Scott Pilgrim, Under the Banner of Heaven, Terry Sanford, Hear the Wind Sing, & Pinball 1973

Scott Pilgrim is finally finished. And only two weeks before the movie comes out, could you really expect me to not have preordered his Finest Hour way back when. Which just makes me wonder why I hadn't even talked about the series in any depth yet. Scott Pilgrim is quite good. Well, he's a forgetful jerk who makes me feel dirty, but he's also full of awesomeness. As are the books. Sure, the first one starts out without Bryan Lee O'Malley having found either a consistent drawing style or evenness in plotting. But once the League of Evil Ex-Boyfriends shows up and the series kicks into overdrive, he gets to the heart of what makes 20-somethings tick. There was ridiculousness, there was fighting, there was fanservice (and the immediate mocking of said fanservice), and an ending that was very far from sucking. I need to get O'Malley to sign the last two issues. Just to match the signed first four. I am looking forward to whatever he ends up doing next. And the movie wil be awesome as well.

Under the Banner of Heaven: A Story of Violent Faith is Jon Krakauer looking at the history of Mormonism, with a focus on the polygamist sects, as a fight against "normal" American society. Having watched the first three and a half seasons of Big Love, I may have been more familiar with the story than I would've been without having seen it, since whole plot threads are straight out of history. Mormons are squicky. And knowing more about the history, and the stuff that they don't want you to know about the murderous tendencies of the official church, just confirms that. Mormonism may be the most American of all religions, but being an American Religion isn't really good. We tend to kind of be dicks.

Terry Sanford: Politics, Progress, and Outrageous Ambitions is as far from being about dick-y Americans as you can. Terry Sanford is a hero to any progressives with Southern ties. He was an FBI agent, a volunteer paratrooper in WWII, a liberal Democratic Governor of North Carolina during the Civil Rights era, president of Duke University for fifteen-ish years, a Senator from North Carolina. Who lost to his former driver who had switched parties due to fighting over who was going to run in 1986 for the seat Sanford won, but only because he had a heart attack a month before the election. He also helped to stop the civil war in Nicaragua that Reagan and North and Bush helped to prolong by funding the Contras. He was a great man, and although this book barely mentions my boss (who would be very important in Sanford's last two campaigns), I liked it. Sanford has a fascinating life story, and I enjoyed reading it.

Hear the Wind Sing is Haruki Murakami's first novel. Only published in Japan, and in a limited run of helping young people learn English, along with his second book, Pinball 1973. Neither are particularly good, although they definitely presage Norwegian Wood in both content and tone, being set in the late 60s and 70s in a real Japan. Hear the Wind Sing is not weird at all, while Pinball 1973 starts to bring in the strange characters that dominate his later works. Don't read them unless you're very into him, because there is a good reason for them not being published in English here. Besides the fact that they're very short.

The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, The Pluto Files, Being Human, Life, & lots more TV

The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Diaz is about the life of an obese Dominican and the history of his family tied up in a story of the Dominican Republic and the fuku that colonization has brought upon the world. Being both a history buff and a nerd, I really loved the book. It's just the kind of thing that I love. I'm enjoying the fact that there's books like this that are winning things like Pulitzer prizes. Because that means that I'm either becoming more literary, or, more likely, the literary establishment is becoming nerdier. I wonder when the first bit of fan fiction will win a major writing award. I really hope it's some good old Luke/Han Solo slash.

I finally actually watched The Pluto Files, and it was just as enjoyable as I was hoping. Neil deGrasse Tyson is just so engaging, and he makes science so interesting. Who doesn't make science interesting were the people who did Being Human. Which was a three part series about the evolution of man, but was pretty darn boring. Life, on the other hand, had annoying narration from Oprah Winfrey, but the footage in HD is worth it. I didn't enjoy it as much as Planet Earth, but it's hard to argue against HD nature footage.

In network TV news, Justified, the new FX series with Timothy Olyphant based on Elmore Leonard stories, is pretty enjoyable. Pacific isn't as good as Band of Brothers, but it's still fairly enjoyable. The Ricky Gervais Show, although based on podcasts, is funny, and Karl Pilkington is a magnificent moron. Community continues to be the best thing on free network TV. Treme, if you aren't watching, is a proud successor to The Wire. This is also about a city and people that is being failed by the institutions that are supposed to have protected it. There are so many things about this show that just make me giddy when I watch it.

House of Cards, To Play the King, & The Final Cut

House of Cards, To Play the King, and The Final Cut are parts 1-3 of a British miniseries about the rise and fall of the Chief Whip of the Tories, who becomes Prime Minister and then has to keep power. They're based on a series of novels that diverge from historical record after Margaret Thatcher steps down. The first one is about how he gets power, and is, by far, the strongest. At the end of the first book/movie, the source and series diverge, as in the book, Urquhart dies, while in the movie, Mattie dies. This means that the series allows for sequels, although the author himself wrote sequels to the movie rather than the book (not unlike Jurassic Park). Ian Richardson is great as the slimy Machiavellian minister, and he makes the second two worth watching, even as they lose much of what made the first so great. To Play the King has Michael Kitchner as a Prince Charles stand-in who has become king after the death of Queen Elizabeth II, and helps make the drop-off much less than in The Final Cut. Which adds a bit of backstory and kind of comes out of nowhere, not fully clicking. The entire series is a great behind the scenes look at how a Parliamentary system might work, although in a very cynical way. You might well think that I enjoyed it immensely, but I couldn't possibly comment.

Neil deGrasse Tyson, Sarah Vowell books, video games, & Dandelion Fall

Neil deGrasse Tyson came to DC to speak on March 11.  I only started following him on twitter a few days earlier, so when he said that he was going to be at the Lisner Auditorium to speak, I was very excited, as was Ms. Albright.  So we trekked down there (mmm, under $3 for a hotdog, chips, and a pink lemonade for easy gulping) and sat through an extremely enjoyable a little over two hours of him blowing our collective minds (although slightly less if you'd been reading his twitter feed for a while, accessible at neiltyson).  He is, without a doubt, my biggest mancrush of all time.  He's so smart, funny, and just plain informative that it's a shame that he's not more famous.  But he is famous enough to get hate mail.  Awesome hate mail.  If you aren't watching NOVAScienceNOW, you are missing out on probably the most informative TV program ever.  I am completely biased, but man, he is as enjoyable in person as he is on TV.  If you want to have an intelligent day, just do a search for Neil on youtube and get some great clips, including the best tale of what happens when you get close to a black hole.

Dandelion Fall is a film by a woman I went on a date with in college.  Yep, I extremely briefly dated a woman who has made a film about a lesbian busker who's basically a kept woman for a fancy lady in New York.  With lots of artfully shot nudity!  Her most recent film, however, has won multiple awards.  This was actually much, much better than the other half a film I sat through on She Likes Girls 3.  Which is not a porn DVD, just a collection of lesbian short films.  I made it through about five minutes of the first movie which was a terrible lesbian vampire crapfest.  Maybe I'm holding it to too high a standard, what with my knowledge of lesbian vampires, but the acting was subpar.  I then realized that I don't usually like film school shorts and that the reviews for the disc as a whole were horrendous and that I only got it because I was friends with a director.  So I can safely say "Don't rent this disc for anything other than seeing Lauren Wolkstein's work.  Which is good."

I also listened (yes, listened, audiobooks are great) to The Partly Cloudy Patriot, Assassination Vacation, and The Wordy Shipmates, all by Sarah Vowell.  They're all entertaining and interesting, although Assassination is, by far, the best of the three.  The Party Cloudy Patriot just brings up horrible memories of the 2000 election, and The Wordy Shipmates is all about 17th century American History, which I don't find as interesting as the strange links between Lincoln, Garfield, and McKinley's assassinations.  I recommend them all, with the caveats as listed.  And if you listened to the audiobooks of them, you get to hear famous people be other famous people.  My favorite is Conan O'Brien as Robert Todd Lincoln.

One reason for the lack of updates and actual content for the updates is that I beat Fallout 3 last month (woo! First platinum trophy!), a fun look at a post-nuclear DC, made more fun by the geographical inaccuracies, and started to play Final Fantasy XIII this month.  I've put around 20ish hours or so in so far, with a little bit of back-tracking when I screwed something up, and it's a very pretty game.  Not the best story or characters or anything, but Sazh is a lot less questionable from a racial standpoint than Barret "Mr. T" Wallace.  Gameplay is moving towards Progress Quest levels of interactiveness (I'm a Puma Burglar Panda Man!), but the Paradigm Shifting is not only a proactive approach to success in conflicts, it's surprisingly deep.  I still haven't made it to the opening up of the world yet, so it's still linear at this point.  But that isn't really that bad of a complaint.  Fallout 3 was possibly a little too open-world.  If it weren't for getting trophies, I would've been very confused about what to do.

Jet Li's Fearless, Women of the Night, Street of Shame, & The Panic in Needle Park

Jet Li's Fearless has a couple good fight scenes, but overall, it's a terribly nationalistic film. Which is to be expected from an accepted Chinese government funded film.

Women of the Night and Street of Shame are the last two films in Kenzo Mizoguchi's fallen women series of DVDs from Eclipse. It's interesting looking at these two films after the other ones, the slight difference in approach to prostitution both before and after the war. Not to mention the fact that Street of Shame is widely cited for having caused if not significantly influenced the criminalization of prostitution in Japan. I don't entirely see how this film, amidst what has to be many stories of the problems with prostitution, could have done that. It's more about the problems that occur due to the changing post-war society. I do not object to prostitution (depending on the reasons for entering into it, see below), although the completely unequal approach to gender in post-war Japan is far more disturbing to me. The films themselves are blatant, telling what could be shown. None of his films are as good as Kurosawa or Ozu, and they're a little frustrating.

The Panic in Needle Park is Al Pacino as a heroin addict. And the thing about the film is that it's clearly set up to make it seem like Pacino's character is in the worst shape of anyone in the film. But all I could think about was my 6th grade social studies teacher who had me read The Jungle for extra credit and then give an oral report. During it, she asked who I thought had it worst in the book, and I picked the main character, but she pointed out that his cousin went through some similar degradations and then went farther down, due to going into prostitution. It was one of the first times I can remember having my male privilege questioned, and one of the many things that have made me a proud feminist. And this movie is set up the same way. I felt bad for Pacino, but Kitty Winn's Helen goes through much worse, including prostitution and being beaten by her abusive boyfriend. Seriously, Helen's time is much worse than Bobby's. Also, Pacino's decline as an actor is obvious even from this early film. He's clearly going to overact in the future.

Return to the Scene of the Crime, Stilwell and the American Experience in China, 1911-45, Our Noise: The Story of Merge Records, & Snow Crash

Return to the Scene of the Crime is the DVD version of the filmed version of the This American Life radio show done last year. As I didn't see either time it was shown in theaters, but I did listen to it when broadcast in abbreviated form, I appreciated the chance to see it. And see Joss Whedon performing in public. As a big fan of This American Life, I enjoyed it. Even if knowing how most of it ended already slightly detracted from my watching it, watching the commentary and hearing Ira and the rest of them nitpicking was pretty interesting. Plus, supporting the show is always good.

Stilwell and the American Experience in China, 1911-45 is a Barbara Tuchman book. And it won a Pulitzer prize. As such, it's a great book. Well worth reading if you have any interest at all in Chinese history. And if you wanted to know why the hell the Nationalists were so corrupt, this is a pretty good way to find it out. Clearly, Chiang Kai-shek deserved to lose China, but the most frustrating aspect of it (and, of course, we had the exact same problem in Vietnam) is that our desire to prop up anti-Communist but horrible despots led to much suffering. For some reason, we haven't learned our lesson. The enemy of my enemy may be our friend, but if we just give blind allegiance and support to everyone, we tend to screw up things. Should we look at our support for Iraq and Afghanistan and dictatorships throughout Latin America, we see this trend continues to cause problems.

Our Noise: The Story of Merge Records is great if you have any interest in learning about indie rock in the 1990s. Just like Our Band Could Be Your Life is the definitive look at indie rock in the 1980s, it's hard to imagine anyone covering just what it's like to be in an indie rock band and run an indie rock label over the last 20 years and doing it as well as this book did. Having all of the interviews with the people themselves makes it great. Ryan Adams is still a dick though. I learned a lot, even with my longtime Merge Records fandom (and enormous Merge Records music collection, owning somewhere around half the entire Merge discography), so definitely pick it up if you want to learn. Check out the website, full of fun Web 2.0ness.

Snow Crash, speaking of the web, is a great book, cyberpunky, and mixing my love of computers with mythology. If there were another author more designed for more of my interests, please point them out. A love of Japanese culture, post-apocalyptic America, the mafia, crazy Christians, and, of course, dentata just added to my enjoyment. I absolutely loved the book. Definitely one of my favorite books I've read. I'm not sure if I like it more than Cryptonomicon, but I think I like the approach of religious history more interesting than the history of cryptology. Either way, I need to read more of his work.

American Swing, 1984, & Slap Shot

American Swing is 81 minutes of messed up. Far be it from me to start going all moral all over people, but having sex with lots of people without protection, on dingy mattresses, in swimming pools, and the like is just disgusting. And the guy at the center of this, Larry Levenson, is a creep and tax evader. With possible mob ties. I was surprised by just how much they showed in the movie, that unrated movie is NC-17, so be forewarned. You will see wangs and hoohas, from not particularly attractive people. The movie didn't take a side as to whether Plato's Retreat was evil or not, and Jon Hart and Matthew Kaufman got some great interviews. Sure, it's a deeply messed up story, but I look forward to seeing what they come up with next. Also, Ed Koch is very, very gay.

1984 is a movie I've been meaning to watch for years. Ever since I first found out that Susan Hamilton was naked in it. This was after I had read the book, and had little interest in actually watching it for class, and so the nudity was not nearly as high on my list of reasons to see it now as it was back in high school. I do want to say two more things about the nudity before getting to the film. One: there's a scene where Winston and Julia are standing at the window, and someone comes in the door, but Winston only turns the top of his body, so you don't see penis. This is both wrong and uncomfortable-looking. Two: Suzanna Hamilton has more hair in her armpits than John Hurt has on his entire body. Anyway, the film is pretty good, conveying the book's message well. That's pretty much all.

Slap Shot is a gloriously profane look at minor league hockey in the 70s. Really, it's a typically 70s sports movie, that many films have tried and failed to be (I'm looking at you Major League). The team is made up mostly of actual minor league hockey players, most of whom are based on the actors themselves, which lends an air of realism that make it work. Of course the stripping during the game wasn't real, but most of it actually happened. I can definitely see why this film has such a huge cult following. I've watched more hockey in the last week of the Olympics than I have in many, many years.

Arabesque, Emma, Coraline, & The Invention of Lying

Arabesque is Stanley Donen trying to redo Charade, but with Gregory Peck and Sophia Loren replacing Cary Grant and Audrey Hepburn. Of course, it is nowhere near as great. Also bad: the brownface. They couldn't find one single Arab to play an Arab in the film? Beyond that, Gregory Peck running was hilarious, but I don't think it was supposed to be as funny as it was. And the plot was basically nonsensical. Not a bad film by any means, but not particularly recommended either.

Emma is... well, it's the third version I've seen, and although others had lots to recommend them, this may be the best version. Romola Garai gets the right mix of innocence and attempting to do the right thing even when she is actually doing the wrong thing. This has Edmund Bertram vs Edmund Bertram for Emma's love. Which is kinda funny, because all of these Jane Austen adaptations share outfits (thanks BBC cost-cutting measures), it's only right that they'd also share heroes. And Edmund (the Jonny Lee Miller version, not the Blake "Emo-lton" Ritson one) wins. Michael Gambon needs to keep playing old guys who aren't completely all there. I think this is the new version of Emma to watch. Congrats BBC for showing everyone else how to do it.

Coraline is really good. It's a shame that so many good animated films came out this year. But it's also nice that so many good animated films came out this year. Henry Selick is quite talented, and I hope that the success of Coraline allows him to make many more films. I also wish that Other Father Song had been nominated for an Oscar rather than two from the Princess & the Frog. Randy Newman is vastly over-nominated as a songwriter.

The Invention of Lying is a kinda worthless film. Robb Lowe plays smarmy pretty well, and there are some interesting ideas about how ridiculous religion is, but still, its a waste of talent. Could possibly have been funny, but it never quite gelled. I watched it on a plane though, so there were some interesting edits. Basically, my high school friend wrote a review for it in the Village Voice that really covers my feelings on the film.

Big Trouble, Butte, America: The Saga of a Hard Rock Mining Town, and video games

Big Trouble by J. Anthony Lukas is about the murder of Frank Steunenberg, probably by members of the Western Federation of Miners in Caldwell, Idaho in 1905. Throughout the awesome book, he weaves in Ethyl Barrymore, Walter Johnson, Clarence Darrow, Theodore Roosevelt, William Howard Taft, William Borah, and many more well-known people of the time, all of whom had some connection to the trial. Really, it's an amazingly well-researched book, and it's a shame that Lukas committed suicide before the book was published. I am a huge fan of sprawling historical epics, about society at the time as much as the "plot". This one has sections on theatre agents, detective agencies, baseball, lawyering, labor strife, forestry, the Spanish American War, racial strife, journalism, and... well... it really just covers so much. It may be a huge book, and it took me a few months to read it (with breaks for comics), but it's really good. I saw that PBS's Independent Lens was going to air a documentary about Butte, Montana and the mining industry there. Butte, America was only an hour long, and it focused much more on more recent labor troubles rather than the labor troubles that lead to Steunenberg's assassination, so I wasn't as into it as I thought. I wanted it to be much better than I got. Not to say it wasn't good, but I felt like it didn't go very deep at all. Ugh. Terrible pun.

Well, in the last three months, I've purchased five video games for the PS3 (The Beatles: Rock Band, Katamari Forever, Fallout 3, Ratchet & Clank Future: A Crack in Time, and Lego Rock Band) and one for the PC (Torchlight). Apparently, I do have too much money. I am singlehandedly keeping the video game industry alive. Well, at least I haven't purchased Dragon Age: Origins or Assassin's Creed II or any other games I've been tempted by, because my games are certainly taking up more than enough of my time as it is. Because that's why it was so long between posts. I am enjoying all of the games, and regret none of the purchases. Well, except for their effect on my ability to do anything else.

Caseus Archivelox: Insomnia & Last Orders

2002-10-31 - 11:23 p.m.
I just realized that I had forgotten to mention what I did Sunday night to require the taping of Alias. I watched the remake of Insomnia. Now, it's too easy to say that the remake is weaker than the original, but it really was. The acting wasn't noticeably better, and the script left a lot less to the imagination. One of the strong points of the original film was that it was difficult to tell why and whether Dormer (or whatever his name was in the original) killed his partner. And the fact that it all occurs during the bright daytime makes the dark aspects work better. The remake explains too much and the lack of darkness isn't as important. Chris Nolan is an obviously talented director (see Memento), but, in this case, he is working from a lackluster script and he gets bogged down trying to do too much with his cast. And Pacino was coasting. He plays the tired cop too well. That's not to say it wasn't a good movie, but it definitely doesn't compare favorably with the original Norwegian film.

What reminded me of that was that we watched Last Orders tonight. That and Gosford Park basically had every single famous English actor currently working. This one had Michael Caine, Tom Courtenay, Bob Hoskins, David Hemmings, Ray Winstone, and Helen Mirren (also in Gosford Park, and Caligula, which I haven't seen, because I haven't found it in a video store in the uncut version). It was weird to see David Hemmings as a large man with huge eyebrows, one week after seeing him as the young, dashing Thomas in Blow-Up. I'd say it was weird to see Tom Courtenay again, but I'd only seen two movies he was in: Doctor Zhivago (which was so long I can't remember his character) and Leonard Part 6, of which I thankfully can't remember any. Bob Hoskins, Michael Caine, and Ray Winstone all made movies more recently, and the only major problem I had with Helen Mirren was that she didn't look 70 (the age of her character). That's obviously a backhanded compliment, because she looked her age, which was 55 or 56 when it was made. She was good, just I think it was weird that she had a 50 year old daughter in the film, because it didn't seem physically possible. The movie was excellent, and it makes me want to read Graham Swift's novel. I loved Waterland very much when I read it in 12th grade, and it made me want to go see the fens of England. Here's a hint: think of the flattest land you've ever seen, and then picture it ten times flatter, and you'd get some idea of the fens. There was also a terrible traffic jam when my mom and bro and I were there. We did stop off and see Ely (pronounced EE-lee) Cathedral, which stuck out like a sore thumb. Cambridge is also near there, but there was literally no hills, no nothing for miles around. I have a picture of myself on the side of the road, and I gave it to my English teacher to show her what the fens were like, and she put it up on the wall in the classroom. I doubt it's still up there, but that area was totally flat. Back to the movie: the skipping back and forth in time would be Tarantinoesque if it hadn't been done before, or if it weren't how Swift writes. Another little problem with the film was that they were speaking in heavy working class accents, which made it hard to understand, so we turned on the subtitles. Score another point for DVDs.

The stuff about Last Orders was already posted here, but I figured I'd just repost everything.

Caseus Archivelox: Pride and Prejudice

2002-09-29 - 10:51 p.m.
I watched Pride and Prejudice (Editor's note: 1940 version) this afternoon, and was surprised with how much I liked it, especially considering how much I generally despise movies that try to condense books into two hour long movies. However, this was great, although not as good as the 90s miniseries with Jennifer Ehle and Colin Firth (quite simply one of my favorite actors currently working), it was very good, not the least because of the acting of one of the greatest actors of all time, Laurence Olivier. Weird bit of trivia about the movie: screenplay partially by Aldous Huxley. And one line in the movie references the battle of Waterloo, which didn't take place until two years after the book was written. That is, not one, but two weird.

The Last Hayride & random TV notes

The Last Hayride is a book about Edwin Edwards's 1983 campaign for governor in Louisiana. He had first been elected in 1971, re-elected in 75, and since he couldn't run in 79, he basically set everything up for his successor, a technocrat Republican named Dave Treen, to fail so he could win. Edwards was a liar, a womanizer (he is the origin of "The only way I can lose this election is if I'm caught in bed with either a dead girl or a live boy."), and it's not entirely clear that he was all that good of a governor. However, he made for a fascinating book. John Maginnis does a fairly good job being in the right place at the right time, although towards the end of the campaign, he starts to complain about being there. But his history of Louisiana and the politics explain a good deal that I didn't really know about why they have the strange electoral structure they do (Edwards put it in place to try to kill off the Republican Party there, but, in effect, revitalized it). Quite an interesting book.

The Middleman DVD is great. Epitaph One, the unaired Dollhouse episode, really makes me wonder where the hell the show is going. Seriously, that is a terrifying future. Torchwood: Children of Earth also kinda leaves me wondering where the hell the show is going to go after that. The Doctor Who specials (the Christmas one and the Easter one) were really good. Hung is kind of a mess, but I haven't yet gotten too pissed at it (and it's one of those shows that kinda can't show the penis and I can't complain about the inequality of the nudity since the penis is all things to all women). True Blood is either more enjoyable this season, or my expectations are so low, that I've been enjoying it. Hard Knocks: The Cincinnati Bengals is pretty good, although I hate Mike Brown even more after watching it, and I like Chad Ochocinco more. Shaq Vs. really is about 25 minutes of filler, 20 minutes of commercials, and 15 minutes of Shaq being extremely personable. Should be enjoyable for the next few episodes. Nova Science Now is the most enjoyable and fascinating science show ever made. Neil deGrasse Tyson really needs to be on TV more often.

Mansfield Park, The Barchester Chronicles, & The Power of Nightmares: The Rise of the Politics of Fear

Mansfield Park is the 1983 BBC miniseries version. As such, it luxuriates in the time period, and in an extended running time. And it has a bunch of actors who are extremely recognizable if you've seen enough British miniseries made around the same time. I didn't really like Sylvestra Le Touzel's performance of Fanny Price, and as a whole, I am not really that big a fan of Mansfield Park, but it is the most accurate version of it (plus it doesn't have frickin' Billie Piper in it or basically messing with everything in it like the 1999 version, which I really liked anyway). So, um, see it if you really want to see the most faithful version of Mansfield Park?

The Barchester Chronicles has an amazingly good cast: Donald Pleasence, Nigel Hawthorne, Alan Rickman, Phyllida Law, Geraldine McEwan, and Clive Swift, among many others, all give great performances. Alan Rickman, in particular, is perfect as the extremely slimy Rev. Obadiah Slope. Anything where he gets to be remotely slimy is extremely worth watching, and this has him at his slimiest. Really, he is pitch perfect. I've never read Anthony Trollope, but I don't feel like I ever will now. Even with the long running time, and far too easy of an ending, it's definitely worth it, especially if you don't mind the BBC video filming, which, along with the aforementioned Mansfield Park, suffers greatly from blurring whenever there's a camera move outside.

The Power of Nightmares: The Rise of the Politics of Fear is a 2004 documentary that's all about how the neocons and al Qaeda basically use the same tactics to get what they want. This, unfortunately for its arguments, makes the claim that al Qaeda was a made up organization that was created in 2001 by the US Government to prosecute terrorists under organized crime laws. This is insane. And pisses me off. Otherwise, it's an ok version of events important to current international relations, but it's also three hours long, and spaced over three DVDs. What the hell? It could have very easily fit on one DVD. Why on three? I don't know. Basically, it was frustrating because it could have been so much better.

The Campaign of the Century & The Blind Side

The Campaign of the Century is all about the 1934 California Governor's election, which is both a turning point for political campaigns (in that this was the first campaign run by full-time political consultants rather than the candidate and this was the first campaign to make large use of televisual advertising (in this case, short trailers before movies)) and for California. Before then, Hollywood wasn't all that involved in political campaigns, but after this campaign where liberal and progressive Hollywood stars were moved to actually be more vocal in the political views, and was the last big hurrah of the political views of the studios being dominated by the studio heads. They were actually garnishing wages and blacklisting people for not supporting Merriam against Sinclair. As enjoyable as the dirty tricks stuff was, I really loved the sections about what was going on during the same time, like the capture of Bruno Hauptmann, killing of Pretty Boy Floyd, William Randolph Hearst visiting Hitler, and many, many more. Really just a fascinating book.

The Blind Side is a fascinating look at the importance of the left tackle in professional (and increasingly college) football. And an interesting inside view of the recruiting and creation of one of the best left tackle prospects in the last decade, Michael Oher. I really enjoyed the book, as Michael Lewis is a great author, who knows just what to include and to exclude, never writing too much when he's putting his stories together. The NCAA regulator interviews were what really made me find this fascinating, though. To me, it seemed like a clear case of where the NCAA should have declared him ineligible to go to Ole Miss based on the rules, but it's also one of those cases that is so ridiculous that it could have ever possibly been a violation that it just pisses me off. Then again, I had just read about what they had done for the kid, and the NCAA didn't have the book. Also, Lawrence Taylor is a beast, I lost a lot of respect for Paul Brown not hiring Bill Walsh when he could have in 1976, and I kinda liked Jonathan Ogden a little more. And I'm terrified about how good of an LT Oher's going to be for the Ravens.

XXY, The King of Kong, Food Party & The Yiddish Policeman's Union

XXY is an Argentinian film about a 15 year old hermaphrodite who is struggling to find out where she fits in society, and society trying to come to grips with him. I think him, as that is what the end of the movie would suggest is Alex's choice. It's a shortish film, but great acting, and about something that a lot of people don't think about very much: hermaphrodites, and whether to allow them to make their own choices about what gender to live as. Few hermaphrodites are given that choice, as it is customary to turn them into women soon after birth. In many cases, however, this leads to a gender identity crisis and later decision to undergo a sex change operation. I would like to think that this sort of issue is well-understood, but it really isn't. And until the day when we can stop having huge articles in major magazines about the sexuality of some pop singer, I doubt that we'll ever have an honest discussion about gender identity.

The King of Kong is the great documentary about the world record for Donkey Kong. Of course, it's horribly biased, but I don't entirely care about its accurateness as history (so I'm actually looking forward to the fictionalized version coming to theaters soon-ish). It tells a extraordinary story with a huge asshole of a villain and an all-American hero. I never actually played Donkey Kong or most other arcade games (I have fond memories of the X-Men arcade game and the Simpsons arcade game, but not much else), so the bit of history was interesting, although I knew about the kill screen before, probably from reading a review when this first came out.

Food Party is a show on IFC. Normally I would ignore a weird cooking/craft/bizarre show. But I actually am friends (it's true, Facebook friends and everything!) with one of the cast members of the show. So I felt I had to watch it. I wasn't able to make it through any of the episodes on the website, due to the screaming and crappy sound, but the show itself was slightly better quality filming, and I actually laughed a few times, recognized my friend easily in his multiple roles. Will watch again.

The Yiddish Policemen's Union is a Michael Chabon novel I'd been meaning to read for a couple of years. And I finally started earlier this year until I was so rudely interrupted by my habit of buying and then reading comics. As a huge fan of The Adventures of Kavalier and Klay and Wonder Boys, and to a lesser extent his other works, I somehow put off reading it myself. I did, however, buy a copy for my dad pretty soon after it came out. I loved the book, and highly recommend it for anyone with an interest in Yiddish, policemen, alternate history, and a great detective story. As the complicated history and plot of the book would be far too complicated for me to get into in any detail without just reading the wiki page, I recommend you just read the wiki page. At least the setting part, as the plot is twisty and kept me guessing.

The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser, Syndromes and a Century, Mr. Arkadin, Get Smart, & The Jane Austen Book Club

The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser is a mid-70s Werner Herzog film. To give you an idea about the film, it is based almost entirely upon the extremely strong performance from Bruno S. And because it's Herzog, Bruno S. is crazy. Here's his biography from the IMDB: "The unwanted son of a prostitute, Bruno S. was beaten so severely by his mother at age 3 that he became temporarily deaf. This led to his placement in a mental institution; he spent the next 23 years in various institutions, often running afoul of the law. Despite this past, he a self-taught painter and musician; while these were his favorite occupations, he was also forced to take jobs in factories such as driving a fork lift. Director Werner Herzog saw him in the documentary Bruno der Schwarze - Es blies ein Jäger wohl in sein Horn (1970) and vowed to work with him, which led to his major roles in Jeder für sich und Gott gegen alle (1974) and Stroszek (1977). He was very difficult to work with, though, sometimes needing several hours of screaming before he could do a scene." It's absolutely insane, and it's based on a true story. A guy is found in Nuremburg in 1828, with a note, and saying that he had been kept in a dungeon for as long as he could remember. And he has problems adjusting to society. Kinda depressing film, and I'm not sure exactly how this fits in with my idea of every one of Herzog's films being about someone being obsessed, but it could work somewhat as an outsider, rather than being obsessed, as Nosferatu is more outsider than obsessed.

Syndromes and a Century is by Apichatpong Weerasethakul, a Thai, whose parents were both doctors, and it's basically a fictionalized version of how they met and fell in love. I'm not sure I could do much better than A.O. Scott's opening paragraph of the review of this, "Ever since his films began to attract admiring attention from the international film festival crowd, the Thai director Apichatpong Weerasethakul has encouraged his tongue-tied Western fans to call him Joe. That friendly, disarming gesture reflects the sensibility behind the movies, which are at once stubbornly difficult — resistant to summary, at times even to understanding — and surprisingly warm and gentle. Unabashed art films that demand patience and close, quizzical attention, they are also generous, unpretentious and funny, posing thorny formal questions in a relaxed, democratic spirit." It's a slightly meandering film, intentionally so, with a final couple of scenes that seem to have little to no relevance to the rest of the film. But if you allow its rhythms to flow over you, it's a very enjoyable time.

Mr. Arkadin is a film that may never be what it should have been. Orson Welles had the film taken away from him in the editing room. The film actually started out as three episodes of The Lives of Harry Lime, a radio show based on his character from The Third Man. Then he started to film it as a multi-European country production, refilming two scenes with Spanish actresses for the Spanish producers. And over the time in the editing room, there were at least five different versions of the film. Two Spanish ones (named for the fake names they've given to Robert Arden) and three versions in English, one for European audiences called Confidential Report, one for American audiences, both of which were butchered from the complicated flashback structure, and a version found by Peter Bogdanovich in the Corinth film vaults. There was also a novelization that was "written" by Orson Welles, but was actually written by Maurice Bessy. So Criterion used all five movie versions, and put together another version in attempting to conform as much as possible to what Welles probably would have done. Unlike with Touch of Evil, where he wrote a 58 page memo detailing the changes he wanted to make, the only way anyone has any idea about what he wanted were some remembered conversations and taking the earliest films as the best indications of Welles's vision. There were some major changes to the structure, including scenes that were put before scenes that clearly said they were after others. The final Criterion Comprehensive version is really the only one that is needed. The film itself is actually pretty good in every scene that doesn't include Guy Van Stratten (played by Robert Arden), and is also good in some scenes with him. When I watched the three versions on the Criterion collection DVD set, I figured he was a terrible actor, mispronouncing words. Now, after thinking about it more, I'm not as sure, thinking that, especially with Welles' tendency to overdub everyone in his films, maybe this was intentional. Maybe he was supposed to be the obnoxious and ignorant American idiot. But man, I was really rooting for him to die.

Get Smart is far too big of a movie for the plot. It's really just too much. The special effects were extremely distracting, and the big action bit at the end was studiously not funny. I like Terrence Stamp, and basically everyone in the cast, but it is never as funny as the original show, just jokes spaced too far apart for any humor to build throughout the film. Sorry film.

The Jane Austen Book Club has a Buffy conference as a punchline (and has a girl identified as only "Girl with a Dog Collar" played by Messy Stench, and that might actually be her name). I'm not sure if I'm supposed to be offended or not. And I'm not sure Grigg is not supposed to make me feel terrible for being a guy who likes Jane Austen, and also is a big fan of science fiction. It's a fairly cheesy romantic comedy, with the Jane Austen hook being the only thing to make it remotely interesting. I didn't regret watching it, but it certainly isn't anything special. Just an inoffensive movie, probably more enjoyable for those who have actually read Austen's books, because otherwise, the parallels will probably be missed. Not that it makes the film much better. Maybe the book is better? Wait, I mean, I'm sure the book is better.

Caseus Archivelox: Seven, Halloween, & This Gun for Hire

2002-04-11
When rewatching Seven in class, I was struck by how long and boring the movie is when you already know what is going to happen. The movie gives the audience no pleasure from rewatching it, and thus, I question how this movie has entered the pantheon as one of the greatest films of the 1990s. Although the directing and acting are spectacular, the writing is frustratingly preachy and there is too much depressing worldview to make me watch the movie over again. Another problem with the film is that there are too few tense scenes in the film. Because of the preachy-ness of the script, it became very clear very early on that John Doe would eventually win, and the only tension would occur would be which sin would be next. There are also no scares at all in the movie, and all (any?) of the suspense is released in the last scene, giving the audience no feeling after leaving the film besides being disturbed by some of the imagery, but no feelings that any of this could happen to them. Unless the audience is deeply religious, they would not be disturbed by the seeming threat of eternal damnation for their sins, and thus would have nothing to fear from the film as they would already by scared by reading the bible and some of the (in my opinion) more disturbing religious imagery only referenced in the movie. More disturbing to me than the movie is reading Dante’s Inferno while looking at Hieronymous Bosch artwork. Seven just borrows some disturbing imagery and adds a dark layer of grime to create an ultimately boring parable to catholic values.

Halloween on the other hand, has an incredible opening tracking shot, adequate to good acting (for a slasher film), and a genuinely tense atmosphere throughout, created partially by the great score, but also by the almost constant subjective camera angles that put the viewer into the film completely. Carpenter uses the urban legend of the boogeyman to great effect here, with Laurie and Tommy constantly discussing whether either of them saw a shape or whether it exists. After Laurie stabs Michael with the knitting needles, she says that she killed him, but Tommy correctly states that you can’t kill the boogeyman, and after Dr. Loomis shot him six times, he confirms that it was the boogeyman, also in a way confirming that he will rise again, along with the closing shots of where his body was when it fell out of the second story window, and the shots of where Michael had been previously.

The creation of the slasher genre can be shown in Psycho, Night of the Living Dead, and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, but few of those films caused the huge number of copycat films that Halloween did. The Fog, Prom Night, Terror Train, and Halloween 2 all followed within the next few years, and those are just the ones with Jamie Lee Curtis. The problem is that few (if any) of the films were created with the style that Halloween was. The later slasher series (Friday the 13th and Nightmare on Elm Street) borrowed heavily from Halloween’s sense of moral retribution for sex, the indestructibility of the killer, while adding the twist that the audience begins to root for the killer to win and remove the stupid teens from the earth. The Texas Chainsaw Massacre was the film to start that, as Franklin is one of the most annoying characters in slasher history until that fat kid with the afro in Friday the 13th Part 3-D who gives the audience headaches until he is so kind as to give Jason the now trademark hockey mask. Thanks, I think.

2002-04-12 - 12:31 a.m.
I went to horror, which was boring, because we just watched Se7en. I don't remember it being as boring before, nor as preachy. Well directed, stylish, well acted. Wayyyyyy too preachy. Andrew Kevin Walker is not that good of a writer. 8mm anyone? Sleepy Hollow anyone?

Then I struggled through a meal at the Dillo before going to see This Gun for Hire. It was based upon a Graham Greene novel. For those who aren't familiar with him, he's an incredibly good writer of lots of things including spy novels and similar things, but also is just a great writer. If you don't like reading, watch The End of the Affair or The Third Man. The only problem with This Gun For Hire (and since I haven't read the book, I'm not sure whether it is Hollywood or Greene) was that I was able to figure out the ending from the first scene. Stupid Hays Code making it so obvious when a character kills someone, they have to be punished. Then again, the fact that it would have caused some weird sexual tension for him to have survived could have also lead to that.

Caseus Archivelox: Carrie

2002-03-21
The more times I watch this movie the more upset I become. The book is a good if not great novel about a teenage girl’s struggle to come to terms with her newfound powers of attractiveness to the opposite sex, while the movie is trash that emphasizes that Carrie receives her power through emotional distress rather than through womanhood. And he just had to make the shower scene in slow motion with lots of very young women fully nude, did he not?

Brian De Palma's Carrie is a shy girl who barely changes and is then destroyed by her own power. She is a girl who attempted to control her emotions, and by De Palma's extension, her telekinetic power. After the shower scene, and her suggested masturbation, a release of her sexual tension, the onset of her period caused her to lose control of her emotions, and show her power. Carrie began to experience the spiraling emotions that occur in the stress of puberty and prom. When the bucket of blood fell, so soon after the dizzying high of dancing with Tommy, she lost control again. Her emotions and telekinetic power finally destroyed her, as she became suicidal after being so embarrassed at prom and after the huge emotional stress of crucifying her mother.

The two Carries have different uses for their telekinesis. King uses telekinesis as a metaphor for the growth of Carrie into a woman, while De Palma uses it as an outlet for a frustrated teenager. De Palma needed to have a universal teenager with whom men can lust after, and all women and men who were harassed in high school can identify. Part of that is that the audience that the movie was trying to attract was teenage boys, as they are a large portion of the movie going population that Carrie would attract (Clover 4-5). Stephen King's shower scene was not erotic at all, yet the eroticism is overpowering in the slow-motion scene in De Palma's movie. Because of De Palma's constraint of having to make a profit on the movie, he was forced to make characters that are different from the original intent of King's version. He has conventionalized the conflicts and Carrie's rage so that more people can directly identify with Carrie. King could stretch more for his characters, making them deeper, and delve into the supernatural, as he was not gambling with other people's careers: he was simply writing a novel.

I believe that with a couple years of distance from when I wrote the previous two paragraphs (from a paper on the differences between the book and the movie, and it is an seven page paper, and not particularly good), I am less willing to accept De Palma’s version as strictly an attempt to make the movie make more money by adding nudity, but it is his fetishistic desire to see young women naked (including his future wife) that caused him to add the completely gratuitous nude scenes.

Nicholas Nickleby, Black Book, The Promise, Running on Karma, A Matter of Loaf and Death, The Wind That Shakes the Barley, & Away from Her

Nicholas Nickleby was actually pretty good. Charlie Hunnam, of the late and lamented by me Undeclared, stars as the titular character, and Jim Broadbent, Christopher Plummer, Jamie Bell, Romola Garai, Tom Courtenay, Anne Hathaway, Juliet Stevenson, Nathan Lane (with Dame Edna as his wife), Alan Cumming, Timothy Spall, Edward Fox, and Kevin McKidd provide able backup. Written and directed by Douglas McGrath, who is also responsible for Emma and Infamous, the less good version of both Emma and the Truman Capote story, he actually manages to make a fine film here, worth watching if you enjoy either social commentary or Dickens (probably both if you enjoy one, really). It's fairly funny, captures the spirit of the Dickens novel without attempting to fit everything into it, and just a very fine way to spend over two hours.

Black Book is a Paul Verhoeven film, so it's full of sex and violence. I enjoyed it thoroughly. It goes to show that Carice van Houten actually can act (and Hollywood had no idea what to do with her, probably because she bleached her pubes on screen here), and the others who are ok in Valkyrie are quite good here. Verhoeven gets slammed unfairly for making Showgirls and Hollow Man (neither of which are good movies per se), but he is also responsible for Robocop, Total Recall, Starship Troopers, and The Fourth Man, all great to amazing films. He is someone who makes watchable films, as long as he isn't censored horribly. I need to make an effort to see some more of his earlier Dutch films. Spetters was kind of hard for me to watch, as I was never able to find a particularly good quality subtitled (or dubbed) version when I looked a few years ago. It's out on DVD here, though, so I'm going to put it in my Netflix queue, along with Soldier of Orange.

The Promise was crap. Sorry, Chen Kaige, but terrible CGI and Cecilia Cheung are not enough to make me sit through crap. The script was a mess, and I didn't even realize that the DVD had a skip in it that made me rewatch four minutes until it skipped for the second time. Avoid like the plague this movie is on Chen Kaige's career.

Running on Karma has Andy Lau in a very fake muscle suit, and starts the movie as a male stripper, who used to be a monk and can see the future and past of people and can talk to animals. He befriends the cop (Cecilia Cheung) who was involved in a sting over his fully nude strip show and helps her solve crimes, including one of a dude who can contort himself in very small places. It is utterly ridiculous. It's co-directed by Johnny To, who's very talented, so it actually is a strange thriller, but with some very, very silly things in it to accept. And then it takes a very, very weird turn in the third act. Karma is a very important part of the film. This ending would never fly in a non-Buddhist country.

A Matter of Loaf and Death is the new Wallace and Gromit short. I am a huge fan of Aardman Animation, and while this isn't as strong as The Wrong Trousers, A Close Shave, or The Curse of the Were-Rabbit, it's up there with Chicken Run and A Grand Day Out. I think I missed cheese. But the animation is as strong as ever, it just didn't quite do it for me as much as their best, although it was full of funny references and terrible dog puns. Still definitely worth watching whenever it actually airs in the US.

The Wind That Shakes the Barley is a Ken Loach film about the origins of Ireland, and the fighting between those who founded the IRA and those who took the Irish Free State way out. As such, it actually is a companion piece with Neil Jordan's Michael Collins, which I saw back in 1996 at a pre-release screening in Cincinnati for an Irish group my grandfather was a member of. Anyway, the film was frustrating, because neither the ubernationalists or the more conciliatory Free-staters were really wrong, so seeing the ending just made me pissed all over again at Eamon De Valera. Damn you. Of course, the parallels between the IRA and terrorist organizations and guerrillas of today is used by Loach very effectively to point out that the British never had a chance in Ireland, and the only surprising thing is that it took so long for them to give up. It's a very good looking film, and for those interested in Irish history, definitely worth it.

Away from Her was directed by Sarah Polley, from an Alice Munro story, and is about a couple, deeply in love, and the wife gets Alzheimer's. Depressing as hell, but beautifully shot, and great acting all around. If you can handle two hours of sadness, I can't think of a better film about Alzheimer's out there. Infinitely better than The Notebook (which I tried to watch once, but man, it was just ugh).

Encounters at the End of the World, You're Gonna Miss Me, Everything's Gone Green, Starter for 10, Dynamite Warrior, Bad Guy, & Cryptonomicon

Encounters at the End of the World is a Werner Herzog documentary (which I saw some time ago, but forgot to review) about how crazy everyone who spends time on Antarctica is. So it's basically a typical Herzog documentary: fascinating. I think that this one may have ventured a little far into sneering contempt for his subjects, as a number of times, he just starts to talk over them. A little disrespectful, especially when he says that they tend to ramble on. Of course, those bits of Herzog being an ass is to be completely expected. It's the parts where he just allows the awesomeness of Antarctica to show, like following the penguins or the below ice scuba diving. Those more than make up for that, and this is a great piece of filmmaking, certainly worthy of consideration as one of the best documentaries this year.

You're Gonna Miss Me is about Roky Erickson, lead singer of the 13th Floor Elevators, the creators of Psychadelic Rock, and, as far as I know, the only band with an electric jug. He was also a huge drug user, and, as an example against those damn hippies, was arrested for possessing a tiny bit of marijuana. His lawyer had him plead insanity, and then he went into a horrible maximum security hospital where everyone else there was a murderer or a rapist, and stayed there for a few years. After finally being declared "sane", he still made some good music through the 70s and early 80s, until his mental problems (that were present well before he became famous) started to make him utterly insane. Clearly a case for serious medical help, his mother (who is crazy and was also traumatized by Roky's drug use and doesn't trust drugs, doctors, or her husband (who may have sexually abused Roky and his four brothers...)) refuses to get him the help he clearly needs. Finally, Roky's youngest brother fights for custody of Roky, and cleans him up and within a year, he's a somewhat functioning member of society. There are some bonus features on the disc that further flesh out the post-movie story: Roky played Austin City Limits in 2005 (and was introduced by that asshole Kinky Friedman), and in 2007 was declared sane enough to be released from custodial care. Of course, his youngest brother has gone slightly crazy, and now denies that there's anything mentally wrong with someone who's declared "schizophrenic" and that drugs don't help. He and his friend, a crazy "doctor" John Breeding, have a bit where they rant about how psychiatry is bull and that mental illness doesn't exist. It was a little hard to follow their "logic", as they were utterly insane. The film, beyond the interest of the story, was full of some pretty good music, although I just wanted the filmmakers to force Roky to clip his nails. Some of them were creepy long. Anyway, I'm very happy that Roky's healthy again, even with all the barriers he had to have others break through.

Everything's Gone Green is a Douglas Coupland script, who is someone I've heard much about, but never actually read any of his writing. This is a slightly smug look at a group of Vancouverites who are all trying to find their place in society, one works as a photographer and writer for the BC lottery interviewing those who've just won the lottery, his best friend is a pot grower, another works as a golf course designer, and another works as a location scout for films. It's kind of hokey, there's nothing particularly brilliant about it, it's a hugely critical of capitalism, and about the only thing I found noteworthy was it's cultural criticism of filming in Vancouver and trying to pass it off as Phoenix or California or some other place it obviously isn't. I mean, the film isn't bad, and it's watchable, but it's just nothing particularly amazing.

Starter for 10 is set in England in 1985, and is about a guy who goes off to college, knowing a crazy amount of useless trivia and wants nothing more than to join the University Challenge team. And his love triangle between the hot blonde on the team and the Jewish student he met the first day at Bristol University. I identified with Brian (played by James McAvoy with an appropriate mix of awkwardness and comfort), and thought the movie was an enjoyable film, that didn't have much to say about much. Apparently, the novel it was based on is much more about class and the non-big three characters are far more fleshed out, which probably would have helped the film a bit. But the best thing about the film was the soundtrack. A great collection of 80s rock, from many songs from The Cure to Echo & the Bunnymen, New Order, Yaz, The Undertones, The Psychedelic Furs, Tears for Fears, and the Smiths to The Buzzcocks and Motörhead. Just a great soundtrack.

Dynamite Warrior is a Thai film that has the martial arts choreographer from Ong-Bak. That has to be why I added it my Netflix queue, right? It's cheesy and over the top (the hero rides into battle riding rockets and, oh yeah, it's set in the 1850s). And the final battle ends with the hero punching the bad guy, who's on fire and being pulled up a rope, in the stomach, knocking him into a tractor, which then explodes. That gives you some idea of how subtle the film is. Sigh.

Bad Guy is a Kim Ki-Duk film, and it's very depressing. Would she really just accept being turned into a prostitute and then fall in love with the guy who forced her into selling her body? Also, there are streets in South Korea where prostitutes just line up and brow beat men into paying for sex? Doesn't this go against everything I know about this culture? Where an actress was just convicted of adultery (seriously, backwards ass country alert), you're telling me prostitutes can just be really obvious on the streets? I never understood why they can do something so obviously illegal in public and not get caught. Not that I think this should be illegal, but my feelings on prostitution and marijuana are basically: legalize it and tax heavily. Because there's a lot of money to be made, plus, neither of them is particularly dangerous unless you keep them illegal.

Cryptonomicon is a Neal Stephenson novel about codes and codebreaking. It's set in both World War II and the present day (as of the late 90s when it was written). Being a huge math and computer nerd, unfortunately unskilled in complicated math and computers, I found it really up my alley. My huge amounts of knowledge of World War II (seriously, I read so many books way back when) still mean that I have a soft spot for that section, and so both sections were very interesting. Plus, the pot shot taken at Reagan was fun. I very much loved the book, and it almost makes me want to read the Baroque Cycle, but I think I'm going to stick with borrowing Snow Crash. If you have my relatively weird combination of interests, Cryptonomicon will be absolutely perfect, but I can definitely see how some wouldn't enjoy it. For some reason, my dad read the review in the Times and bought it many years ago, and still hasn't gotten around to reading it, but I borrowed and read it.