Your one-sentence(ish) catch-up post

So, it was the holiday season, and I read and watched a bunch of stuff without posting anything.  My bad.  Here's my take on it all.

Movies!


Mission: Impossible: Ghost Protocol (I have no idea how to punctuate that)
Super fun!  Saw it in IMAX and was definitely worth the extra $5 or whatever.  I don't have strong opinions about/really remember the other movies, but this one was a really entertaining and nail-bite-worthy sequel.  Catch it in the theater if you're even vaguely interested; I bet it won't be as good at home unless you have a real butt-kicker of a television.

Winter's Bone
Haunting and excellent.  One of those movies I'm glad I saw but never want to see again.  Jennifer Lawrence was as good as everyone says--can't wait for Hunger Games!

Midnight in Paris
Cute and dorky.  It's probably fun for everyone but more fun if you catch all the references to Hemingway, Fitzgerald, and the like, which I didn't even manage despite my Comp Lit degree.  (shame)

The Descendants
Well-acted and compelling.  A little too "grief-porn" for my tastes (thanks to whoever came up with that phrase in reference to the AMC series The Killing--it fits well here) but I couldn't look away from Clooney and that girl from ABC Family.  And it was funny and sweet at times too, not all sadness.  Certain to generate Oscar buzz.

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo
Unique and brilliant adaptation.  That super long book became a pretty long movie, but the condensation of an incredibly detailed manuscript somehow didn't glaze over much.  Incredibly suspenseful throughout; beautiful cinematography.

Sherlock Holmes (not the new one)
I love Robert Downey, Jr.  The end.





TV seasons!
Dexter, season 6
Thank you, Showtime preview weekend.  Not as good as the other seasons.  Still better than most shows I'm watching on other channels.  And what a cliff hanger!  (Problem--spoiler alert--Deb and Dexter?  for real?  what's up with that?)



Books!

Is Everyone Hanging Out Without Me? (Mindy Kaling)
Be my friend on Goodreads for a slightly longer review.  Funny most of the time, rarely hilarious.  Pick it up if you're an Office fan.

Before I Go to Sleep (S.J. Watson)
Also a longer review on Goodreads.  A Memento-style amnesia mystery, beautifully written and suspenseful to the end.

Room (Emma Donoghue)
Another suspense, this time a best-seller.  Narrated by a five-year-old, which is both impressive and obnoxious.  The plot was exciting but the pacing was a little off--the last half of the book was downhill for me.  Still, worth a read if you want something quick.

Friday roundup: Breaking Dawn, Matched, and more

Happy Friday, readers!  Here's an update on my reading and viewing life of late.

The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn, Part 1
Film, 2011, dir. Bill Condon


Ooh steamy! No wait, his skin is icy cold.  Brr!

 Breaking Dawn was just what you would expect if you have seen the other movies and you are familiar with the story.  In case you have managed to avoid the media buzz (good job!), the plot is that Bella and Edward get married, consummate their passionate love, and end up with a vampire baby growing inside still-human Bella.  This makes Jacob (wolfy friend/third corner of love triangle) mad.  I imagine Taylor Lautner's in-character thoughts as something along the lines of "JACOB SMASH! RAWRRRRRRR!" (because he phases into his werewolf form when he gets really mad...)  This led to the most ridiculous scene in the movie--and trust me, that's saying something.  Jacob's pack of wolves can talk to each other mentally when they are in their wolf form, so there's a bunch of CGI-ed giant wolves on the screen growling at one another while the helpful captions let the rest of us in on the conversation.  This is backed by some truly dramatic score--nothing reinforces wolf drama like soaring violins.  Anyway!  Props to whoever did the makeup and CGI on Kristen Stewart, because that girl looked like the living dead for most of the movie (see, her life force is being soaked up by the demon baby because vampires are stronger than humans...leading Bella herself to drink blood...leading everyone in the theater to laugh uncomfortably because it's really gross to watch when her teeth get all red.)  The acting was meh, the writing was meh, the source material was terrible, but I still had fun!  Yayyyy Twilight.

Matched
YA Novel, Ally Condie, 2010

This is a kind of cool cover.
That is the only other nice thing I will say.

Matched is really not very good.  I saw some good reviews of it and I am puzzled.  I will give Ally Condie a little bit of credit for being a pretty good writer.  She puts together some nice images and turns of phrase from time to time.  However, the plot of this book is boring and derivative.  It's like The Giver and 1984 and Twilight all raised a dull child together.  Our heroine Cassia is repressed by her post-some-kind-of-apocalypse overlord government, and has to navigate the troubling waters of her budding rebellious spirit as she debates between the guy the Society "matched" her with (Xander) and the guy she secretly loves because he's dark and mysterious and has pretty eyes (Ky).  I was intensely irritated to find that the "matching ceremony" where people get assigned to their mates seems to be strictly heterosexual, and no other sexual preferences are even mentioned.  Cassia notes that you can opt out of the matching and be "a single" instead, but that doesn't really address the issue.  Anyway, on to other things that bother me. Cassia gets an illegal copy of Dylan Thomas's famous poem "Do not go gentle into that good night."  One thing that really grinds my gears about YA fiction is when a book latches onto a poem, book, symphony, etc. as an example of fine art and then smashes in our faces for the rest of the book (cf. If I Stay's classical music selection.)  That is what happens here, as Cassia adopts "I will not go gentle!" as an obnoxious refrain.  My biggest problem with this book, though, is my own fault--I listened to it on audiobook even though within five seconds I was terrified to find out that chipmunks have acquired the powers of speech and are recording audiobooks.  The girl reading the book just drove me nuts, and every time she used her "voices" for the characters (often) I felt annoyed with her.  Don't ask me why I kept listening--I dunno, I just did.  Actually, I guess it was because I was intrigued by the beginning of the book, before it was entirely clear that it would suck.  Oh well, it was free--did you know you can get audiobooks from the library!  Crazy!

The cover is misleadingly Oscar-centric.

I'm currently in the middle of a second underwhelming book (hard copy this time)--Street Gang by Michael Davis.  The cover promises to be the history of Sesame Street, which it is.  Sadly for me, I didn't read the rest of the summary, which clarifies that it mostly explores the histories of the various writers and producers who brought the show to life and how the idea came to be.  Thus I am about half way through and we haven't even gotten to the first episode being written yet.  I was really looking for more of a behind-the-scenes expose of what went down between Ernie and Elmo, you know?  Oh well.  I'll update again when I finish it. (To clarify, it's not a bad book, just kind of rambly.  I don't do a lot of nonfiction, so maybe I just have a short attention span.)

Oh, is Christina Hendricks in this show?

On TV, I've been watching my usual shows that are currently on air (How I Met Your Mother--decent, Glee--meh, The New Girl--hehe she's so awkward!, Community--ridiculous, Parks and Rec--my personal fave) and supplementing with Netflix streaming of Mad Men.  So far I'm about 10 episodes in, and I like it but I'm not sure I get what all the fuss is about.  It seems like a PERIOD PIECE where we are forced to appreciate every time they say "swell" or all light up a cig together.  But I do like well-drawn character dramas, in the end.

I'm going to see The Muppets this weekend, hooray!  I've heard many of you already saw and enjoyed it, but that won't stop me from opining on it at length next week!

Dexter, Season 5

TV show, 2010-11 season

Do any of you have Showtime?  Calling all premium cable owners.  I need a friend with Showtime so I can watch season 6 when it starts in October.

I've been a Dexter fan since Netflix had the first two seasons streaming about two summers ago.  Since then it has been an arduous process of waiting for each DVD by mail.  It's always worth it, though, because Dexter never disappoints.

This is Dexter. He kills people.

If you haven't seen the show at all, read this paragraph and then stop.  If you have seen the show, jump ahead if you like, where I will go more in depth about the particulars of this season.  Gone?  Ok, noobs.  Dexter is not for the faint of heart.  It's about Dexter Morgan, who is a serial killer.  But he's the good guy.  See, he only kills other killers.  Vigilante-like.  By day, he's a blood spatter analyst for the Miami Metro Police, so he's an expert in forensics and murder, a handy combination.  The series follows his close calls as he takes down one baddie after another, and also follows his family and friends--his potty-mouthed tough cop sister Deb, his girlfriend Rita and her kids, and his intriguing mix of police coworkers.  Each season has a driving plot arc that usually has to do with a tough-to-catch serial killer and how Dexter and the cops are both going after him/her.  The pace is good--early and mid-season episodes sometimes lose steam as they set up the big reveals to come, but those last few episodes are always a good payoff.  I recommend this series highly--to adults only--and only those adults who can handle copious fake blood and bad language.

Dexter with Deb.  They were married in real life. Gross.

Now for you veterans.  Note: spoilers throughout for this season.  I heard some of you didn't like season 5 as much as some of the previous seasons.  I agree that it can't top the Trinity killer, but I thought it was still a good to very good season.  I think its major weakness was that the bad guys (all of them up to and including Jordan Chase) were just not as deliciously maniacal as, say, Trinity or the Ice Truck Killer.  These were just some perverts.  So when push came to shove at the end of the season, it wasn't as fun when the bad guy went down.  I thought Julia Stiles held her own, though--that was one thing I was worried about when I heard she was in this season.  Lumen was an interesting enough character and Stiles played her just right.  The end of her plot line felt a little abrupt, and I was pretty heartbroken for Dexter.  He had what might be his only chance ever to share his lifestyle with someone he loves, and it didn't work out.  That makes me sad.  Leave it to me to get caught up in the romantic subplot of a serial killer show though.

Speaking of which, how about Quinn and Deb, huh?  What's up with that?  Like Deb, I came around on Quinn by the end of the season, after he stopped being a giant jerkface (he also stopped being a good cop, but whatever).  I was pulling for her to get her butt in gear and return his affection.  I hope that Deb has a least a few episodes of solid happy romance in the next season, but I'm not holding my breath.

Get out of my show, you baby.

I was also happy that we managed to ditch Astor and Cody.  They are always just in the way of more important plot lines.  And Astor still managed to get her drunk emo butt in the way of an entire episode.  Harrison was annoyingly both over-involved ("too many nanny stories") and under-considered ("now that I think about it, where is Harrison anyway?  still with the nanny?  that's weird")  I guess part of the draw of the show is trying to figure out how this guy can be a family man and a serial killer at the same time, but I feel like we kind of played that one out back when Rita was still around. I really just want some more creepy crime scenes and Dexter sneaking up on terrifying serial killers.  Also Deb.  I do like Deb.

Seeing Lumen let go of her "dark passenger" (I really hate that phrase) at the end of the season made me wonder if they are setting up the series finale.  Now that they've proven it's possible for a killer to come back to the light, they're allowing for Dexter to do that too.  I hope that we get some more good murders in before then though.  So, who's hosting me for season 6 watching parties?

Alias: Seasons 1 and 2

TV Show, 2001-2006

Take this entire review with a grain of salt, because I have just started season 3, and so far, am skeptical of where we're going with this whole thing.

That being said, seasons 1 and 2 of Alias are awesome and totally worth your time.  It's a spy show, full of double agents, fake-out deaths, geeky spy gadgets (you know, lipsticks that can blow open safes and stuff), and even heart-wrenching love stories and family drama.  J.J. Abrams, as he is wont to due, leaves you dangling at the end of each episode, so it's highly addictive with its international underground crime-busting missions packed with action sequences.

Here are the things that propel Alias above and beyond your typical procedural:
1. Victor Garber.  Plays every scene with incredible intensity.  If that's not enough acting clout to impress you, consider that he was great as Jesus in Godspell back in the day.  Now that's range.
2. It's the best elements of Mission: Impossible (crazy spy gear in creative new situations each week!) combined with season-driving plot developments in the vein of Dexter or Lost.
3. For those of you who care about this kind of thing, Jennifer Garner wears more sexy outfits in pretty much every episode than Gillian Anderson did in all nine seasons of the The X-Files combined.  Or, for those of you more interested in the male species, you've got Bradley Cooper in the prime of his youth.  Plus previously-unknown-to-me Michael Vartan.  Just imagine the love triangle possibilities!

Maybe more than anything else, though, I have to love a show with a kick-butt female lead.  She can shoot guns, dominate hand-to-hand combat, and speak a zillion languages.  There's really not a male counterpart who she backs up; all the men are her accessories and behind-the-scenes support.  Rock on, Sydney Bristow.