My review of this, as it didn’t fit at Allconsuming: http://niklasblog.com/?p=12723

This is a modern-day, serves-you-right Shakesperian reality-yet-not-reality tragedy. An extremely wealthy family is hit by an economic recession and can’t seem to fathom the human factors of life, only the glossy veneer of their former mundane existence. This might be the best view of economic horror and humanity since “Inside Job”.

This book – a collection of essays, reviews, monographs and notes, interspersed with words and their meaning as culled from his notebooks – starts off with what is often known as his best piece of non-fiction, “Both Federer And Not”, about tennis professional Roger Federer as he plays Wimbledon. To be honest, non-fiction is a wonky term here, as DFW often twisted the truth his way.

In that essay, he wrote miraculously. Sadly, I’m not much into mathematics, so that piece went away. Also, the same thing for “The U.S. Open”, which is like the Federer piece but a lot less interesting. I’m not a tennis fan.

I am, however, into film, so reading his piece on “Terminator 2” is insightful and fun. As is “Twenty-four Word Notes”, about words and their meaning. His bit about a few note-worthy prose books – “Overlooked: Five Direly Underappreciated U.S. Novels >1960” – makes me want to go seek them out.

All in all, there are a few really great bits and bobs in here. DFW’s use of language is always truly wonderful and he is really good at writing non-fiction, but I much prefer his prose to this, completely speaking.

Not my thing at all – like a coffee-table version of Dido, quite badly produced.

This is a great partner to “Paradise Lost 3”, which is the third installment of the trilogy that makes the documentary of the West Memphis Three, e.g. three young teenage boys who were judged as murderers in lieu of the real killer(s). Where this film is at its worst too skipping in time, it makes up for in spades where tempo, humanity and questioning the bad is concerned. A slew of people are interviewed and as the film progresses, we’re thrown into the arms of Terry Hobbs, the stepfather of one of the murdered boys. Well-made documentary, but should perhaps only be seen after having delved into “Paradise Lost 3”.

Bodil Malmsten is probably the greatest living author in Sweden, today. While this book is all about how she writes – which she dissects in this book, to carefully point out that her only mission is to show how she writes, not how others should write – it contains many great points, quotes and tips that can definitely aid any writer.

She stresses that a very big part of writing is that if you truly want to write, you will. And you should. And, if you’re a real writer, you have to write; she states that it’s more of a disease than a way to make money or anything else.

The tone of this book is a combination of honest and humble, and I really recommend it to anybody looking to write their own stuff.

This documentary/event is too good to miss. A child goes missing in the USA and a few years later, his family receives a call from Spain, where authorities state that they’ve found the child. I shan’t say more, but suffice to say, this has its share of suspenseful twists and turns and displays beautiful cinematography and a masterful use of tempo.

This film started out very well, not only with the straight-forward appeal of Christiane, a 12-year-old girl, who lives in Berlin and starts smoking pot at that age, but also with the intense weaving of David Bowie into the film on all musical levels. Without revealing too much of the film, I think some scenes were great, portraying a very grim existence, while other scenes were just packed with after-school special rhetoric, i.e. “do bad and you’ll go to Hell”. Great music, fine direction and a raw sense makes this a good view.

Yes, this was actually better than the first part of this trilogy; this film doesn’t show a lot of sappy scenes where all trauma lies explained – all childhood related – and the start of the film, where three parallel stories unfurl, is quite exciting. Still, it all dribbles down to one fatal flaw that people like Shakespeare, Akira Kurosawa and John Ford realised: if you use simple stereotypes and decide to tread the path that says “all bad guys must go down”, you must have a twist on it. Here, there is none, and the film rots from the half to the end, where script, tempo, dialogue, and everything else suffers but lens glares are prioritised. Oh, well.

In stupid fashion, I expected this film to be a straightforward “New Jack City” type of film, where the bad are bad, the cops are good, etc. But I did wrong. I repent. Even when watching the very start of the film, where the two main cops, Brian and Mike (Gyllenhaal and Peña, respectively), strap bug-sized cameras onto their uniforms and film everything that happens, I thought “Oh no, this won’t be done well.” But I was wrong again. And even before watching the film, I thought “Gyllenhaal? He can’t act with authority!” and even he proved me wrong. This film simply comes out right, on the strength of a good script, good direction, good music (thank you, David Sardy and Public Enemy) and actually how it was all filmed. Somehow, it reminded me of how “Starship Troopers” was shot. I simply liked the sound of the film a lot; the feel was intense and good throughout. It was a film that I didn’t want to turn off. I really like how there was no nonsense or sap about the action scenes, or what followed, really. Very nice one.