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Overdue Reviews
Mar. 2nd, 2015 07:36 pmHi,
Sooo...between the snow shoveling and rehearsals it’s been a while since I wrote anything. But I’ve seen and read a bunch of stuff so let’s talk about that!
Movies:
Inherent Vice -- an adaptation of a Thomas Pynchon novel about a hippie detective in the late 60’s who tries to find out what’s happened to the millionaire boyfriend of his ex-girlfriend. It’s a Pynchon novel so there’s a lot of low-level weirdness running around.
I thought the movie was pretty good. It was rather like what would happen if Hunter S. Thompson wrote a crime noir novel. I liked how the movie conveyed a sense of being stoned without resorting to any goofy special effects or being over the top. Confronted with the underlying reality of a Pynchon universe is rattling enough before you toss in regular dope smoking.
The movie has good acting, dialog, cinematography and music. The plot is more than happy to leave threads dangling all over the place, but you should’ve expected that going in.
What We Do In The Shadows: A mock-umentary from New Zealand about four vampires who live together in a run-down apartment in Wellington. It’s yet another Vampire LARP I’d love to play. After 300+ years the guys are rather out-of-touch and not well suited to living together. Then one of the vampires turns a bar-crawling dude bro who introduces them to modern living...although he himself can’t resist telling people he’s a vampire.
It’s a lot of fun. There’s also a side plot involving a group of werewolves. Imagine a sort of redneck AA group only it’s lycanthropy they’re trying to control and you’ll get the idea. It’s all a lot of fun and if none of it is terribly original, it’s put together well and the actors all relish their parts. I’m kind of hoping Vampire movies like this and Only Lovers Left Alive start to edge out zombie flicks.
Song of the Sea: An animated feature by the folks who did The Book of Kells so the artwork is very celtic and very distinctive. On an island lighthouse, a young boy, his father, sister and dog are living out their lives under the cloud of having lost their mom (yeah, it’s a “My Mom Is Dead” kinda picture). Turns out that Mom was a selkie and young Socha is just starting to come into her mystical inheritance.
Ben is mostly annoyed that his younger sister is weird and resentful that she causes his grandmother to come in and sweep the kids back to her stuffy place in the city. So Ben and Socha work to find their way home -- a task that takes on more importance as Socha is identified by the fey as a selkie and because she’s away from her magical coat.
It’s a sweet, charming movie every bit as much fun as its predecessor. The ending is clearly engineered to pull on your heartstrings, but I remained stony faced and impassionate.
Books:
Most of my reading in February was taken up with The Confluence Trilogy by Paul McAuley. Technically I read three books since this omnibus collects Child of the River, Ancient of Days and Shrine of Stars.
The setting is Confluence, a giant, artificial world sitting between the Milky Way and the Eye of the Preservers. The Preservers were the supremely advanced descendants of humanity who reshaped the galaxy into a configuration they prefered, built Confluence and seeded it with uplifted humanoid versions of tens of thousands of animal species from across the galaxy and then built the Eye, an artificial black hole, and plunged down into it never to be heard from again.
So, in the intervening millennia, Confluence has been rocked with various wars and troubles and much of its technology has been lost to the people who live on it. Then a baby boy is found floating down the Great River on a mysterious boat. A local magistrate takes him in and calls him Yama. Yama is from an unknown bloodline and he has a talent for making machines listen to him. Eventually Yama sets off to discover more about himself and his powers.
There’s a lot of interesting ideas and good description, but I was a little underwhelmed by the series as a whole. The pacing was very uneven with one book covering only a couple of weeks and the last book covering years. The last book also seemed rather rushed and the conclusion didn’t really work out for me. It tried to tack on an interesting theme, but just really shoehorned it in.
I probably should’ve dropped this one sooner, but I can be stubborn on these things and the ending could’ve had a better pay-off. Sadly, it didn’t so maybe skip this one.
After seeing the movie, I decided I wanted to read the book, so I whipped through Inherent Vice by Thomas Pynchon. Pretty much everything I said above about the movie applies here and I can now say that the movie was a very good adaptation of the book. I say that because the movie has to make choices about what to keep and what to chuck. The book winds it’s way all over the place and the movie has a schedule to keep. Still, the movie stuck to the themes of the book even when it had to stray from it.
The writing is top-notch. Everything just flows and it reads real smooth and easy. It’s been mentioned that this is sort of Pynchon-lite, a more accessible piece of his writing, but I am reminded that I want to delve a little deeper so I’ll probably be reading a couple more of his novels over the coming year.
later
Tom
Sooo...between the snow shoveling and rehearsals it’s been a while since I wrote anything. But I’ve seen and read a bunch of stuff so let’s talk about that!
Movies:
Inherent Vice -- an adaptation of a Thomas Pynchon novel about a hippie detective in the late 60’s who tries to find out what’s happened to the millionaire boyfriend of his ex-girlfriend. It’s a Pynchon novel so there’s a lot of low-level weirdness running around.
I thought the movie was pretty good. It was rather like what would happen if Hunter S. Thompson wrote a crime noir novel. I liked how the movie conveyed a sense of being stoned without resorting to any goofy special effects or being over the top. Confronted with the underlying reality of a Pynchon universe is rattling enough before you toss in regular dope smoking.
The movie has good acting, dialog, cinematography and music. The plot is more than happy to leave threads dangling all over the place, but you should’ve expected that going in.
What We Do In The Shadows: A mock-umentary from New Zealand about four vampires who live together in a run-down apartment in Wellington. It’s yet another Vampire LARP I’d love to play. After 300+ years the guys are rather out-of-touch and not well suited to living together. Then one of the vampires turns a bar-crawling dude bro who introduces them to modern living...although he himself can’t resist telling people he’s a vampire.
It’s a lot of fun. There’s also a side plot involving a group of werewolves. Imagine a sort of redneck AA group only it’s lycanthropy they’re trying to control and you’ll get the idea. It’s all a lot of fun and if none of it is terribly original, it’s put together well and the actors all relish their parts. I’m kind of hoping Vampire movies like this and Only Lovers Left Alive start to edge out zombie flicks.
Song of the Sea: An animated feature by the folks who did The Book of Kells so the artwork is very celtic and very distinctive. On an island lighthouse, a young boy, his father, sister and dog are living out their lives under the cloud of having lost their mom (yeah, it’s a “My Mom Is Dead” kinda picture). Turns out that Mom was a selkie and young Socha is just starting to come into her mystical inheritance.
Ben is mostly annoyed that his younger sister is weird and resentful that she causes his grandmother to come in and sweep the kids back to her stuffy place in the city. So Ben and Socha work to find their way home -- a task that takes on more importance as Socha is identified by the fey as a selkie and because she’s away from her magical coat.
It’s a sweet, charming movie every bit as much fun as its predecessor. The ending is clearly engineered to pull on your heartstrings, but I remained stony faced and impassionate.
Books:
Most of my reading in February was taken up with The Confluence Trilogy by Paul McAuley. Technically I read three books since this omnibus collects Child of the River, Ancient of Days and Shrine of Stars.
The setting is Confluence, a giant, artificial world sitting between the Milky Way and the Eye of the Preservers. The Preservers were the supremely advanced descendants of humanity who reshaped the galaxy into a configuration they prefered, built Confluence and seeded it with uplifted humanoid versions of tens of thousands of animal species from across the galaxy and then built the Eye, an artificial black hole, and plunged down into it never to be heard from again.
So, in the intervening millennia, Confluence has been rocked with various wars and troubles and much of its technology has been lost to the people who live on it. Then a baby boy is found floating down the Great River on a mysterious boat. A local magistrate takes him in and calls him Yama. Yama is from an unknown bloodline and he has a talent for making machines listen to him. Eventually Yama sets off to discover more about himself and his powers.
There’s a lot of interesting ideas and good description, but I was a little underwhelmed by the series as a whole. The pacing was very uneven with one book covering only a couple of weeks and the last book covering years. The last book also seemed rather rushed and the conclusion didn’t really work out for me. It tried to tack on an interesting theme, but just really shoehorned it in.
I probably should’ve dropped this one sooner, but I can be stubborn on these things and the ending could’ve had a better pay-off. Sadly, it didn’t so maybe skip this one.
After seeing the movie, I decided I wanted to read the book, so I whipped through Inherent Vice by Thomas Pynchon. Pretty much everything I said above about the movie applies here and I can now say that the movie was a very good adaptation of the book. I say that because the movie has to make choices about what to keep and what to chuck. The book winds it’s way all over the place and the movie has a schedule to keep. Still, the movie stuck to the themes of the book even when it had to stray from it.
The writing is top-notch. Everything just flows and it reads real smooth and easy. It’s been mentioned that this is sort of Pynchon-lite, a more accessible piece of his writing, but I am reminded that I want to delve a little deeper so I’ll probably be reading a couple more of his novels over the coming year.
later
Tom
