100 Word Movie Review : The Time Traveler’s Wife

TTW is a much abridged and largely sanitised version of the novel. Henry is a librarian with a genetic disease that causes him to travel through time. He meets Claire when she’s really young and he’s already married to Future Claire. The time travelling concept is intriguing, but the acting isn’t great, and many exciting (and slightly risqué) aspects of the novel are completely removed.  The novel’s Henry is more awesome and Claire less annoying, but the pacing of the film means all that (and the author’s many references to other novels and German poetry) is lost. Read the book.

100 Word Movie Review : Public Enemies

A mobster movie starring Captain Jack Sparrow, Dr Manhattan and Batman was always promising too much. Public Enemies is quite good, but with the promise of that cast I was expecting fantastic. Enemies tells the true story of mobster, John Dillinger (Depp) who likes to see himself as Champion of the Common Folk because this makes it easier for him to hit on attractive women and get cheered by press when arrested.  Dramatic “shaky camera shots” increase tension whenever Dillinger leaps out of bed to elude the coppers, but that tension is sorely lacking for the rest of the film.

Hiatus Over

Once again a fairly lengthy blog break. Multiple reasons for the slacking off: some good, some not so good, but let’s imagine that it’s all because of the post-Getting a Girlfriend euphoria and ignore the super-stressful academic pressure that was (and still partially is) piled up on me. Yes, I got a girlfriend. There is some fear from certain portions of the friendship circle that that fact will begin to encompass every post and comment in my life, I’ve always considered myself able to establish clear boundries, so that shouldn’t be a problem.

Too much study, but in between there has been: Modern Family, a movie or two and a desire not yet fully realised, to return to reading something that isn’t a legal judgement. Now that I’ve actually picked up a keyboard, there will be thoughts to follow. As it stands, it’s good to be back.

For those who care:

•  Um…
• Wow. Exams really sucked the creativity right out of me.
• It’s Bernard’s Birthday today. Happy Birthday.

The Gloomy Corner

One can’t complain. I have my friends. Someone spoke to me only yesterday.
Eeyore

100 Word Review: Up

It seems to me no small irony that films targeting children often leave me emotionally drained. Up is no different. The movie’s first fifteen minutes tugged the heart-strings a plenty and followed that up with talking dogs, aging adventurers, giant birds and a whole lot of balloons. It’s not exactly a rollercoaster ride of ridiculous humour and there’s a clear moment when I felt it crossed the line of believability (yes, this movie had talking dogs and a house elevated by thousands of balloons and I still felt there was a line), but it is a sweet, funny, geriatric adventure.

100 Word Movie Review – Twilight

The first thought I had while watching Twilight was “Yay! A movie that glorifies pale people!” I, as a card-carrying member of the Pale People Club, am all for this. “Be gone, you Bronzed Surfers! Back to the beach with you damning examples of all that humanity can be and I am not.”   And then things got a little awkward as I found the maudlin self-indulgence of these teen love puppies a little, you know, self indulgent. It is, in essence, teenagers talking about their feelings. Oh and they’re vampires. And their skin glows like diamonds in the sunlight. Sigh.

101 Books to Read Before You Die – Fugitive Pieces

It’s hard to approach a book that I’ve declared my favourite book ever, a book I read once two years ago and haven’t had the courage to pick up again, despite buying my own copy and buying a copy as a gift for a friend. It would probably be easier to write about some of the books I’ve read repeatedly; I must have read some of Terry Pratchett’s Discworld novel four or so times and I’ve made a habit of re-reading the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy every few years, but that’s different. Those are books that I’ve enjoyed and influenced the way I’ve thought and the essence of I am, true, but Fugitive Pieces by Anne Michaels was more. The Guide and Discworld were novels that set me in a certain direction, they took the flowing river of my mind and diverted it, set it on a course of humour and absurdity, added to its flowing currents. Reading the Fugitive Pieces was uncovering a something that I’ve never known within myself; striking a subterranean lake of cool, refreshing water bursting to the surface, unexpected, overwhelming, liberating.

 And painful. At times I would read a paragraph and decide that that would be enough, that that would be all I could take at this time. I don’t think I could review this book normally; as if while  describing the novel I would have to write as beautifully and deeply as the novel itself to do it justice; So I’ll say a few quick words and then end off. It’s a novel about loss, and coming to terms with that loss. It’s a novel about the parts of ourselves that we are yet to find, and how we find them. Split into two pieces, telling the stories of two different men, I was initially unsettled at the harsh division between the storylines, but in retrospect they serve a purpose

 And that’s all I’m going to say about it for now. I’ll more than likely return to this book, slowly, cautiously feeling my way back in and when I did I’ll post snippets of it up on the blog. But not too long a quote. I don’t think I could take that.

 But sometimes the world disrobes, slips its dress off a shoulder, stops time for a beat. If we look up at that moment, it’s not due to any ability of ours to pierce the darkness, it’s the world’s brief bestowal. The catastrophe of grace.

Time Traveler’s Teaser

I can’t describe the deep, deep pleasure I take from the fact that Eric Bana has gone from playing a time-travelling alien in Star Trek to a time-travelling librarian in The Time Traveller’s Wife. It’s those sort of neat parallels that provide a lot of joy in my life. Here’s a snippet of the book before the movie (which I hear is rubbish) gets released (here in SA):

“I bet I can guess your favourite bird.”

He shakes his head and smiles.

“What’ll you bet?”

He looks down at himself in his T-Rex shirt and shrugs. I know the feeling.

“How about this:  if I guess you get to eat a cookie, and if I can’t guess you get to eat a cookie?”

He thinks it over and decides this would be a safe bet. I open the book to Flamingo. Henry laughs.

“Am I right?”

“Yes!”

It’s easy to be omniscient when you’ve done it all before. “Okay, here’s your cookie. And I get one for being right. But we have to save them ‘til we’ve done looking at the book; we wouldn’t want to get crumbs all over the bluebirds, right?”

“Right!” He sets the Oreo on the arm of the chair and we begin again at the beginning and page slowly through the birds, so much more alive than the real thing in glass tubes down the hall.

“Here’s a Great Blue Heron. He’s really big, bigger than a Flamingo. Have you ever seen a hummingbird?”

“I saw some today!”

“Here in the museum?”

“Uh-huh.”

“Wait ‘til you see one outside – they’re like tiny helicopters, their wings go so fast you just see a blur…” Turning each page is like making a bed, an enormous expanse of paper slowly rises up and over. Henry stands attentively, waits each time for the new wonder, emits small noises of pleasure for each Sandhill Crane, American Coot, Great Auk, Pileated Woodpecker. When we come to the last plate, Snow Bunting, he leans down and touches the page, delicately stroking the engraving. I look at him, look at the book, remember, this book, this moment, the first book I loved, remember wanting to crawl into it and sleep.

“You tired?”

“Uh-huh”

“Should we go?”

 ”Okay”

 

100 Word Review: District 9

As a South African I feel immensely proud that a film with South African actors, accents and locales is doing so well in America. D9 is an innovative collision of comedy and Sci-fi action. Although the film contains an obvious apartheid motif, this is not a biting social commentary; it’s just a film that happens to take place in an apartheid-like setting, but with Aliens. There’s a lot of swearing (but in Afrikaans, so it doesn’t really count) and people explode. A slightly above-average sci-fi made better awesome by the “Hey, I live there” factor and a comical turned badass procrastinator protagonist.

Prawns Go Home

Why don’t you tell me what to write?

I don’t initiate well, but I do follow commands so I’ll do this: I’m opening up to the floor (that is, the comments below) for suggestions of topics for a series of posts of “My Thoughts on…” The suggestion will remove any feelings of awkwardness on my parts for the selection of topics.

If you’re just visiting the blog, feel free to let your relative anonymity be your shield and drop some contentious, obscure or incredibly deep topics for me to try and deal with. Comment on this note with your suggestions.