Belatedly, July, August and September diversions
Films: Since the last update, I've seen a few. Very brief thoughts on Saving Private Ryan, The Black Windmill, Kung Fu Panda, Chinatown, Harry Potter and The Half-Blood Prince, Inglorious Basterds, The Quiller Memorandum, Three Days Of The Condor, and The Happening are over here at 52filmchallenge.
Hancock - This started off a bit darker and a bit more interesting than your typical superhero blockbuster; for a while it looked as if it was going to be a bit more thoughtful than usual. Then after about an hour it ran out of story, took a 90 degree swerve into batshit insano land and got utterly silly.
Babylon AD - Awful futuristic "thriller". Many different kinds of rubbish.
Books: Thicker Than Water and The Naming Of The Beasts, Mike Carey - the fourth and fifth Felix Castor novels. It's no surprise that Carey, author of Hellblazer among others, nails the whole "ghosts, zombies, demons and shit" malarky, but what's impressive (to me, at least) is how well he nails the noir genre. Castor is the perfect PI; perpetually broke, a rigid but flawed moral code, an unerring ability to get himself beaten up, and good intentions that tend to rebound hard on the people around him.
Anathem, Neal Stephenson - finally :-) lamentables and abrinsky very kindly gave me this 900-page behemoth as a gift for Christmas, and abrinsky made me promise to read at least 200 (or was it 300?) pages before deciding I didn't like it. Well, I found out why; it wasn't that I didn't like the book for the first few hundred pages - it's that NOTHING HAPPENS for the first few hundred pages. Now, I'm a crime fiction reader, I'm all about plot or characters or narrative, so this was a bit of a challenge, but it was well-written enough, and anyway, I'd promised. So, for a few hundred pages it's all world-building, with a very-much-like-us-but-not world of maths-obsessed not-religious monks and nuns living in convent-equivalents, bound by arcane and bewildering rules, whilst all the time employing the sort of faux Latin and Greek that makes non-SF readers giggle out loud *ahem*. Eventually, things start happening, and within another hundred pages or so, the story really kicks off, and we're well into a typical quest-genre story. And then things get a bit weird, then there's a hundred-page philosophy lesson, and there may have been a monks-in-space bit, and then it gets all very weird and the ending feels like a bit of an anti-climax after all that. I tracked down coalescent's IROSF review, which covers a few of the problems I had with the book (most notably the hand-waving away of the casual abandonment of the female characters when things get interesting). But I think that ninebelow's Strange Horizons review better sums up my reactions to the book; in particular his final two sentences:For everyone else this monumental book is worth reading just because, like Everest, it is there. Anathem is a unique, impressive but fairly mad novel: one part hubris to one part taking the piss to one part gnarly geek awesomeness.
I liked it :-)
TV: House season five has been excellent, bookended by big emotionally powerful storylines (don't spoil the final episode for me, the recording failed part-way through, and we'll watch it over the weekend). True Blood has proved to be interesting, silly, and damn-near pornographic. With vampires. What's not to love? Speaking of interesting, silly and damn-near pornographic, we finally got around to watching Desperate Romantics recently (sadly no vampires). A six-part series depicting lives and work of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood (in spirit, if not in fact), this benefited from the near perfect casting of the three leads. Even better, it was preceded by The Pre-Raphaelites: Victorian Revolutionaries, a documentary on the same subject.
Theatre: All's Well That Ends Well, saw this at the National Theatre. This had excellent reviews, but I was a little less impressed. There was nothing *wrong*, per se, just... not brilliant. And of course, trying to reconcile what Shakespeare would have considered a happy ending with what a modern audience may well consider to be blatant misogyny is never easy. The production made a nod in that direction, but it was a token gesture.
Waiting For Godot at the Haymarket. I loved it, really loved it. DH... not so much. He certainly preferred the second half, where there was a bit more going on. I'd not seen or read the play before, so I was completely unaware that there were any other characters in the play than the two main protagonists. Stewart and McKellen were excellent in the lead roles, but Simon Callow was rather over-the-top in an irritating and jarring way as Pozzo.
Travel: We had a weekend away on London, to go to the theatre, and fortunately we ended up in a hotel just off Leicester Square, behind the National Gallery, and we therefore able to pop into Trafalgar Square several times to gawp at One and Other, Anthony Gormley's art installation on the fourth plinth.
We also went to Portugal for a week, to Ferragudo, a small village in the Algarve, where we did as little as possible except eat, drink, read and generally laze about in the sun (or in the shade, in my case). The hotel we stayed in was great, air conditioning in the rooms, two swimming pools, a jacuzzi, landscaped gardens, great views - we had a great time.
Hancock - This started off a bit darker and a bit more interesting than your typical superhero blockbuster; for a while it looked as if it was going to be a bit more thoughtful than usual. Then after about an hour it ran out of story, took a 90 degree swerve into batshit insano land and got utterly silly.
Babylon AD - Awful futuristic "thriller". Many different kinds of rubbish.
Books: Thicker Than Water and The Naming Of The Beasts, Mike Carey - the fourth and fifth Felix Castor novels. It's no surprise that Carey, author of Hellblazer among others, nails the whole "ghosts, zombies, demons and shit" malarky, but what's impressive (to me, at least) is how well he nails the noir genre. Castor is the perfect PI; perpetually broke, a rigid but flawed moral code, an unerring ability to get himself beaten up, and good intentions that tend to rebound hard on the people around him.
Anathem, Neal Stephenson - finally :-) lamentables and abrinsky very kindly gave me this 900-page behemoth as a gift for Christmas, and abrinsky made me promise to read at least 200 (or was it 300?) pages before deciding I didn't like it. Well, I found out why; it wasn't that I didn't like the book for the first few hundred pages - it's that NOTHING HAPPENS for the first few hundred pages. Now, I'm a crime fiction reader, I'm all about plot or characters or narrative, so this was a bit of a challenge, but it was well-written enough, and anyway, I'd promised. So, for a few hundred pages it's all world-building, with a very-much-like-us-but-not world of maths-obsessed not-religious monks and nuns living in convent-equivalents, bound by arcane and bewildering rules, whilst all the time employing the sort of faux Latin and Greek that makes non-SF readers giggle out loud *ahem*. Eventually, things start happening, and within another hundred pages or so, the story really kicks off, and we're well into a typical quest-genre story. And then things get a bit weird, then there's a hundred-page philosophy lesson, and there may have been a monks-in-space bit, and then it gets all very weird and the ending feels like a bit of an anti-climax after all that. I tracked down coalescent's IROSF review, which covers a few of the problems I had with the book (most notably the hand-waving away of the casual abandonment of the female characters when things get interesting). But I think that ninebelow's Strange Horizons review better sums up my reactions to the book; in particular his final two sentences:For everyone else this monumental book is worth reading just because, like Everest, it is there. Anathem is a unique, impressive but fairly mad novel: one part hubris to one part taking the piss to one part gnarly geek awesomeness.
I liked it :-)
TV: House season five has been excellent, bookended by big emotionally powerful storylines (don't spoil the final episode for me, the recording failed part-way through, and we'll watch it over the weekend). True Blood has proved to be interesting, silly, and damn-near pornographic. With vampires. What's not to love? Speaking of interesting, silly and damn-near pornographic, we finally got around to watching Desperate Romantics recently (sadly no vampires). A six-part series depicting lives and work of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood (in spirit, if not in fact), this benefited from the near perfect casting of the three leads. Even better, it was preceded by The Pre-Raphaelites: Victorian Revolutionaries, a documentary on the same subject.
Theatre: All's Well That Ends Well, saw this at the National Theatre. This had excellent reviews, but I was a little less impressed. There was nothing *wrong*, per se, just... not brilliant. And of course, trying to reconcile what Shakespeare would have considered a happy ending with what a modern audience may well consider to be blatant misogyny is never easy. The production made a nod in that direction, but it was a token gesture.
Waiting For Godot at the Haymarket. I loved it, really loved it. DH... not so much. He certainly preferred the second half, where there was a bit more going on. I'd not seen or read the play before, so I was completely unaware that there were any other characters in the play than the two main protagonists. Stewart and McKellen were excellent in the lead roles, but Simon Callow was rather over-the-top in an irritating and jarring way as Pozzo.
Travel: We had a weekend away on London, to go to the theatre, and fortunately we ended up in a hotel just off Leicester Square, behind the National Gallery, and we therefore able to pop into Trafalgar Square several times to gawp at One and Other, Anthony Gormley's art installation on the fourth plinth.
We also went to Portugal for a week, to Ferragudo, a small village in the Algarve, where we did as little as possible except eat, drink, read and generally laze about in the sun (or in the shade, in my case). The hotel we stayed in was great, air conditioning in the rooms, two swimming pools, a jacuzzi, landscaped gardens, great views - we had a great time.