ironSoap – Complete

dreamy-shinigami:

Hidden world by *cat-meff

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from Like a Detuned Radio — February 27, 2012 at 11:19AM

kisskicker:

I was reading Dracula a while back, and decided to do a painting of Lucy. Lucy gets a bad rap in the movies—Movie Dracula is seductive, and so Lucy is a slutty slutty slut because she falls for him first and gets vampirized. In the book, Lucy is a wonderful woman, and her only real flaw is having idiot friends who are too stupid to actually protect her.

Seriously, the thing reads like Van Helsing and his cohorts have some kind of memory disorder. They keep leaving the near-dead Lucy alone, and either Dracula breaks in, or the house staff freaking LETS HIM IN by opening the windows in Lucy’s room and taking down all the garlic because it smells bad. This happens again and again and again. Surely, you think, surely THIS TIME Van Helsing will stop being a baby and just spend the night in the room while Lucy’s suitors search for Dracula and kill him. But no, nobody does that, and so Lucy has to die. Worst vampire hunters ever.

This made me laugh. Plus, the illustration is really nice.

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from Like a Detuned Radio — February 27, 2012 at 11:17AM

Super 8

★★★☆☆

Directed by: J.J. Abrams

Written by: J.J. Abrams

My initial impression of Super 8, J.J. Abrams’s celluloid love letter to Steven Spielberg, was that it was pretty great. But something occurred since the close of the credits and my attempt here to distill my opinion into a few paragraphs of review; something fairly unusual for me: My opinion changed. Not so far that I went from being very enthusiastic about it to hating it, but free of the nostalgic warm fuzzies immediately during and after, the ultimately low-stakes plot and deliberate pace made the movie forgettable, drifting out of my memory readily within hours.

The film follows a group of young teenagers who are trying to film a zombie movie under the direction of Charles. His friend, Joe, is a quiet boy who we learn in the film’s opening scene has recently lost his mother to a tragic factory accident, leaving him under the care of his busy and detached father, who is also the local sheriff. While filming a scene near the railroad tracks, the group witnesses a train crash, caused by a desperate man driving a truck. Meanwhile, their camera captures what appears to be some kind of creature escaping from the wreckage. The military muscle their way into to the train accident, but strange occurrences begin to build up and people start disappearing until finally the kids must try to use their knowledge to understand the threat and, if possible, stop it.

On the positive side, the young actors that are the principals are good (Joel Courtney as Joe, Riley Griffiths as Charles) to downright excellent (Elle Fanning as the love interest, Alice, who has a connection to Joe outside the film project) and the special effects are mostly superb as well. The plot isn’t terribly original but it unfolds in a satisfying way and there are enough nods and thematic similarities to kid-adventure movies from the 80s like E.T. and The Goonies to carry it through.

However, there are some issues, too. For one thing, Super 8 has a surprisingly slow burn, with a lot of unnecessary scenes and extended sequences that seem, at the time, to ratchet up the tension. But for all this creeping menace and character development, it doesn’t really amount to much. There’s a halfhearted affection triangle between Joe, Charles and Alice; a lot is made of the divide between Joe and his dad but it kind of seems like the Sheriff’s distance from his son is partially what enables the inevitable reconciliation; the alien/monster is missing from large stretches of the film and the movie’s central antagonist, Air Force officer Nelec (played with scowly enigma by Noah Emmerich) lack sufficient menace to even stop a bunch of junior high kids from breaking martial law. Certain sections of the film, like the train wreck, are deliriously over the top, in a bad way. The biggest issue is that when the reveal finally comes and the audience understands what’s been going on, the answer to all the questions is sort of interesting but doesn’t have enough emotional hook left to leave a mark on anyone.

It’s hard when thinking about this film to not recall another J.J. Abrams near-hit: Cloverfield. In that movie, we had too much set-up, a sort of dicey conceit and then a really solid long stretch of excitement before the thing unraveled by revealing too much at the end, most of which wasn’t necessary anyway. Here, we have a lot of set-up (though it works better in this case), a solid conceit and then a long stretch of quasi-exciting build up before too much is revealed. At least the answers provided here are welcome at the surface, but their nature deflates what little tension had been carefully built to that point. Come to think of it, that’s a pretty good description of Lost (another Abrams project). The trend I’m starting to see (going back to Alias) is that Abrams is great with the ideas, he’s a solid filmmaker and storyteller but he lacks the punch to payoff his introductory ideas. Who knows, maybe he needs to try working from a darker place or starting at the end and back filling to the beginning or something. But he’s starting to frustrate me by creating awesome set-ups that don’t ever quite live up to early promises.

And that’s really why Super 8 faded for me after the initial high of watching wore off. Like Alias and Lost and Cloverfield there is a certain visceral enthusiasm he is able to effortlessly create, but when it’s over, there is a sense that it has been a lot of smoke and mirrors; that there was just a man behind the curtain cashing in on conceptual currency instead of truly delivering on the investment the audience has made. In this case, it’s not a bad final product, just one that fails to stay with you. For all the rest of the borrowing done from E.T. here, that’s the one part that mattered the most.

from No Thief Like a Bad Movie — February 27, 2012 at 10:54AM

theimpossiblecool:

Twain.

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from Like a Detuned Radio — February 27, 2012 at 10:59AM

from Paul Hamilton — February 26, 2012 at 02:05PM

author: Scott O’Dell
name: Paul
average rating: 3.88
book published: 1960
rating: 4
read at: 2012/02/26
date added: 2012/02/26
shelves: childrens, classic, novel
review:
The thing I liked the best about Scott O’Dell‘s Newbery-winning story Island of the Blue Dolphins comes actually in the Afterword, where it is revealed that Karana, the story’s protagonist, is based on an actual person, the Lost Woman of San Nicolas. This is a very fictionalized account according to O’Dell since very little is known about her other than the barest of facts: White explorers did in fact collect all of the natives from an island off the California coast save one girl who jumped off when she found her brother had not made it to the ship; the brother was killed by wild dogs and the girl was later rescued wearing a cormorant skirt and accompanied by a wild dog. The rest has been added by O’Dell’s extrapolation of those few facts.

Island of the Blue Dolphins is not altogether unlike plenty of other cast away stories, like Robinson Crusoe, although it is a bit less of a self-discovery tale since Karana is a native of the island and not an accidental visitor so she is already familiar with the basic skills needed to survive. What she doesn’t have is accompaniment, assistance or support (until she eventually befriends the leader of a pack of wild dogs, whom she dubs Rontu), and that makes the novel incredibly lonely and often very melancholy.

What is interesting is that O’Dell allows the inconsistency of loneliness to shine through as well. Sometimes, loneliness is a terrible, oppressive thing. But solitude can also be incredibly liberating and one gets the sense that while ultimately Karana desires the company of others more than anything, she mentions the island and the animal friends she makes in a wistful, contented sort of way that suggests she doesn’t always long for escape from her life.

Island of the Blue Dolphins is kind of a strange, sad little book. I like that Karana has to buck the societal conventions that her tribe set for her as a girl/woman in order to survive which makes her a strong and admirable female character, and I like the adventure it conveys that is frequently devoid of any exploitative elements (it is never overly violent, not oppressively preachy nor saccharine). Karana’s voice is somewhat clinical and detached which at first I thought was odd and off-putting but later seemed to be more deliberate in its effort to characterize a girl who grew up and lived nearly all her life with only her own thoughts and some domesticated animals for company.

I definitely plan to keep this book on hand and give it to my daughter when she’s a little bit older; a very good children’s book and every bit deserving of its fondly-recalled reputation.

from Paul's bookshelf: read — February 26, 2012 at 12:21PM

author: Aldous Huxley
name: Paul
average rating: 3.83
book published: 1932
rating: 3
read at: 2012/02/24
date added: 2012/02/25
shelves: classic, novel
review:
Aldous Huxley‘s Brave New World, due to an uninteresting sequence of academic mishaps, was never an assignment for me in school. However, the promise of an early work of dystopian characterization was something that had intrigued me since I saw some peers carrying it around in high school so after much delay I finally decided to check it out.

Brave New World is set in a future world where civilization is divided into castes based on birthright. All infants are ‘decanted’ in a sort of laboratory environment and lower castes are populated by large batches of identical multiples (actually the term “twin” is misused in the book) while upper classes (Alphas and Betas) are also manufactured but in a more naturalistic single embryonic state (i.e. they are individuals as opposed to functional clones). A form of sleep hypnosis is used as a form of conditioning to drum societal morals into the populace and the civilians, regardless of caste, exist in a kind of regimented consumerized infancy, encouraged to pursue id-inflected pastimes like complicated, manufacturing-friendly recreation, casual sex, social bonding via ritualistic orgy, and heavy drug use when not fulfilling their societal labor obligations. In this society, individualism, family structures and especially natural parentage are considered so outdated as to be crass or pornographic.

Against this background we are introduced to Lenina, a popular, prototypical Alpha girl and Bernard, an Alpha boy who is dissatisfied with civilization and infatuated to a degree with Lenina. The first part of the book establishes the context of Huxley’s dystopia and lays the groundwork for Lenina and Bernard’s trip to New Mexico where they vacation in an uncivilized Native American reservation and are introduced to John (also referred to as The Savage).

John is a bastard whose mother was from civilized London and was accidentally left in the company of the Natives some eighteen years prior, impregnated and injured. Her transition into the lifestyle of the tribe has been marginally successful at best and John has felt himself an outsider in the only world he’s ever known since birth, but has also grown up hearing his mother’s tales of modern life. When Bernard finds himself stricken with John’s potential as a unique artifact and arranges to have him and his mother brought back to London, the stage is set for the book’s final act in which John disrupts and questions the standards established in the new world and ultimately seeks to forge his own tragic path.

As a novel, Brave New World is kind of messy, I thought. The structuring of it means that the actual protagonist of the story, John, isn’t even introduced until halfway in and the remaining characters who carry the first half don’t really have much in the way of complete arcs. The plot is pretty sketchy overall, and you can see how Huxley’s nods to decency as he lampoons an indecent world struggle to convey a true sense of the nightmare he’s trying to set forth. It comes across (perhaps only modernly?) as a timid book that is trying to be courageous and outrageous which minimizes the overall impact. I suppose eighty years ago when the book was published it might have been downright scandalous but for all the talk I’ve heard about the book being as resonant today as when it was contemporary, I feel that in a world where Chuck Palahniuk publishes regularly, this isn’t shocking in the least.

As social satire, it works pretty well I think. I got the points Huxley was making about promiscuity and the dissolution of core social structures like family; I understood the fearmongering about industry and modernization/mechanization; I saw the validity of the concerns over disintegration of interest in promoting individualism and critical thinking, literacy and the like. It’s not exactly subtle, though, so saying I grasped the point isn’t actually saying that much.

As a dystopian vision, I’m not quite sure what to think. It’s certainly no 1984, for one thing, in terms of effective realization of the core ideas. Parts of Brave New World’s vision seem founded on some pretty shaky science which makes it into more of a wild fantasy to the modern reader. However, while 1984 outlines a path to ruination that is clear and observable, Brave New World is at times more haunting because it better describes how such societies could realistically emerge through the utter disenfranchisement and indifference of the populace. Which, for example, is more likely: The abolishment of books by an oppressive regime or the gradual decline of interest in books or of knowledge itself as fashionable characteristic? I think the popularity of drivel like Jersey Shore shows that Huxley may have been the more prescient. The fact that 1984 is constantly referenced (every political action these days seems destined to be decried by someone or another as being indicative of the inevitability of “Big Brother”) alone probably indicates that 1984 is an extreme which will never truly emerge, but the relative indifference of Brave New World might indicate that people are paying almost exactly as much attention as Huxley feared they might.

As a random aside, I will say that Brave New World gave me an interesting new perspective on another book I read recently, Lois Lowry‘s young adult novel, The Giver, which I now think of as a middle schooler’s intro to Huxley, for what it’s worth. I saw an awful lot of parallels between the two, especially in how the authority figures justified and rationalized even the social norms that were clearly divorced from innate human inclination (subversion of the family unit, for example).

So the bottom line to me is really that Brave New World is a middle-of-the-road work: Somewhat interesting, clumsy as a novel, feels a bit dated, containing some decent satire but really strong as a work of dystopian alarmism. I think the struggles it has as an actual story make it harder to recommend than something comparable but I’m definitely glad I read it and am now sadder than ever that I didn’t get the chance to have it discussed and dissected in a classroom environment.

from Paul's bookshelf: read — February 25, 2012 at 11:37PM

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from Like a Detuned Radio — February 24, 2012 at 11:30AM

@ironsoap — February 24, 2012 at 10:31AM

awritershigh:

by Rachel Dowda

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from Like a Detuned Radio — February 23, 2012 at 09:36AM