I ran across this post on the blog Book Riot, about when you are allowed to talk about the details of something and perhaps spoil it for others and when you're not. Fun for me to ponder as your blog author, and perhaps you will enjoy it too if you like giving your opinions about stuff all the time, like me.
If I spoil the blog post right now, how meta is that? The post includes two sections of different spoiling situations and subcategories of each section! Bwahahaha, has the world exploded with my meta-ness?
Wednesday, October 19, 2011
Thursday, October 13, 2011
50/50
Film, 2011, dir. Jonathan Levine
A quick run-down on this movie, which you can still catch in theaters. (I thought it would be a riot to review something semi-relevant.)
1. I cried for approximately 40 of its modest 100 minutes. Twice it was like, try not to disturb other theater-goers with awkward noises because you're choking back sobs type-of-crying; the rest of the time it was just gentle tears. Some happy, some sad.
2. If you have been affected by cancer in some way, there will be at least one moment that you will feel captures the experience profoundly. Or at least accurately and without too much saccharine music.
3. I loved pretty much every actor/actress in this movie. Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Seth Rogen, Anna Kendrick, Bryce Dallas Howard, even Anjelica Huston--they were all fabulous.
4. In case you haven't seen the previews, it's about a guy named Adam (Joseph G-L) who gets cancer, and how he and his friend (Rogen), therapist (Kendrick--yeah, interesting role there), girlfriend (Howard), and mother (Huston) all deal with it.
5. It's funny at times (mostly Seth Rogen times) and sweet and sad or some combination of all of the above at others. It's kind of hard to pick a genre for it. Perhaps that stupid word "dramedy" would cover it.
In short, I really enjoyed it, and I would recommend it. I'm not sure I want to see it again anytime soon because I don't always enjoy being drenched in my own tears, but it's one of those ones to put on the "good cry" shelf. And, for the record, my friend sitting next to me didn't cry at all. She's brave, I guess.
1. I cried for approximately 40 of its modest 100 minutes. Twice it was like, try not to disturb other theater-goers with awkward noises because you're choking back sobs type-of-crying; the rest of the time it was just gentle tears. Some happy, some sad.
2. If you have been affected by cancer in some way, there will be at least one moment that you will feel captures the experience profoundly. Or at least accurately and without too much saccharine music.
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| They are both super cute, admit it. |
4. In case you haven't seen the previews, it's about a guy named Adam (Joseph G-L) who gets cancer, and how he and his friend (Rogen), therapist (Kendrick--yeah, interesting role there), girlfriend (Howard), and mother (Huston) all deal with it.
5. It's funny at times (mostly Seth Rogen times) and sweet and sad or some combination of all of the above at others. It's kind of hard to pick a genre for it. Perhaps that stupid word "dramedy" would cover it.
In short, I really enjoyed it, and I would recommend it. I'm not sure I want to see it again anytime soon because I don't always enjoy being drenched in my own tears, but it's one of those ones to put on the "good cry" shelf. And, for the record, my friend sitting next to me didn't cry at all. She's brave, I guess.
Prey
Novel, Michael Crichton, 2002
My husband and I were on a road trip this weekend, and we have a habit of reading out loud to each other as we drive. This usually works best if the passenger reads to the driver, btw. Since I'm in the middle of Dune, we opted for another book that we could get through quickly and that neither of us had started yet. Enter Prey. I found this lying on the side of the road, so I picked it up, hoping it would be as much fun as Jurassic Park or Sphere, which are my only other two Crichton reads, I think.
Well, it wasn't. It was certainly good for an amusing car ride, and there were some very suspenseful passages, so I wasn't disappointed on my major expectations. However, I found the whole thing a little disjointed, and some of the pseudoscience was really insufferable. More on that after a brief summary for those who haven't read it:
In Prey, Jack Forman (solid hero name) is a computer programmer or something, and his wife Julia works for a nanotechnology development company. The first part of the book sets up some strange events going down around their house--Julia seems irritable, the baby gets a mystery rash, etc.--that, since this is Crichton, after all, are inevitably the effect of said nanotechnology run amok. The middle of the book is when the nanotechnology gobbledegook gets thick, as we are led on a tour of the company's creepy desert facilities and are introduced to their product: a swarm of tiny particles that can control themselves as a group, like a flock of birds. This swarm is rapidly evolving, to the extent that it "learns" new behaviors every few hours. Oh yeah, and it's trained to be a predator. Why, you ask? Well, that's how Jack got involved in this whole mess--he wrote some predator-imitating software that Julia's company bought. So he's trying to kill the swarm. The rest of the book really picks up the pace as the swarm develops crazy new ideas and hunts down the humans at every step.
This last part is pretty fun. However. The two thirds of the book it took to lead up to the crazy swarm madness were way too much. Crichton spends a few hundred pages setting up all these great mystery hooks in a slow-ish pace, then races to the end with an entirely different plot than what he started with. He took the last two pages to explain those little teasers he started with and blew his climax on a crazy subplot that entered in the last section of the book. This rapid change in pace (nothing-at-all-happening to holy-crap-everything-happening-at-once to what-it's-over?) is what leads to the book feeling disjointed, I think.
I also happen to have a pretty low tolerance for the technical specifications of the nanotechnology. I understand that that is probably what a lot of people like about Crichton--the THIS COULD ALMOST REALLY HAPPEN BECAUSE LOOK IT'S SCIENCE sort of feeling. But I don't like when the story gets interrupted every few pages so that Jack can explain to the reader "key" details like what exactly the nanoparticle assemblers are made of.
Anyway, my husband and I just skipped those parts and used some funny voices for the dialogue, and it turned out to be a very enjoyable trip.
My husband and I were on a road trip this weekend, and we have a habit of reading out loud to each other as we drive. This usually works best if the passenger reads to the driver, btw. Since I'm in the middle of Dune, we opted for another book that we could get through quickly and that neither of us had started yet. Enter Prey. I found this lying on the side of the road, so I picked it up, hoping it would be as much fun as Jurassic Park or Sphere, which are my only other two Crichton reads, I think.
 |
| Is it wrong to imagine nanoparticles as fleas? |
In Prey, Jack Forman (solid hero name) is a computer programmer or something, and his wife Julia works for a nanotechnology development company. The first part of the book sets up some strange events going down around their house--Julia seems irritable, the baby gets a mystery rash, etc.--that, since this is Crichton, after all, are inevitably the effect of said nanotechnology run amok. The middle of the book is when the nanotechnology gobbledegook gets thick, as we are led on a tour of the company's creepy desert facilities and are introduced to their product: a swarm of tiny particles that can control themselves as a group, like a flock of birds. This swarm is rapidly evolving, to the extent that it "learns" new behaviors every few hours. Oh yeah, and it's trained to be a predator. Why, you ask? Well, that's how Jack got involved in this whole mess--he wrote some predator-imitating software that Julia's company bought. So he's trying to kill the swarm. The rest of the book really picks up the pace as the swarm develops crazy new ideas and hunts down the humans at every step.
 |
| An official science picture of nanotechnology |
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| What I kept hoping was coming in Prey |
Anyway, my husband and I just skipped those parts and used some funny voices for the dialogue, and it turned out to be a very enjoyable trip.
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