4 Books, 4 Movies
Did I really read the same amount of books and see the same number of movies? Well, if you count my Netflix movie (and I do) I guess I did.
First, following my Christmas tradition, I re-read Traveling With the Dead-and I was reminded as to why I like it so much as it's such a well-written book. Great characters, wonderful descriptions of people (well, vampires), clothes and settings and a fairly good sense of the time and its societal norms...it was really good. And it takes place close to Christmas, which I don't think I realized until this year. Maybe that's why I read it before Christmas! Or, you know...not. I went from Travelling to Spin-a gift from my friend DL, who loves science fiction as much as I do and is a pretty good source of good SF reads (although he does enjoy mocking some of the authors I like but that's okay). So Spin was very good. It takes place in the near future and the Earth has been enclosed by a protective shield, which not only blocks the sun, moon and stars (but still offers artificial sunlight that looks like the real thing), it encloses the earth in its own space-time continuum and outside the shield, time is moving at a much faster pace. This occurence is viewed threw the eyes of the three main characters-a brother (Jason) his sister Diane and their friend Tyler. Jason is a genius who wants to discover as much he can about the Spin, Diane become a religious convert and Tyler lives his life being friends with and later person physician to Jason and trying to deny his unrequited love for Diane. In the meantime, Jason and his team of scientists have been trying to seed Mars so it can become livable-so what happens if Mars became not only habitable but developed its own humans...and one came to earth? This book posits not only that question, but how people would behave at the end of the world. When the spin disappears, many people believe the world is about to end, and I have to say almost no one behaves well. because it's the supposed end of the world, many people take it as a licensce to behave as badly as possible by killing everyone they want, raping whoever they feel like and grabbing whatever property is around. You know that line from Star man where Jeff Bridges says about the human race "You are at your best when things are at their worst"? This is the opposite of that and while it made for a great story, I'm not sure I can believe it. There have been times when humans believed the world was ending (the year 1000,during the Plague of the Middle Ages, the dawn of the year 2000) and no one behave THIS badly. Yes, bad things happened and many people acted strangely but not on a massive scale like this. And if you thought you were going to die, would you rather
A) be with your loved ones or
B) Go out and kill some people?
While I do believe people are capable of behaving very badly, this was pretty extreme-but it was still a really good book. It was well-written and the ideas were very interesting.
After Spin I read Spook and I really needed a book like this after the harrowing tale of Spin. Spook takes a scientific look at the afterlife in a very irreverent but still serious way. What I mean by this is that the author is serious about the subject matter-she has a true intellectual curiousity about the afterlife without any preconceptions. She's curious about reincarnation (the stories change a lot) but her strip to India is very funny. She's curious about ectoplasm (unlikely to exist but the possible hiding places for it on the mediums' bodies are both fascinating and gross) and she's curious about actual mediums-and this provides a true WOW moment when she meets the woman who is the inspiration for the TV show Medium. At first, she isn't impressed and is curious as to why spirits don't answer the important queations-like "what's it like where you are? and Is there a God?" No one cans answer these questions-but when the medium tells the author that she thinks she's spoken to her mother and she's showing her an hourglass...and her brother collects hourglasses....it was a little creepy. The author has a tremendous sense of humor-it's much like mine so that should tell you whether you want to read it or not.
Next up was the latest installment of Charles Stross's Merchant Princes series-this one was The Clan Corporate. While I really liked this book and the ideas it posits about trade, ideas, education and the role role of women in different societies, this book still drove me crazy. And it was because Miriam, who is a former journalist and med school graduate, makes some incredibly stupid moves. How can a woman who develops a factory and a business in a Victorian-like society make some incredibly stupid moves? Oh, it was annoying. But the book was still fun to read and if you've read the other two, you should read this one as well.
And last is the latest installment in Chelsea Quinn Yarbro's St Germain series. The Count St Germain first appeared in Hoterl Transylvania (a great book) and has been having adventures thoughout different periods of time ever since. (he's 4,000 year-old vampire, did I mention that?). Truth to tell, I had been getting a little bored with the series as they all seemed to follow the same plot-St Germain is in a precarious period in time (the Renaissance, the Middle Ages, the height of the Roman Empire) and meets a woman who he either falls in love with or wants to cause his destruction (and sometimes both) and he has to make a mad rush out of town before either the A)Praetorian Guard B) The Nazis or
C) some Devil-worshipping French aristocrats try to kill him and/or the woman he loves. It's usually a near miss but St Germain always makes it and sometimes the woman does too and sometimes she doesn't...but it was a formula that was getting old. As much as I loved her descriptions of the different eras (and she prides herself on correct place names, hairdos, clothes and manners) I wanted a different story-and in the last few books it WAS different. In Come Twilight, St Germain makes the mistke of changing a woman he doesn't know very well over to his life-and what a mistake it was. She turns her son and all her clan into vampires and they end up running a whole area of Spain-in the mountains where the vampires are difficult to reach. And in Midnight's Garden, he meets an albino who has the marks of stigmata and who ends up walled up as an anchorite in a remote abbey. As she feels she deserves this, it's kind of a happy ending for her-but what I liked about these two books was that they weren't the usual story-but unfortunately the latest Roman Dusk is a return to the same story. Don't get me wrong, it's still engaging and the descriptions of the Roman Empire as it begins to fall is very interesting, but St Germain makes his narrow escape, organized religion gets a bad reputation (usually deserved, sad to say) and luckily in this case, the woman who loves him survives as a wealthy woman to do as she pleases-the women in these books don't always have such a happy ending.
As for movies (and I miscounted! I read more books than saw movies! Whew...i was worried there for a minute).
So, I saw The Good Shepherd, Casino Royale, The Curse of the Golden Flower and Pollock. All of them had their good and bad qualities (well, Casino Royale didn't have any bad qualities) but I liked all of them for different reasons.
The Good Shepherd was really good-Matt Damon gave a great, low-key performance. he isn't required to do much in this part-but he does look like he's always thinking, even if he doesn't give much away. I still find it hard to believe a straight guy could marry Angelina Jolie and ignore her for the pretty, deaf girl but that's me. Wouldn't he make the best of it? But I'm more and more impressed with Matt Damon as an actor-he melts into the part and yet it's always him, even when the parts are different-it's pretty amazing. My only quibble is that the kid playing his son looked like he was 15-it was hard to believe he worked for the CIA but it wasn't hard to believe he'd spill some secrets.
Casino Royale...my friend D told me I had to see it because Daniel Craig was really hot and she was right-he is. The man exudes sexual charisma like nobody's business. That said, Casino Royale is a hugely entertaining, well-made movie. It has characters instead of stereotypes and a Bond girl who actually has a brain in her head and can give right back to Bond. She's not an idiot or a wuss. And Craig is a great Bond-hard as nails and willing to do what needs to be done to finish the job and won't let anything go. It's a tough, believable performance-and yet different from the Israeli agent he played in Munich. It's way overdue that Bond got reinvented...and he's really hot. Did I mention that?
The Curse of the Golden Flower reunites the beautiful Gong Li and her old lover/director Zhang Yimou. These two raised the bar for Chinese movies, with such films as Raise the Red Lantern and Red Sorghum (please don't say Crouching Tiger-it was a good popcorn movie but Raise the Red Lantern was great drama and no wire work. That said, I did think Zhang's work in Hero and The House of Flying Daggers was much better than Ang Lee's in Crouching Tiger-he did the whole Chinese action/wire work thing much better-just look at the fight among the leaves in Hero and deny it...) Anyway, Curse is about an extremely dysfunctional royal family in ancient China. The Emperor is poisoning the Empress to get her lands, the Empress is scheming with her stepson (who she's been sleeping with) to overthrow the Emperor...and the nice youngest son? Not so nice, as it turns out. This movie is beautiful-the colors and set design are amazing, as are the costumes. Everything is red and gold or blue and silver-and when the armies of the Emperor and Empress clash, clad in silver and gold, it's beautiful You know there was no CGI involved in this movie and that it's the real thing. That said, the performances are excellent. Gong Li is beautiful and scheming, Chow Yun Fat doesn't look evil, until you find out just how evil he really is and the actors playing the three sons are uniformly good. But were there really that many bosoms in ancient China? The costumes are glittering and gorgeous but definitely designed to show off off the decolletage and it was a little weird as I thought everyone really covered up then-am I wrong?
Pollock, about the life of painter Jackson Pollock features some great performances. Ed Harris (and usually when an actor or a director finally gets to make their "lifelong dream of a movie" it turns out to be crappy)gives a great, powerful and tough performance. It's usually quite difficult to show an artist on film-for many writers and painters,it's internal. This movie accomplishes the difficult task of actually making you feel the creative process and having you believe it. Harris and Marcia Gay Harden are both wonderful.
So, I recommend all the movies, but they aren't all for everyone...make your choices wisely.
First, following my Christmas tradition, I re-read Traveling With the Dead-and I was reminded as to why I like it so much as it's such a well-written book. Great characters, wonderful descriptions of people (well, vampires), clothes and settings and a fairly good sense of the time and its societal norms...it was really good. And it takes place close to Christmas, which I don't think I realized until this year. Maybe that's why I read it before Christmas! Or, you know...not. I went from Travelling to Spin-a gift from my friend DL, who loves science fiction as much as I do and is a pretty good source of good SF reads (although he does enjoy mocking some of the authors I like but that's okay). So Spin was very good. It takes place in the near future and the Earth has been enclosed by a protective shield, which not only blocks the sun, moon and stars (but still offers artificial sunlight that looks like the real thing), it encloses the earth in its own space-time continuum and outside the shield, time is moving at a much faster pace. This occurence is viewed threw the eyes of the three main characters-a brother (Jason) his sister Diane and their friend Tyler. Jason is a genius who wants to discover as much he can about the Spin, Diane become a religious convert and Tyler lives his life being friends with and later person physician to Jason and trying to deny his unrequited love for Diane. In the meantime, Jason and his team of scientists have been trying to seed Mars so it can become livable-so what happens if Mars became not only habitable but developed its own humans...and one came to earth? This book posits not only that question, but how people would behave at the end of the world. When the spin disappears, many people believe the world is about to end, and I have to say almost no one behaves well. because it's the supposed end of the world, many people take it as a licensce to behave as badly as possible by killing everyone they want, raping whoever they feel like and grabbing whatever property is around. You know that line from Star man where Jeff Bridges says about the human race "You are at your best when things are at their worst"? This is the opposite of that and while it made for a great story, I'm not sure I can believe it. There have been times when humans believed the world was ending (the year 1000,during the Plague of the Middle Ages, the dawn of the year 2000) and no one behave THIS badly. Yes, bad things happened and many people acted strangely but not on a massive scale like this. And if you thought you were going to die, would you rather
A) be with your loved ones or
B) Go out and kill some people?
While I do believe people are capable of behaving very badly, this was pretty extreme-but it was still a really good book. It was well-written and the ideas were very interesting.
After Spin I read Spook and I really needed a book like this after the harrowing tale of Spin. Spook takes a scientific look at the afterlife in a very irreverent but still serious way. What I mean by this is that the author is serious about the subject matter-she has a true intellectual curiousity about the afterlife without any preconceptions. She's curious about reincarnation (the stories change a lot) but her strip to India is very funny. She's curious about ectoplasm (unlikely to exist but the possible hiding places for it on the mediums' bodies are both fascinating and gross) and she's curious about actual mediums-and this provides a true WOW moment when she meets the woman who is the inspiration for the TV show Medium. At first, she isn't impressed and is curious as to why spirits don't answer the important queations-like "what's it like where you are? and Is there a God?" No one cans answer these questions-but when the medium tells the author that she thinks she's spoken to her mother and she's showing her an hourglass...and her brother collects hourglasses....it was a little creepy. The author has a tremendous sense of humor-it's much like mine so that should tell you whether you want to read it or not.
Next up was the latest installment of Charles Stross's Merchant Princes series-this one was The Clan Corporate. While I really liked this book and the ideas it posits about trade, ideas, education and the role role of women in different societies, this book still drove me crazy. And it was because Miriam, who is a former journalist and med school graduate, makes some incredibly stupid moves. How can a woman who develops a factory and a business in a Victorian-like society make some incredibly stupid moves? Oh, it was annoying. But the book was still fun to read and if you've read the other two, you should read this one as well.
And last is the latest installment in Chelsea Quinn Yarbro's St Germain series. The Count St Germain first appeared in Hoterl Transylvania (a great book) and has been having adventures thoughout different periods of time ever since. (he's 4,000 year-old vampire, did I mention that?). Truth to tell, I had been getting a little bored with the series as they all seemed to follow the same plot-St Germain is in a precarious period in time (the Renaissance, the Middle Ages, the height of the Roman Empire) and meets a woman who he either falls in love with or wants to cause his destruction (and sometimes both) and he has to make a mad rush out of town before either the A)Praetorian Guard B) The Nazis or
C) some Devil-worshipping French aristocrats try to kill him and/or the woman he loves. It's usually a near miss but St Germain always makes it and sometimes the woman does too and sometimes she doesn't...but it was a formula that was getting old. As much as I loved her descriptions of the different eras (and she prides herself on correct place names, hairdos, clothes and manners) I wanted a different story-and in the last few books it WAS different. In Come Twilight, St Germain makes the mistke of changing a woman he doesn't know very well over to his life-and what a mistake it was. She turns her son and all her clan into vampires and they end up running a whole area of Spain-in the mountains where the vampires are difficult to reach. And in Midnight's Garden, he meets an albino who has the marks of stigmata and who ends up walled up as an anchorite in a remote abbey. As she feels she deserves this, it's kind of a happy ending for her-but what I liked about these two books was that they weren't the usual story-but unfortunately the latest Roman Dusk is a return to the same story. Don't get me wrong, it's still engaging and the descriptions of the Roman Empire as it begins to fall is very interesting, but St Germain makes his narrow escape, organized religion gets a bad reputation (usually deserved, sad to say) and luckily in this case, the woman who loves him survives as a wealthy woman to do as she pleases-the women in these books don't always have such a happy ending.
As for movies (and I miscounted! I read more books than saw movies! Whew...i was worried there for a minute).
So, I saw The Good Shepherd, Casino Royale, The Curse of the Golden Flower and Pollock. All of them had their good and bad qualities (well, Casino Royale didn't have any bad qualities) but I liked all of them for different reasons.
The Good Shepherd was really good-Matt Damon gave a great, low-key performance. he isn't required to do much in this part-but he does look like he's always thinking, even if he doesn't give much away. I still find it hard to believe a straight guy could marry Angelina Jolie and ignore her for the pretty, deaf girl but that's me. Wouldn't he make the best of it? But I'm more and more impressed with Matt Damon as an actor-he melts into the part and yet it's always him, even when the parts are different-it's pretty amazing. My only quibble is that the kid playing his son looked like he was 15-it was hard to believe he worked for the CIA but it wasn't hard to believe he'd spill some secrets.
Casino Royale...my friend D told me I had to see it because Daniel Craig was really hot and she was right-he is. The man exudes sexual charisma like nobody's business. That said, Casino Royale is a hugely entertaining, well-made movie. It has characters instead of stereotypes and a Bond girl who actually has a brain in her head and can give right back to Bond. She's not an idiot or a wuss. And Craig is a great Bond-hard as nails and willing to do what needs to be done to finish the job and won't let anything go. It's a tough, believable performance-and yet different from the Israeli agent he played in Munich. It's way overdue that Bond got reinvented...and he's really hot. Did I mention that?
The Curse of the Golden Flower reunites the beautiful Gong Li and her old lover/director Zhang Yimou. These two raised the bar for Chinese movies, with such films as Raise the Red Lantern and Red Sorghum (please don't say Crouching Tiger-it was a good popcorn movie but Raise the Red Lantern was great drama and no wire work. That said, I did think Zhang's work in Hero and The House of Flying Daggers was much better than Ang Lee's in Crouching Tiger-he did the whole Chinese action/wire work thing much better-just look at the fight among the leaves in Hero and deny it...) Anyway, Curse is about an extremely dysfunctional royal family in ancient China. The Emperor is poisoning the Empress to get her lands, the Empress is scheming with her stepson (who she's been sleeping with) to overthrow the Emperor...and the nice youngest son? Not so nice, as it turns out. This movie is beautiful-the colors and set design are amazing, as are the costumes. Everything is red and gold or blue and silver-and when the armies of the Emperor and Empress clash, clad in silver and gold, it's beautiful You know there was no CGI involved in this movie and that it's the real thing. That said, the performances are excellent. Gong Li is beautiful and scheming, Chow Yun Fat doesn't look evil, until you find out just how evil he really is and the actors playing the three sons are uniformly good. But were there really that many bosoms in ancient China? The costumes are glittering and gorgeous but definitely designed to show off off the decolletage and it was a little weird as I thought everyone really covered up then-am I wrong?
Pollock, about the life of painter Jackson Pollock features some great performances. Ed Harris (and usually when an actor or a director finally gets to make their "lifelong dream of a movie" it turns out to be crappy)gives a great, powerful and tough performance. It's usually quite difficult to show an artist on film-for many writers and painters,it's internal. This movie accomplishes the difficult task of actually making you feel the creative process and having you believe it. Harris and Marcia Gay Harden are both wonderful.
So, I recommend all the movies, but they aren't all for everyone...make your choices wisely.
posted by SHbookworm at 8:16 AM
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