The final scenes will stick with you forever. It’s a trump card for when you and your friends have that “this scene from this movie was the most f*cked up thing I’ve ever seen” converstaion. If you’ve seen audition, you will always win that contest.

This movie was soooo great! Tons of black comedy and sarcasm, as well as touching moments. It even made my boyfriend tear up! And you will clap and cheer with joy at the end.

I was really looking forward to seeing this movie because of all the good reviews and award nominations it received. But I was really disappointed. It’s not a BAD movie per se, but it doesn’t really have a story. It’s like they took a bunch of interesting characters set in a really interesting time period, and then completely failed to do anything interesting with them. It falls flat because there’s no real conflict (other than the huge generalized conflict of Mcarthyism vs. Free Speech) involving any of the characters and there is absolutely no climax. It just peters out after they announce something (I won’t ruin it for anyone who wants to see it) that you know is going to happen 5 seconds after a certain character walks on screen in the beginning of the movie. The only brilliant part of the movie is the dialogue in the newscasts that are delivered by Murrow—but they didn’t even have to write that! It’s the actual dialogue!

The most interesting part of the movie is the rampant smoking and smoking paraphernalia. Ah, the days when there was a stand-up ashtray in every waiting room and newscasters would smoke while delivering the evening news.

It’s not quite as good as the anime, and Mika’s acting skills are so-so, but the casting in this first one was really top-notch. All the actors and actresses really look like and embody the characters they portray, and it was a nice touch casting actual music artists as Nana and Reira, so you know it’s really them singing when you hear it. The movie runs from Nana and Hachi’s first meeting till the time when they attend the Trapnest concert in Hachi’s hometown. If you love the NANA anime or manga, then you will really enjoy watching the series come to life. If you’ve never seen or read anything NANA before, you’ll probably find it intensely mediocre. So watch the anime or read the manga first!!!

Supposedly, this book is chock full of useful information about the AIDS epidemic in Africa. I say ‘supposedly’ because the shoddy editing, the propagandist tone of the book, and the author’s deliberate omission of almost all personal info and insight made me question any ‘scientific’ facts he presented.

This book tries to straddle the line between personal memoir and medical nonfiction and manages to embody neither well. Cameron should have either gone totally in the direction of a personal memoir—and given us insight into the effects that living with HIV in South Africa had on his emotional and personal life—OR gone totally in the direction of a factual non-fiction historical, scientific, or anthropological text dealing with the vicissitudes of AIDS awareness in South Africa.

As it is, he doesn’t offer enough personal information to make the book worth reading as a memoir, yet his stances are too partisan and unreferenced to make it worth reading as a factual text.

If you’re personally interested in reading a list of dropped names or getting a vague and general overview of the life accomplishments of Edwin Cameron, then you might find this book useful. Otherwise, it’s a complete waste of time. I’m sure there are much better books about the effects of the AIDS epidemic in Africa.