If people thought we were haters it would be a matter of time."

Julia DiVino, the main character in Snitch, a novel by Allison van Diepen attends an inner city high school in Brooklyn. The school is dominated by gangs, a lifestyle Julia intends to avoid, but can't.

Her mother is dead and her father is usually either working or with his girlfriend, leaving Julia to fend for herself most of the time. For years, she has managed to get along without being part of a gang, but then she meets Eric, a mysterious new boy at school. Trying to protect him, gets Julia branded as a snitch and suddenly joining a gang doesn’t seem like such a bad idea.

By Gaylord Dold
McClatchy Newspapers (MCT)

No matter where we go — to a restaurant, a movie, a public restroom, and yes, even a funeral — people are seen clutching and using a slim device that allows them to do just about anything they can do from an Internet-enabled computer at home. Who hasn't attended a so-called business meeting in which every person is staring at a MacBookPro and talking on a cellphone simultaneously (while someone else plays a PowerPoint)?

Called a "wireless mobile device" (WMD — how ironic is that?), this object has for many become an obsession, something they check endlessly regardless of where they are or who they are with.

By Billy O'Keefe
McClatchy-Tribune (MCT)

If it's possible for anything to emerge triumphant from the fallout over "Mass Effect 3's" roundly disappointing (and, according to no less than the Better Business Bureau, misleading) ending, you're looking right at it. Save for Bethesda's games, no game anywhere gives you the power to carve your destiny as measurably as does "The Witcher 2: Assassins of Kings." And even Bethesda's endgames don't pay off on the choices you make as satisfyingly as this one does.

That's a credit to "Kings" taking the concept of role-playing to a certain limit but not past it. Though dauntingly thick with side quests and opportunities to explore freely, "Kings" still subtly guides players through a narrative that's more Bioware (cutscenes, dialogue trees, significant story decisions that fork the road) than Bethesda. You're playing as Geralt, the titular Witcher, and while his destiny rests in your hands, his personality and physical makeup come pre-designed (and for good reason).

Within that structure, though, things can get wonderfully messy.