reviews

Monday, January 06, 2003

Dead Zone a little better, but not much

I really didn't care much that The Dead Zone started up again, but there was nothing else on and Stanley wanted to see it, so ... I pretty much gave up on the show after the vision in the cave with the shaman from long ago episode--what a pile of horse manure that was. And Stillson didn't appear until the last episode of the season.

Tonight's episode was better, sort of. It didn't explain anything, though, and wasted some good characters. Why did his visions suddenly come back after being absent for weeks? Why did the loony involve Johnnie in the kidnapping? What was his message all about? The writers for this show pretty much suck -- worse than the writing for the last two years of X-Files. Tries to be mysterious but ends up being insubstantial and just very annoying.

All in all, pretty disappointing. Next week is supposed to be about Sarah again--who cares about her? The writers try to make her seem noble, just screwing around on her husband that one time. But instead she comes off as a selfish, whiny slut. And Walter comes off as so noble he just seems dumb. Get some better scriptwriters!

posted by lee on 01/06/03 at 06:37 AM
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Tuesday, December 31, 2002

Fascinating exhibits

The National Archives & Records Administration has a pretty fascinating series of exhibits on its website. Go here: List of exhibits and check them out. The Depression-era photographs, in particular, are amazing. There are four pages of exhibits listed -- enough to keep you busy for quite a while. I stumbled upon this in my quest for more information about 1920s and Depression-era kitchens. Yep, that's what we're shooting for in fixing up the kitchen -- may as well go with the flow.

posted by lee on 12/31/02 at 01:49 AM
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Tuesday, December 24, 2002

Feeding the Fetish ... the Solaris soundtrack ... and heading out sooner or later

Top 10 Space Science Images of 2002 -- very interesting, though the images of the Leonids are pretty weak. Except for the one of the Leonids and the aurora borealis (click the links, go ahead!)

Great Music
The soundtrack CD for Solaris by Cliff Martinez (who did the scores for Traffic and The Limey, among other movies) arrived this morning ... it's GREAT. Minimal and rich at the same time, ambient like Eno's stuff. I'll make a lot of webpages to this soundtrack.

Merry Christmas and all that blah blah blah
We're heading to Natick sooner or later. Since Stanley and I have a lot to do, we're surfing, naturally. We will be spending a couple of days with sister and family. We'll pack up the dog, cat, presents, goodies, and oh yeah some clean clothes, probably about two hours later than we expect. I have only one more thing to get, then I'm finished with everything.

I know it's sort of un-American to hope for no snow on Christmas -- but I hope it doesn't snow tomorrow. It's supposed to be wet sloppy dangerous stuff here (Connecticut) and in Massachusetts and we could do without it. I could do without snow all winter -- we've already had enough.

I like giving loved ones gifts. I like hanging out with family and cooking a great meal and all that. But I hate the pressure that goes along with Christmas. Have to have to have to ... yuck. But I'm not quite ready to resign from society, so I go along with it. I prefer Thanksgiving -- no demands other than good food.

posted by lee on 12/24/02 at 05:23 PM
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Saturday, December 14, 2002

Not for the dumb or the navel gazers

Stanley and I finally got a chance to see Solaris -- good thing we went since, at least around here, it appears it's headed for oblivion.

I read the novel (by Stanislaw Lem) the movie is based on so long ago I had forgotten the plot, for the most part, but not the mood. I watched the Russian version, which Stanley dug out of some now-defunct videostore -- I watched the entire movie while Stanley snored away. I thought the Russian version was so stupefying boring that the reviewers who claimed it's a masterpiece just don't want to admit that they fell asleep. "Oh, it's Russian, and there's Philosophy in it, and it's Existential, and therefore it must be a Masterpiece [even though I didn't understand it | fell asleep | screwed while it was on | knit an entire sweater]," they wrote [thought].

As we were going in to the theater, the ticket guy sneered at us. Hmm. I wondered side of the bell curve he falls under. If somewhere on the downward slope, that didn't bode well for the movie.

This movie is excellent. I found it fascinating; the two hours seemed to fly by. The mood was true to what I remember of the novel. The music was perfect. I actually got to think while watching a movie -- how damned wonderful! After it was over I realized why so many people didn't like it: it requires thought, there are no car chases, there are no martial arts, and it takes the time it needs to develop the story. No pabulum for the ADHD generation in this movie.

The acting was superb and the movie was beautiful just to watch. It touched on chords of irony and regret and, yes, existential questions. It leaves a hundred questions unanswered: it's up to the viewer to find the answers, if there are any answers. The impact is subtle, and you don't really notice it until the credits start rolling and you're sitting there saying, "but, but ... " Clooney is good. I believed his fear and confusion and sadness.

Did I have any problems with the movie? Well, really only a couple. I disliked the way Davis played Snow, and Solaris, while beautiful, didn't look like a water world to me.

I would like to see it again within a couple of months to catch the bits I know I must have missed. That, for me, means I like it very much indeed since, unlike Stanley and my nephew Ben (who could watch the same movie a hundred times in a month and be happy about it), I usually prefer to wait years before seeing a movie again. I might even, and this is very rare for me, buy it!

posted by lee on 12/14/02 at 05:33 AM
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Wednesday, December 11, 2002

it’s not as easy as it looks

A game, Fly The Copter from South Coast Diaries - Seethru Zine. I won't tell you my best score -- it's too embarrassing.

posted by lee on 12/11/02 at 05:30 PM
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Sunday, December 01, 2002

meta!

I stumbled upon Metacritic a little while ago. The site features movie, video, DVD, game, and music reviews -- well, mainly they keep track of all the reviews they can and then combine the results into a metascore. But what I really like is the list of review summaries with links to the entire review, plus reader reviews (some of which actually make sense). Maybe this site is widely known, I dunno, but it's new to me.

posted by lee on 12/01/02 at 06:30 AM
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Monday, November 25, 2002

skinwalkers & harry potter

Tonight we (Stanley and I) watched PBS's Mystery! Skinwalkers. Robert Redford funded this movie, with the screenplay written by his son, James -- based on the Tony Hillerman novel of the same name. They did an excellent job, I thought -- I love Hillerman's Joe Leaphorn/Jim Chee mysteries so much so that I actually buy them in hardcover as soon as they're published. Adam Beach played Jim Chee, and he acted just as I envisioned Chee would be as I read the novels. (Lou Diamond Phillips did a good job as Jim Chee several years ago in Dark Wind -- an underrated movie.) It wasn't a perfect production -- the story was a little confusing at times if one hadn't read the book -- but all in all, a fine movie, very satisfying. I would love to see Redford et al. make more of these mysteries into movies. I was also glad to see a Mystery! I could understand -- meaning I long ago gave up on watching the British mysteries they usually have since it takes so long to decipher the accents I never catch up with the plot. (So I'm a little dimwitted in the accents department.)

We also went to see Harry Potter & the Chamber of Secrets this weekend. I enjoyed it thoroughly, and I suppose it was at least a decent movie but I cannot give an objective review since I'm so familiar with the books. It seemed not to last long enough to explain everything -- we were surprised that it was 2.5 hours long! What was most fun was listening to the little kid in the row behind us -- he had one of the best laughs I've heard in quite some time. So even though we went to a matine to escape the hordes, we did have the pleasure of watching it with some children in the theater. Just spared the popcorn & jujube-throwing masses. This version is better than the first, and scary, but I'm looking forward to the next version because it won't be directed by Chris Columbus, who manages to make the story a treacly in a way that Rawlings never does.

Oh, cool, Stanley just told me Skinwalkers is the first of a projected series of Hillerman stories on Mystery! Very good!

posted by lee on 11/25/02 at 06:12 AM
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Saturday, November 16, 2002

Review: Beneath Buddha’s Eyes

Before my review, a disclosure: we (Stanley and I) made the author's website, www.beneathbuddhaseyes.com. And we really like author, Tony Anthony.

That said, another pre-review comment: I was nervous about finally getting to read this book. I assumed it was good enough for a publisher to spend scarce publishing money on, but I didn't know whether I would find it a good read. Via Puppet Press, our ebook publishing company, we get so very many submissions that, well, suck. Most of them are of the "It was a dark and stormy night ... " ilk. I never thought Tony's book would fall into this category, but what if I didn't like it ... what could I say ... ? I'm very happy to report that my worries were groundless -- Beneath Buddha's Eyes is very, very good. I submitted this review to Amazon, so here it is, unedited:

posted by lee on 11/16/02 at 09:38 PM
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my favorite cookbook(s)

I've been meaning to do more reviews -- I like reading reviews in other blogs and journals, a lot, so I think it's time I start returning the favor more often. Today's review is of a cookbook, or more apt, a how-to-cook manual, with another mini review of another cookbook by the same author.

How to Cook Everything: Simple Recipes for Great Food, by Mark Bittman, is simply one of the most useful cookbooks I've encountered in all the years I've been looking at them (and I used to do indexes for cookbooks, so I'm very familiar with them, the good, the bad, the ugly ... ) This book gives you the basics on how to cook stuff, what terms mean, where to find ingredients and how to buy them, what kind of kitchen equipment you need (and the stuff you can hold off on buying), and more. The recipes are easy to follow and easy to adapt -- Bittman even gives several variations to try if you're too nervous to improvise on your own. What this book does, basically, is teach you how it all works so you have a basic understanding of what you can and can't do to get good food prepared well. He also makes a strong case for cooking "from scratch" at home, versus eating out or buying prepared meals -- it's often just as fast, if not faster, to make a meal yourself than to buy the pre-made versions of most foods. Better for you, too.

Mark Bittman writes the "Minimalist Chef" column in the New York Times, which I read regularly. Last year I bought his The Minimalist Cooks at Home: Recipes That Give You More Flavor Out of Fewer Ingredients in Less Time (I noticed that he sure doesn't go for minimalist titles!) and use it often enough that I wish the pages were plastic instead of paper (I'm not the neatest cook in the world ... ) Most of the recipes in this book are very good to eat and pretty easy to prepare, though there are a couple that sound great, but taste awful (even Stanley rejected the Fennel-Orange Compote, and he tends to eat whatever I serve him with no complaints). But I wanted more, so I got the Big Book. Both are wonderful cookbooks and definitely belong in your kitchen.

posted by lee on 11/16/02 at 09:13 PM
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Monday, October 28, 2002

styrogami - sculpture for the next millennia

Boston Globe | Arts / Carving out a unique niche

"Consider the man who, for the past 20 years, has been carving small sculptures out of used and unused coffee cups made of foam polystyrene, referred to by most of us, Vitali included, as styrofoam."

(From The Obscure Store and via Stanley.)

"Styrogami is sculpture evolved from mentally extrapolating the trash and waste proliferation and combining the exponential growth of world population while

factoring in rain forest depletion rates with due consideration given to the half-life of stored nuclear waste and the destruction potential inherent in modern day weaponry. I have come up with the visionary concept that we may indeed be presently and blindly basking in the glory of our final historical footnote, leaving no future generations to learn the hard lessons that the destruction of one's own planet will teach. Though I disdain the Styrofoam cup and the throwaway society it represents, Styrogami is, nonetheless, something metaphorically exquisite to admire as we walk this path to the gallows." From the gallery (?) announcement (?)

I guess it takes a person with special vision to find art in trash. This isn't any weirder than a lot of stuff people have been trying to pass off as art - some successfully, some not so successfully. All this artist has to do is exhibit one piece of "Styrogami" in an institution supported in some way with public funds and that depicts something such as Ashcroft pissing on the Laura Bush or god pissing on anything (whether it actually does or not doesn't matter - the label is everything) and he'll be the current darling of the art world - overnight.

I hope he gets lots of money and commissions.

posted by lee on 10/28/02 at 10:59 PM
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