*** Mean Girls. I’ve been wanting to watch this one again for a while, to see if it was still as good as I remembered. It was. When I first saw it, I thought that Lindsay Lohan girl was great and had a fantastic future in front of her, but I guess now we can give a lot more of the credit for this movie to Tina Fey’s writing. The supporting cast is also very good.
Author: mike
Movies, January 2012
**** Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy. Terrific. I don’t really want to compare it to the terrific Alec Guinness version. Gary Oldman makes it his own, and the supporting cast, direction, and look of the film are all great.
Books, December 2011
*** Patrick Rothfuss – The Wise Man’s Fear. This second book of the Kingkiller trilogy again kept me turning the pages. The slight problem with this one was the sheer arrogance and unbelievability of the main character. In the framing device of these books, he’s a legendary figure, with all kinds of stories and myths told about him. In the first book, we started to learn the story of his younger days, before he was such a legend. As such, he was vulnerable and made mistakes. In this second book, he’s starting to come into his legend and his deeds become more grandiose and unbelievable. Rothfuss perhaps takes it too far — some of what his character accomplishes is unbelievable, and it might have been better to reveal a more humble truth behind the legends. Still, I’m looking forward to the third book, and I hope to like it as much as the first.
Books, November 2011
*** Patrick Rothfuss – The Name of the Wind. Incredibly engaging, kept me turning the (many) pages and made me want to read the next book (it’s the first of a trilogy) as soon as I was done. Many aspects of the story and characters are certainly cliched, but Rothfuss manages to give them enough life and interest that you don’t really mind.
* Diana Gabaldon – Outlander. Awful, if occasionally gripping, romance novel. It was recommended to me as good fantasy, but aside from using time travel to throw the heroine into historic Scotland, there is absolutely nothing fantastic or science-fictional about this book at all; the heroine could just as well have been a visitor from another country, and the story would have been about the same.
** Mervyn Peake and Maeve Gilmore – Titus Awakes. Awful. What this has to do with the Titus Groan of Peake’s Gormenghast novels, aside from sharing his name, I couldn’t say. Admittedly, my memory of the third book isn’t as strong as the first, so maybe this one arises more naturally from it (and it is based on fragments Peake left behind). But still.. not good.
Movies, November 2011
*** Glee, Season 2. There are a lot of annoying characters on this show, and I didn’t think the musical numbers were as good as in season 1. At this point though, I think we’re watching almost entirely for Britney. But overall still not a bad way to pass the time.
Books, October 2011
* Joseph Conrad – The Secret Agent. Blaaah. Could not read.
*** Raymond Feist – Magician: Apprentice.
** Raymond E. Feist – Magician, Master. These two books are apparently the two halves of what was elsewhere released as one book, and the beginning of a series. The first set up the standard “nobody stable boy makes good” type story, teasing the idea that he would become a mighty magician, and hinting at the working out of a complex and interesting system of magic. But then everything got caught up in a big transdimensional war that never made that much sense or had that strong an emotional pull for me. At some point, the kid does become a master magician, but we never get to enjoy the “system of magic” exploration — it just sort of happens like blah blah time passes and then he was super magic. I was interested enough to finish these two books, but left with no curiosity about the rest of the series.
**** John LeCarre – Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy. Masterful.
*** Elmore Leonard – Get Shorty. Amusing. Is the movie good? Maybe I should see the movie; it seems meant to be a movie.
*** David Foster Wallace – The Pale King. It’s unfinished, and of course it felt like it ended just as it was getting going. Which is interesting, since I read somewhere that DFW had said most of the book as he intended it was done. So.. whatever. I wish we’d gotten the final book; I don’t know if I’ll read this fragment again.
*** David Foster Wallace – Brief Interviews with Hideous Men. I dipped into this book again. Some bits are very good, but as a whole it doesn’t hold your attention. I should finish rereading it, but don’t feel like I need to right away.
*** John LeCarre – Call for the Dead. Not as good as Tinker Tailor, but I definitely need to read more Smiley and more LeCarre in general.
Movies, October 2011
*** The Trip. Obviously, you have to be in the “enjoys Steve Coogan” camp to enjoy this one, as it’s more of the usual. As usual, he plays a (fictionalized?) womanizing, self-centered, insensitive version of himself, Rob Brydon plays a (fictionalized?) goofy, annoying version of himself, and they goof off and see what happens. It was pretty funny.
Movies, September 2011
*** Midnight in Paris. A charming way to pass some time. The best parts were the various actors having a good time hamming up characters like Hemingway and Dali (I am.. Dali!).
** Drive. Already reviewed.
Drive
We’ve seen this movie before. The hero does bad things but is not a bad man. He’s singlemindedly very very good at something that other people use for evil, but he’s pure of spirit. He is good at what he does but not very good at any other aspect of life; he’s a naif, a child. His skill and singlemindedness define him as a good person, even if he commits illegal acts; the only victims of his actions (at least, the only victims we get to see) are themselves bad people. The heroine is also a pure spirit, and an innocent caught up in a bad situation not of her making. Ultimately, it turns out that the bad men who use the hero and the bad men that are causing problems for the heroine are the same bad men, and the hero must turn against them, using his exceptional skill at one single thing to singlemindedly destroy them. He saves the heroine but cannot save himself; he is too innocent and simultaneously too stained by the things he’s done to live.
This is a very very good story. It has pathos and tragedy, dramatic tension and romance. We like to be able to see a cool guy do cool bad things while managing to believe that deep down he’s good. We like to see him grow up and use those cool skills to do bad things to bad people. We like to see the pretty girl survive and shed a tear for the noble man who saved her. It worked well for The Professional and it should have worked well for Drive.
Unfortunately, we don’t really get much proof that Driver is an exceptional driver. The opening scene is great and shows some of his skill and his cool, but there’s not that much to see it and, for a movie called “Drive”, the rest of the movie is surprisingly light on good car chases. We briefly see him racing on a track, but not enough to know that he’s good. Instead, we just have people saying how good he is. So the audience is denied much of the pleasure of watching the hero at work, and our faith in his purity and goodness (which are predicated partly on his being pure and singleminded in pursuit of his skill) are undermined.
The chemistry between Driver and Irene is fairly unconvincing. Her seemingly complex relationship with her husband is left unexplored, and so her quick attachment to Driver is hard to believe. Their relationship is mostly established with a number of awkward silences that, I think, are intended to meaningful, as well as with some interplay between Driver and Irene’s son that I didn’t buy at all. The situation was partly rescued by the fact that the relationship between Driver and Irene’s husband started to get complicated and interesting rather than being merely formulaic, but that didn’t go very far.
I think the main flaw of this movie is that it intends us to believe that driver is skilled, taciturn, innocent, capable of love, etc, but that it doesn’t really show us enough to make us believe these things. Instead, we are supposed to accept them on faith — either we’re told them, or they come along with all the genre cliches. And without really believing in the character, I wasn’t really able to fully accept the movie. It was decent, but I think it missed being the icon of utter cool that it so obviously wanted to be.
Books, September 2011
*** Alfred Bester – The Stars My Destination. Great vision of the future, great (anti)hero. I’ve been going through Alfred Bester (who I’ve never read before) recently and I just wish he’d written more full-length novels.
*** Alfred Bester – The Demolished Man. Another fascinating future with fascinating characters.
** Alfred Bester – Hobson’s Choice and Fondly Fahrenheit. Both throwaway short stories, cute more than genuinely interesting. I don’t think I’m a big short story fan any more.
*** Ben Bova – Mars. I started this knowing nothing about it, and so had no idea what to expect. This worked out really well as I kept being unsure whether bug-eyed green-skinned aliens were about to pop out from behind a rock (or at least from tiny bacteria in the air). This book (and his whole series about exploring the solar system) are fairly hard-science-realistic though — focused on the details and difficulties of traveling to other planets and learning about them. It was very interesting but, at the same time, I’m not sure I’m interested in reading many more of them.
*** Octavia Butler – Wild Seed. A book about two (essentially) immortals in a world of mortals who meet and uneasily try to figure out how to coexist. The “science fiction/fantasy” elements are really beside the point here: they just serve as the background situation in which to explore characters. Butler isn’t really that interested in the whys or hows of those elements. Unfortunately, I think, without some exploration of where they come from, why they do what they do, or where they’re going, these characters seem to be just floating in a void, and I was unable to maintain as much interest in them and their problems. The story was good and much of the characterization well done, but I was bored at times.
*** Thomas Perry – Silence. Pretty good thriller, some interesting characters and a good plot, even if you do have to suspend a fair amount of disbelief to buy the basic premise.
** Thomas Perry – The Butcher’s Boy. Perry is hugely praised for this one (his debut novel, I believe), but I was mixed on it. The story follows a mob hit man and a justice department agent as they commit and solve murders, respectively. The parallel structure is nice, but it doesn’t really work here because the agent is mostly presented as an idiot. She makes a number of mistakes and misses things that are obvious to the reader long before they happen, and she just doesn’t have much personality. The hit man’s lack of personality, at least, can be read as intentional; he’s a faceless killing machine who does his best to be nondescript.
*** C.S. Lewis – Out of the Silent Planet. Great vision of a possible alien civilization, and generally enjoyable, but a bit preachy, especially at the end.