ironSoap – Complete

Disney Females Brought to Life – Imgur:

Nice work. Snow White is probably my favorite.

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from Like a Detuned Radio — December 31, 2011 at 08:46AM

author: Lois Lowry
name: Paul
average rating: 4.12
book published: 1993
rating: 3
read at: 2011/12/30
date added: 2011/12/30
shelves: childrens, novel, young-adult
review:
Lois Lowry‘s Newberry Medal winner isn’t really much of a story, to me. It felt much more like a parable, a bit reminiscent of 1984 only without the sort of depth of focus applied to the speculative aspect permitting the book to answer the questions about how this would all work. Much of the detail is left out of the operational whats and whys in the utopian/dystopian society depicted here, perhaps to grant it a certain timelessness or perhaps because Lowry didn’t feel it was necessary to get the point across.

The Giver is the story of Jonas, a boy who is about to reach the age where he is assigned the role he will fill in his idyllic, though neutered, society where a collective selects mates and jobs for the populace and permits only adoption-based atomic families to exist. When Jonas gets his assignment, though, he becomes the Receiver of Memories, a solitary advisor to the community Elders who is responsible for holding all the memories that ever were to provide context for decisions among Elders who otherwise are only ever concerned with the present. But as Jonas begins to train with the previous Receiver, who now becomes The Giver, he starts to see what the community has sacrificed in order to become the way that they are.

Obviously Lowry is preaching about the importance of knowledge and highlighting the dual nature of human experience which contains both limitless suffering but also the capacity for colossal happiness. This is a middle school English class discussion waiting to happen, filled with enough emotional hooks and light symbolism that can be readily transferred to modern society or at least paralleled with current warning markers. It’s easy enough to see how The Giver is working to transmit its message.

This transparency, however, is why the novel works more on an illustrative level as opposed to a literary one. In many ways this reads like a short story, where things happen just because they do and characters behave in a particular way for no reason other than that they must to propel the thin plot forward. The Giver and Jonas are the only reasonably detailed characters here and the society itself, which is the only antagonist Lowry bothers with, is so vague as to be hardly a menace at all. In this the true conflict lies between Jonas’ childhood acceptance of bland comfort and conformity of the institution and his new insight into the joy and tragedy of real life. It’s an allegory for adolescence whose moral I can’t fault but whose execution I can’t really recommend.

The flaw in The Giver is that Lowry doesn’t seem to know how to conclude it. After a brisk but deliberate pace for the first three fourths of the book, the last few chapters are rushed and lack tension despite the dire circumstances. Then further, the finale is vague and hazy, leaving too much up to the reader to decide. For a story that is trying to say something, its inability articulate the consequence of its lesson is a regrettable failing, in my opinion.

I think I wanted to like The Giver a little more than I was actually able to. I lend no credence to the idea that the themes in this are inappropriate for children and I admire what this book can spur as real conversations with young readers, but I wish the execution of the concept had been done a little more precisely and with a clearer, lighter hand so that the novel itself could stand alone and not be a mere mechanism for discussion.

from Paul's bookshelf: read — December 30, 2011 at 09:13AM

Some men just want to watch the board turn.

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from Like a Detuned Radio — December 30, 2011 at 10:52AM

@ironsoap — December 28, 2011 at 11:07PM

@ironsoap — December 28, 2011 at 02:21AM

@ironsoap — December 27, 2011 at 07:05PM

11 Minutes Ago

★★★★☆

Directed by: Bob Gebert

Written by: Bob Gebert

Initially, 11 Minutes Ago seems like some low-budget science fiction mindbender, a la Primer. But rest assured that this is not some nerd-heavy speculative wank-fest and it is, in fact, a romance. The science here is easily dealt with via a few key contrivances: The mechanic of time travel conveniently necessitates the dark (so the light can be turned off, saving on effects budgets); certain core science entanglements are glossed over for the sake of the larger plot; and much of the conceits necessary for dramatic tension are never explained (the third hop, for example, where Pack says, “something happened here, and things changed” is left intentionally or necessarily vague).

This is all fine though because 11 Minutes Ago isn’t really about time travel, it’s about time itself, and the fleeting nature of creating memories. The movie is structured in a kind of Memento-esque time-hopping format which is actually linear as pertains to Pack (played with talented amateur capability by Ian Michaels), who begins the movie late in the chronological flow and then begins to experience the events of the film’s run (which, in their re-constructed state are more or less real-time) sort of backward. It would be something of a spoiler to explain why he does this, and to a certain degree one of the film’s logical flaws is why Pack locks himself into a timeline he cannot possibly understand just based on the early tumbles back in time. Why not, for example, target his third or fourth visit to an hour or two earlier than the wedding? Eventually it becomes clear why he stays with the formula, but early on you just have to kind of accept that he’s adhering to his own timeline just for the curiosity of it. I found that to be a little bit of a stretch, but eventually the narrative catches up to the concession and it becomes clear why Pack is so interested in maintaining the state of the continuum.

At its core, 11 Minutes Ago is the kind of romantic movie that works because it doesn’t rely on the typical contrivances. RomComs are often derided because they create a kind of canonical fairytale world where things work a certain way because that’s how RomComs work. I believe it is that self-referential nature that turns off so many people who dislike the formula on the face of it. This film could easily have been a romantic comedy, but instead the romance is played straight, replacing silly sight gags with earnestness and sentimentality that mostly works. Here’s the main problem with 11 Minutes Ago, and the thing that keeps it from being truly great: The writing, which is to say the dialogue, shows too many seams. There are a lot of speechifying moments that I’m sure looked great on the page but in a film that is supposed to be cinematic reality TV, they come across as very forced, and very rehearsed. It’s not that the lines don’t work, it’s that they break the illusion because they sound like something someone wrote as opposed to something someone would come up with off the cuff, and that hurts the tone the film is trying to convey.

I did find myself liking 11 Minutes Ago quite a bit. Romances are usually not my bag but this is the kind of romance that people like me can find themselves cheering for. It’s unique, original and has something to say beyond trite “love conquers all” obviousness. It’s not quite perfect, but it’s an achievement and sometimes that’s enough.

from No Thief Like a Bad Movie — December 26, 2011 at 11:57PM

@ironsoap — December 27, 2011 at 12:28AM

@ironsoap — December 26, 2011 at 09:43PM

@ironsoap — December 26, 2011 at 07:28PM