All Consuming : mwshook

A review of "Across the Universe (Two-Disc Special Edition)"

nobody@allconsuming.net (mwshook) — Mon, 25 Feb 2008 02:04:55 GMT

Across the Universe (Two-Disc Special Edition)

by Julie Taymor

This weekend, I started reading the Illuminatus! Trilogy and watched this movie. So, is this how the Sixties are remembered by people who experienced it? Is it all one hazy psychedelic blur?

I didn’t make it to the end of the movie. The music would have been great, if not for all the annoying vocoding. But I knew the songs were going to be good going into it. I just really don’t like musicals. And “Being for the Benefit of Mr. Kite!” is the last song I would put in a movie.

Illuminatus! makes me wish I was alive during the sixties. Across the Universe makes me wonder if Paul McCartney is rolling over in his grave.

A story about "Speaker for the Dead (Ender, Book 2)"

nobody@allconsuming.net (mwshook) — Thu, 24 Jan 2008 04:00:32 GMT

Speaker for the Dead (Ender, Book 2)

by Orson Scott Card

Sometime in college, an acquaintance told me that the main Ender series sucked, and that I should skip straight to Ender’s Shadow. I just finished the latest installment in the Shadow Saga (Shadow of the Giant) and was blown away by what an ethically challenging book it was. I had never seen such big issues (future human interactions with alien species) effortlessly mingled with “medium sized” issues (a three-way war between Islam, China, and India) and “small” issues (a mother’s love for her children)

I was especially affected by this passage:

Mine mine mine. That was the curse and power of human beings—that what they saw and loved, they had to have. The could share it with other people but only if they conceived of those people as being somehow their own. What we own is ours. What you own should also be ours. In fact, you own nothing, if we want it. Because you are nothing. We are the real people, you are only posing as people in order to try to deprive us of what God means us to have.

Speaker for the Dead introduces a concept of categorizing things that are foreign to us. “Framlings” are humans of a foreign culture. “Varelse” are animals or non-intelligent alien species. We could probably include dogs or chimps as varelse. Although harming them is frowned upon, under specific circumstances we might sacrifice varelse for research or population control. “Raman” are intelligent aliens that we could possibly communicate with and achieve peace.

Humans do not have a good track record dealing with framlings. I don’t have to belabor the point that when two human cultures meet, it usually does not take long for things to degenerate into bloodshed. We don’t seem wired to accept humans of other cultures as real full members of our same species. Which is inherently ridiculous, as we are all biologically equivalent.

We can only imagine the culture shock that comes with meeting telepathic insects, or plant/animal hybrids (as in these books). The challenge for humanity to establish a dialog with a truly alien culture is daunting, and even a bit depressing. We can’t even achieve peace on our own planet.

In Speaker, Card uses a mean-spirited alcoholic abusive father as a parallel for his aliens. Here is a man, even of the same culture as his neighbors, who becomes varelse in their eyes. The people avoid him and are afraid of him. But they do not reprimand him, because as an animal, they have no moral expectations of him.

Similarly, we do not need to look to things like the Holocaust to find examples of dehumanization, of people being turned to varelse. It happens at any time we are prejudiced or afraid of someone foreign. In the last week, this book has colored how I view all human interaction around me, especially at the hospital. (just search “hospital dehumanizing” on google. ) I see this especially with the elderly.

Basically, I think the whole book is an extension of the Parable of the Good Samaritan . One must ignore prejudices between groups and take action to help others. I think in all interactions with people of different cultures, I must ask myself, “am I treating this person as a neighbor, or as a varelse? If I have lost sight of this person’s inherent humanity, what am I stumbling on? What can I do to regain the common ground?”

In Ender’s Game, the first time humans made contact with an alien species, we destroyed them completely. Hopefully, if we ever do meet extraterrestrials, we will be at a point in our history where we can all survive the encounter.

A review of "Dark Harvest"

nobody@allconsuming.net (mwshook) — Wed, 02 Jan 2008 03:09:56 GMT

Dark Harvest

by Norman Partridge

During our last trip to Universal Studios’ “Halloween Horror Nights,” Missy and I were commenting on how the holiday has changed over the years.

Traditionally, the scary stuff was ghosts, goblins, witches, vampires. It was all about the supernatural. Now the seasonal movies are slasher flicks like Saw. It all seems to be about serial killers and violence for violence’s sake. We miss the old-school Halloween.

Then, a friend lent me Dark Harvest. This is a novel that is dark, mysterious, violent and ruthlessly suspenseful. It is hip, literate, and relevant. It sweats ‘60s teenage machismo, B-movie attitude and small-town desperation. The villian is truly original, truly horrifying, and is a freakin’ JACK O’ LANTERN!

Finally, someone out there has the cojones to spin a good scary yarn with an honest-to-God Halloween monster! The story is unashamedly supernatural, undeniably frightening, and had me smiling the whole time.

It was recommended to me because I introduced my friend to American Gods. It is very much in the same vein as that book. I think any Gaiman fan would enjoy Dark Harvest

A story about "Sixty Days and Counting"

nobody@allconsuming.net (mwshook) — Sun, 02 Dec 2007 01:05:35 GMT

Sixty Days and Counting

by Kim Stanley Robinson

I’m halfway through the last installment of Kim Stanley Robinson’s Forty/Fifty/Sixty trilogy. I love this author, and this may be his masterpiece. A couple morsels of food for thought:

The Department of Energy has an Intelligence Office. You couldn’t make this stuff up. Also, a quote from a homeless biology professor talking with a common homeless Vietnam vet:

“You should be a Buddhist,” Frank said. “You should talk to my Buddhist friends.”
“Yeah right. I don’t go in for that hippie shit.”
“It’s not hippie shit.”
“Yeah it is. How would you know.”
“I talk to them is how I know. I lived with them.”
“Oh. Well. That explains it then. But it also proves my point about them being hippies. I mean you don’t just live with people, do you.”

A review of "The Simpsons Movie"

nobody@allconsuming.net (mwshook) — Tue, 31 Jul 2007 20:22:29 GMT

The Simpsons Movie

by David Silverman

(posted from All Consuming)

A. It was really, really funny.

B. I laughed my head off.

C. It kept me laughing for 2 hours.

D. It didn’t really leave an impression on me.

I was hoping for one of those movies that is so amazing, it’s in my thoughts for days to come. It was two hours of classic Simpsons humor, and there’s certainly nothing wrong with that. But as Homer said, I paid $8 for something I could have gotten for free on TV.

A review of "Hot Fuzz"

nobody@allconsuming.net (mwshook) — Tue, 15 May 2007 06:40:14 GMT

Hot Fuzz

by Edgar Wright

The best parodies make fun of a genre, yet are also an entertaining work within that genre. Examples include Shaun of the Dead (of course), the South Park Movie (musicals), and to a lesser extent Galaxy Quest.

Hot Fuzz was an amazing action movie. I’m a bigger fan of action than horror, so I liked it even more than Shaun. It does crack me up that nerdy little Simon Pegg has gone from ironic accidental badass to unabashed badass.

A story about "Fifty Degrees Below"

nobody@allconsuming.net (mwshook) — Thu, 05 Apr 2007 01:59:40 GMT

Fifty Degrees Below

by Kim Stanley Robinson

This entry is crazy, a combination of a GIP and an allconsuming post. This book is the sequel to Forty Signs of Rain by Kim Stanley Robinson. In the first book, there was some discussion of the Prisoner’s Dilemma, a game theory problem that looks at strategies chosen by two prisoners asked to rat each other out. The game becomes interesting when computers are used to run through this game repeatedly.

If you cooperate, you both get a small punishment. If you both chose to defect (against your cellmate), you get a moderate punishment. If you choose to defect and your partner chooses to cooperate, you get no punishment and your partner gets a huge punishment. This hypothetical choice is given repeatedly, and you have a memory.

The “rational” choice would be always-cooperate, but this guarantees a small punishment in the best case. If your partner defects, you get screwed. If play always-defect, you will never get screwed and never get the worst punishment, but this will piss off your partner, causing them to never cooperate. Simulations have been made into the best way to play, and it is to always copy your partner’s previous move, with some random extra cooperates thrown in. (Tit-for-Tat with forgiveness)

This game has shown similarities to real-world behavior like arms races and sports. (See the Wikipedia link, it’s really interesting)

In Fifty Degrees Below a character looks at a huge gas guzzling SUV and notes how driving one is like playing environmental always-defect. This struck me as so true, I decided to make an icon.

While I’d like to consider myself an environmentalist, I’m really just a hypocrite. I don’t really make any effort to conserve anything. When I was a teenager, I got a huge gas-guzzling truck. At the time, gas was 90 cents and I didn’t really think about these things. I could have traded it in sometime the last ten years, especially after college when I was no longer transporting a bass drum section (drums and players included). But I like the comfort of sitting in a large vehicle (I’m 6’4”), I move to new apartments a lot, I’m emotionally attached to it, and I can afford the gas. Although I don’t openly say “I’m a hypocrite who loves my big vehicle,” I’ll acknowledge this to anyone who asks. Sadly, I’ve been playing a defect game for years; I just didn’t know the terminology.

A story about "Watchmen (Absolute Edition)"

nobody@allconsuming.net (mwshook) — Sat, 10 Mar 2007 15:27:49 GMT

Watchmen (Absolute Edition)

by Alan Moore

I’m re-reading Watchmen, so I decided to make an icon.

A review of "Brick"

nobody@allconsuming.net (mwshook) — Mon, 11 Sep 2006 02:46:26 GMT

Brick

(Posted from All Consuming)

Brick is by far the most engaging movie I’ve seen this year. I’ve seen a lot of fun stuff, and a lot of fluff lately. Serious movies have lately either depressed or disappointed me.

We had seen trailers for this in other DVD’s we rented, and wanted desperately to see it. I think we’ve checked every week for a month to see if Blockbuster had it in.

This is a bit of a concept movie. It’s a gritty noir whodunnit set in a present-day high school. The setting of a high school is a bit arbitrary, in the same way that mysteries are sometimes set in the 40’s, or 18th Century France, or Space. By having this mystery play out at a high school, it gave a set up for the needed social strata, complex relationships, and arbitrary limits.

At the same time, this was not a teen drama. The diologue was fast paced, hard to follow, and straight out of the 30’s. These teens didn’t really go to class, or have parents, or really even exist in the “real world.” It was a vehicle for a cool mystery and a WHOLE LOT of style. The style was completely engrossing for the whole duration of the movie.

A review of "Snakes on a Plane"

nobody@allconsuming.net (mwshook) — Sat, 19 Aug 2006 15:51:57 GMT

Snakes on a Plane

by David R. Ellis

(Posted from Allconsuming )

Missy and I saw Snakes on a Plane last night, and it was the most fun I’ve ever had at a movie. The theatre was huge, but only half full. Still the crowd was really into it, lots of cheering and yelling.

Everything about SOAP was pure fun.

A review of "Superman Returns"

nobody@allconsuming.net (mwshook) — Thu, 27 Jul 2006 02:14:51 GMT

Superman Returns

by Bryan Singer

I’m not sure why I went into this movie with low expectations, but I did. I was surprised, this movie was excellent! In this current era of superhero re-inventions and re-reinventions, I think it was actually bold of them to make this movie a continuation of 70s-80’s series. I was surprised they tried to make the new superman look so much like Christopher Reeve.

Kevin Spacey really was great as Lex. He annoys me so much, I forget how good he is at playing unlikable characters. He should stick to bad guys exclusively.

My biggest beef with this movie was that Superman was too powerful. But when I remember back, that was always my beef with the Superman comics. Other superheroes have limits, he seems to have a random conglomeration of undefeatable powers. But I guess that’s just who he is.

Four Stars

A review of "Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest"

nobody@allconsuming.net (mwshook) — Thu, 27 Jul 2006 02:06:53 GMT

Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest

by Gore Verbinski

Not as good as the first, but I digged it. I feel like it had been a while since I’d seen a movie that was actually exciting.

A common sin of modern action/adventure movies are the “Twenty Minute Action Scene That Really Lasts Way Too Long, Is Not Related To The Plot, And Gets Boring After Awhile.” POC2 had a few of those scenes.

Still, when all was said and done, it was an extremely enjoyable movie, and I can’t wait for the third one.

A review of "Shopgirl"

nobody@allconsuming.net (mwshook) — Wed, 26 Jul 2006 16:10:53 GMT

Shopgirl

by Anand Tucker

I’m not a big fan of the serious romantic comedies, but sometimes Missy picks out one I enjoy. It had some really funny parts, Jason Schwartzman’s character was hilarious, and it was a bit touching.

Three Stars

A review of "Brokeback Mountain (Widescreen Edition)"

nobody@allconsuming.net (mwshook) — Wed, 26 Jul 2006 16:06:02 GMT

Brokeback Mountain (Widescreen Edition)

by Ang Lee

Really, I feel that I have been lied-to by The Hype. I was told that this was going to be a Gay Cowboy movie. As the movie began, were they driving cattle? No, they were herding sheep. It was a Gay Shepherd movie, and who in their right mind would want to watch that?

In all seriousness, I assumed it would at least be a good drama. But it was very boring and slow, and quickly lost my interest. I left the room to work on my computer after about half an hour and left Missy alone to sit through the all the 45 second dramatic pauses.

A review of "Nacho Libre"

nobody@allconsuming.net (mwshook) — Sun, 18 Jun 2006 04:29:41 GMT

Nacho Libre

by Jared Hess

(Posted from All Consuming)

Today, we plopped down our $11 to see Jack Black in Nacho Libre . I’ve been known to thoroughly enjoy stupid movies. In my “stupid movie” category, I put such classics as Happy Gilmore, Zoolander, and Anchorman. Nacho Libre is stupider than all of them.

By the end of the movie, my smile muscles and gut-bustage-preventing muscles were hurting. Sure, the movie is offensive to Catholics, Mexicans, and Catholic Mexicans. But between The Da Vinci Code and the House Republicans, those groups have bigger things to worry about.

Nacho Libre is full of slapstick the likes of which I haven’t seen since The Three Stooges. The dialogue, the facial expressions, the body language were all perfect. And Black’s sidekick Héctor Jiménez was a true find. I want to see this movie again and again. I can’t wait until Comedy Central inevitably picks it up and shows it 4 times a weekend.

A review of "Anansi Boys"

nobody@allconsuming.net (mwshook) — Sun, 18 Jun 2006 04:15:23 GMT

Anansi Boys

by Neil Gaiman

This sequel to American Gods recaptured a lot of the humorous aspects of the original while keeping the story light and engaging. Where American Gods was epic complex and multi-faceted, Anansi Boys was a simple, well-told story.

I’m looking forward to many, many more novels in the “Gods” universe.

A review of "The Magic Numbers"

nobody@allconsuming.net (mwshook) — Sun, 18 Jun 2006 04:06:32 GMT

The Magic Numbers

by The Magic Numbers

(Posted from All Consuming)

The Magic Numbers are a great live band and this is a very fun album. I don’t seem to enjoy it as much as Missy, though. She can’t stop listening to it. I’m a sucker for boy-girl harmony, and the band has seemed to capture a very enjoyable sound.

A review of "Forty Signs of Rain"

nobody@allconsuming.net (mwshook) — Mon, 12 Jun 2006 16:17:52 GMT

Forty Signs of Rain

by Kim Stanley Robinson

... by Kim Stanley Robinson
Posted from All Consuming

He’s one of my favorite authors, but this was not among his best work. It was interesting, but up until the last few chapters, it was simply boring. The characters were interesting enough for me to care what happens to them, so I may end up finishing the trilogy eventually. But the second book will have to pick up the pace.

Books about lobbyists and scientific beureaucrats aren’t always the most exciting stories in the world.

A story about "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy"

nobody@allconsuming.net (mwshook) — Sat, 28 May 2005 17:41:33 GMT

The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

by Garth Jennings

It was quite enjoyable, and I plan to see it again on DVD.