gee zack, you made a movie with only five colours! what up

i am on a mission to read through all of philip k. dick’s work, because when he’s on, the man is untouchable. most of these stories though, written at the beginning of his career, are pretty weak sauce. predictable, clumsy, and written with a decided lack of style.

there’s a handful of good stories: paycheck contains one of the most brilliant plot mechanisms in any short story, and there’s a general upwards tick in quality in the last quarter, but most of these stories are pretty forgettable.

i really wanted to dig this, but i just don’t get it. the covers of this book are practically painted with pull-quotes lauding its rich, original satire, and it’s a great idea and all (corporate re-branding of the iraq war (an analogue in this case) as the ultimate sexy peak life experience) but for the occasional chuckle and good bits, there’s a shit load of soap operatics that i ultimately really didn’t care about.

nice enough, but pretty superfluous. i don’t really see the point of this existing in the long run. is anyone going to watch this again over re-reading the book?

(if you are, hate. hate and death to you.)

i keep falling asleep after the first three songs. normally i’ll fall asleep a couple times when i’m first starting to listen to something, but i don’t think i’ve ever listened to something so many times and covered so little. too relaxing i guess?

this is not very good!

i liked the first volume in a shallow entertainment sort of way… it didn’t really add up to much in terms of characters, etc. (they’re quirky! woah) but i was interested to see where the master plot was headed.

this one just kind of drove me over the line, though. the art is all gorgeous, but the obnoxious writing tics here drove me nuts, especially the dialogue. i don’t mind cleverness, but this is pretentious, clumsy bullshit that doesn’t pass muster for cleverness. and man, i am not afeared of the profanity (i adore the big lebowski), but i have never enjoyed overuse of the f-bomb less. on top of that: those dreadful monologues that open most every issue attempting to offer some deep observations (wow, thanks for educating us about the compelling drama of class struggle, immigrants and the dark secrets of america wrapped up in the convenience store there), in tangent with that the fact that the writer seems to think he’s producing something important with things to say when he’s barely capable of writing a decent thriller, and the lack of story! really that’s what killed it for me. i like spooky mythologies that slowly unravel, but that really only works if you have actual stories to tell in the meantime, here things just happen, in a spectacularly meandering fashion at that, and don’t tell me that’s life, because this book has nothing to do with life what-so-ever.

I think it will maybe take me a couple more viewings to absorb the actual content of the movie, but god DAMN is this movie ever gorgeous.

a little bit of a slog, sometimes, through a bunch of superhero fighting bullshit and extended, vaguely uninteresting plot threads, but there’s a reasonable amount of amusement and ideas to be had. when travis charest draws, it’s pretty—he seems like a more refined and european jim lee (and therefore is better than jim lee, ha).

tao is the best, though. you maybe should read it just for tao.

i wouldn’t buy it or read it again unless it was for some kind of analysis of alan moore’s work.

i picked this up because i had never read a stephen king novel and read it in the space of a couple days, and i suppose it was sufficiently gripping for me to want to finish it, but just, no.

some of the ideas are good and some of the characters are interesting, mostly the stuff revolving around carrie’s mom and her fanaticism and repulsion with sex and her body in general, but as a whole the book does not work at all.

the constant references to outside sources and quoting of authoritative books on the subject of “what happened at prom night!!!!!” are basically pleasant, mildly interesting filler for most of the book, but then when shit goes down and carrie goes bezerk at the high school, the book completely pulls away from it and falls apart. it feels a persistent and obnoxious need to distance itself from the actual interesting events going on at the high school, and dances around it in what is probably supposed to be ‘the building of suspense’ but is pretty much just a chore.

so yeah, not that great. maybe i should have picked a different novel for my first stephen king book. any suggestions?

(spoilers, i guess.)

I’m pretty baffled by this, and I’m sorry this is so long but this movie just infuriates me.

Some people hate critics and established critical consensus, but I appreciate the existence of a canon of sorts, something to point me out to good movies, and usually I agree that they are, indeed, good.

But not this one.

I don’t mean to completely dismiss this, because there are parts of it that I enjoyed. Alec Guinness is fun, a good performance, some of the interaction between the heist team is funny, and I love the giddy out-of-nowhere absurdity of the spiral staircase descent.

But, man, this is just not a good movie. It’s supposed to be a comedy, I think, but there’s not really anything significantly funny in it. Presumably there is supposed to be humor in the ineptness of the thieves, but they really aren’t inept enough to be humorous. And it’s not interesting as a drama, either, because until the last twenty minutes of the movie, there’s basically no conflict. Yes, they have a few minor hitches in their little heist, but they’re so minor that there’s essentially no tension.

When things finally go wrong, in Paris, it just seems contrived. Sure, they chase after the girls who have the gold Eiffel towers. Sure they have trouble getting onto the boat because they are not prepared at all to board it. But when they’re attempting to get their passports stamped and Holland gets his out but Pendlebury can’t find his, Holland waits for him? Really? When the boat could leave at any minute, possibly condemning them to prison? There’s a line between what is funny and dramatic and what is contrived and aggravating, and that scene crosses it.

I just don’t understand. What is funny here? Where is the great wit of the script? Some of it is amusing, but it just wasn’t enough to keep me interested, and I’m not someone to write off old movies for being boring.