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Jan. 17th, 2007 07:50 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
molly_oTwo new phrases I love:
The first, coined by my brother, is along the lines of chillin' like a villain: "cool like the other side of the pillow."
Mark came up with the second as we passed an over-decorated (by my uptight Episcopal standards) church: "They're getting wacky with the tacky."
So, for 2007 I thought I would start listing in my blog every book I read and every movie I see. It might get me to post a little more frequently, but then again it might not. At any rate, so far this year I've read two books: Neal Gaiman's Neverwhere and Nancy Mitford's biography of Madame de Pompadour.
The former was excellent; I have yet to be disappointed by anything Gaiman has written. This is kinda ironic, because I actually avoided him for a long time -- I thought of him as a graphic novelist, and I have a hard time reading graphic novels. (To be precise, I have a hard time "reading" pictures -- I get confused about what's going on when it's not spelled out in words.) But someone linked to his LJ, and I loved his voice there, so I finally picked up a copy of American Gods sometime last summer. Since then I've read Good Omens and Anansi Boys and Smoke & Mirrors, and I have a copy of Fragile Things waiting for me upstairs.
The latter was a gift, and not the kind of book I usually read (by which I mean it's non-fiction). I enjoyed it more than I expected, though; it was written about as engagingly as a novel, and it was a lot funnier than I expected.
Sunday RM & I saw Primeval. It was a MUCH better movie than either of us expected. (I was thinking it would be like Anaconda 2, and it was more like ... well, not as good as the remake of Dawn of the Dead, but better than any other creature feature I can think of.) But I kinda had some political issues with it. There was some really good, trenchant dialogue (like when Orlando Jones' character observes that, "White people don't care about black-on-black crime when it's around the corner; why would they care when it's 6,000 miles away?"), but the take-home message seemed to be that the best thing a black person can do is get the heck out of Africa.
It's to the point that Orlando's character actually says to himself -- granted, as he's being pursued by a man-eating crocodile -- something to the effect of, "I'll never say this in front of a white man, but slavery was the best thing that could've happened to us -- anything to get out of Africa." In context, it's funny -- more funny because it's a fairly tense scene, and the humor breaks the tension -- and if it had stopped there, I would've dismissed it as a throwaway joke. But subsequent plot developments reinforce the sentiment so that it seems more like an actual theme of the movie, and I'm more than a little dubious about that.
The first, coined by my brother, is along the lines of chillin' like a villain: "cool like the other side of the pillow."
Mark came up with the second as we passed an over-decorated (by my uptight Episcopal standards) church: "They're getting wacky with the tacky."
So, for 2007 I thought I would start listing in my blog every book I read and every movie I see. It might get me to post a little more frequently, but then again it might not. At any rate, so far this year I've read two books: Neal Gaiman's Neverwhere and Nancy Mitford's biography of Madame de Pompadour.
The former was excellent; I have yet to be disappointed by anything Gaiman has written. This is kinda ironic, because I actually avoided him for a long time -- I thought of him as a graphic novelist, and I have a hard time reading graphic novels. (To be precise, I have a hard time "reading" pictures -- I get confused about what's going on when it's not spelled out in words.) But someone linked to his LJ, and I loved his voice there, so I finally picked up a copy of American Gods sometime last summer. Since then I've read Good Omens and Anansi Boys and Smoke & Mirrors, and I have a copy of Fragile Things waiting for me upstairs.
The latter was a gift, and not the kind of book I usually read (by which I mean it's non-fiction). I enjoyed it more than I expected, though; it was written about as engagingly as a novel, and it was a lot funnier than I expected.
Sunday RM & I saw Primeval. It was a MUCH better movie than either of us expected. (I was thinking it would be like Anaconda 2, and it was more like ... well, not as good as the remake of Dawn of the Dead, but better than any other creature feature I can think of.) But I kinda had some political issues with it. There was some really good, trenchant dialogue (like when Orlando Jones' character observes that, "White people don't care about black-on-black crime when it's around the corner; why would they care when it's 6,000 miles away?"), but the take-home message seemed to be that the best thing a black person can do is get the heck out of Africa.
It's to the point that Orlando's character actually says to himself -- granted, as he's being pursued by a man-eating crocodile -- something to the effect of, "I'll never say this in front of a white man, but slavery was the best thing that could've happened to us -- anything to get out of Africa." In context, it's funny -- more funny because it's a fairly tense scene, and the humor breaks the tension -- and if it had stopped there, I would've dismissed it as a throwaway joke. But subsequent plot developments reinforce the sentiment so that it seems more like an actual theme of the movie, and I'm more than a little dubious about that.