Because of some pending infrastructure changes on my home server, I decided it was time to get my own domain name for this site. Lo, you should now point your bookmarks at whattafiasco.com. The old address won’t be going away any time soon, but the new one is nice and neat. Also, there’s a new page listed over the right, Me, Elsewhere, listing some of the other places I have content out on the web.
August 2008
Monthly Archive
Fri 29 Aug 2008
Fri 29 Aug 2008
Ah, this was the book I was expecting it to be. It’s also the book I should have read before diving into Elizabeth Bear’s Tam Lin stuff. It’s not a definitive source, but it’s a very good and very straight forward version of the material. (I love eBear’s books, but they seldom fall into the category of straight forward.) And it’s the darned good read I’d expect from Ellen Kushner. This book also joins an increasing pile of books that I wish I’d read when I was much younger, but I was born too early.
Wed 27 Aug 2008
Fun fluffy popcorn, but of the semi-nutritious variety without any of that nasty fake butter substitute. It would be a sad world without any popcorn, but I don’t want to eat it every day. Not even the nutritious kind. And while it’s cute and girl-empowering, with full points for fairy tale subversion, it also made me better appreciate the level of obsessive prose polishing done on many of my current favorite books.
Wed 20 Aug 2008
This is the tenth anniversary edition of the book, and having read some more recent books of hers, this one clearly shows as an earlier effort. Which doesn’t make it bad. If I’d read it when it first came out, I’d have identified it as a promising book and kept my eye out for more. Or at least, I hope I would have!
Tue 12 Aug 2008
Sweet and quirky and more than a little disturbing at times, this film looks at the working relationship between two women, a Belgian trying to reclaim the Japan she knew in her youth, and her Japanese supervisor. The characters are all flattened out to near comic book level, but the flatness is used for comedic effect and to foreground our main players. (I suspect this film would easily adapt to a graphic novel format.)
Tue 5 Aug 2008
I’m not a huge fan of the Batman thing, nor do I have any stirrings of fandom toward Heath ledger, but I was in the mood for a summer action flick. And that’s what I got. And as usual for me with the batman movies, I either like Bruce Wayne, or the Batman, but not both. This time I found Bruce Wayne a little inteersting (if a bit simple), but Batman in his costume was a big snooze. Ledger’s Joker more than makes up for it though. I was also a little surprised by how much of the camera work felt like it was in a tighter frame, as if that might make it more of comic book panel look. Where are the sweeping vistas showing the emotional loneliness of the superhero in the big bad city? And then when Batman is set up with a classic double bind choice, the movie jumps right to the action rather than giving either the characters or the audience time to absorb what’s happening. And then, at the very end, the sound mix results in the music nearly drowning out the final lines, as if the editor didn’t really want us to hear them. Weird.
Mon 4 Aug 2008
I really wanted to like this book, and the opening was promising and the characters were engaging. But. I feel as though I missed something critical in the process of reading. My beef is that the sfnal component of this book could have been excised with very little work, leaving an interesting novel that wasn’t science fiction at all. Yet I enjoyed reading it. He keeps coming close enough to the book I want him to write, and doing it well enough, that I keep coming back for more. It’s tantalizing, but not every book is (or should be) written for every reader.
Mon 4 Aug 2008
It’s not bad, but I wanted more. And I was disappointed that the film didn’t follow through on its artsy-fartsy framing device. Yes, arms trafficking is bad. Yes, governments sometimes sanction bad things. Yes, trying to deny any sense of basic human decency can be a soul-sucking proposition that can ruin your life. We know this already. What I don’t get enough of is how this experience changed the protagonist. Because, aside from a few emotional blips along the way, I don’t really see any changes at all.
Mon 4 Aug 2008
Chow Yun Fat as a self-described “sissy boy” womanizer. (Except the subtitles claim he’s either cissy or cizzy.) Not wretched enough to keep me from watching the whole thing, but not quite campy enough for me to recommend it on that basis.
Fri 1 Aug 2008
Sweet little robots. Lots and lots of Space: 2001 references. Engaging and cute (and dig the Apple boot tone), but nothing ground breaking. At one point is was beginning to feel more like a pastiche than a plot.