I hope the book’s a more in-depth and less black-and-white exploration of the themes the audience is so clumsily whacked over the head with in this film version of the story. The movie was a bit of a snore-fest.

Take this with a grain of salt, for it was a few months ago that I borrowed this book from the library, but as someone interested in building a smaller, more interesting-looking home, nothing in this really stuck out as terribly interesting or unique to me. Some nice photographs, but it’s more aimed at people looking for ideas towards building a fairly standard – if prettier, and (arguably) more environmentally-friendly – “family-sized” home. I flipped through it once in bed and pointed out a few pictures as attractive, but scarcely read any of the text and wasn’t ever excited about or drawn back to it before the time came to return it.

Some okay lines but the different premise (lesbian decides to act as surrogate mother for sister with fertility problems) does nothing to detract from the fact that, at the base of it, we’re watching here just one more the same old haters-learn-the-error-of-their-ways storyline that comprises one of the two or three staples into which 98% of the “lesbian movie” genre continues to fit. Its message isn’t something anyone could complain about—of course tolerance is something that a lot of people could certainly stand to learn—but since its target audience (or at least the only audience it’s going to attract) knows already that Intolerance Is Bad, I just wonder why we continue to produce things like this…

A lesbian movie that laughs at stereotypes rather than either perpetuate them or desperately, earnestly refute them. Awesome!

I’m not a Dixie Chicks fan—mostly due to an admittedly adolescent kneejerk tendency to reject most of anything my parents listen to, something I’d already become aware of as being lazy and unfair, and seeing this only added fuel to that fire—but was invited to watch this by a friend who is and who thought I’d appreciate the content anyway. She was right. For me, very interesting material on what it means to be a shade of grey (specifically here, having a progressive opinion whilst proudly claiming membership of a musical genre typically considered conservative) in an environment that can’t see beyond black and white.

I’m never going to be a fan of very much of country music—I’ve ridden in my father’s car with my eyes wide open in horror at some of the sexist, heterosexist and just plain uninteresting subject matter of the majority of what’s played on his favourite station—but I’m always, and particularly in this case because the country music topic challenges me personally to look at my own views, going to be interested in artists who rock the boat with these ostensible contradictions and thereby prompt one’s mind to open a little more.

I don’t disagree with the subject matter, but there is such a thing as too much Michael Moore…. or maybe it’s just that his narrative style comes across better in spoken/documentary format. Worth a look, but best read in small doses for that reason.

Lame-o. You could give it a star or two for the pretty factor if it wasn’t so blatantly ripping off ‘The Matrix’ (and doing a far worse job of it). The storyline, however, was completely uninspired: unoriginal for one thing, but also just very simple, like it was considered the unfortunately necessary coathanger they needed to hang some pretty shots on in order to get them into a cinema. Most of all, though, I found it a really disappointing addition to a genre that generally uses futuristic or similar settings to explore and inspire thought about issues being faced at present. This did none of that… although this probably a good thing given the very simplistic and black-and-white Good Vs Evil plot going on in it. No greys to think about, no contradictions or challenges or character growth or any of that “human condition” stuff, at all. Which is what in the end makes it so unbelievable and uninteresting.

Only two patterns in it I’d actually wear, for a start (who’d knit a baseball cap or a cowboy hat, really? Others are just silly, good for dress-ups for a child maybe but not for wearing), but also the reader (knitter) should be warned that the designer doesn’t make it easy to substitute alternative yarns for the ones she’s suggested. Which mightn’t be quite so annoying if the hat I wanted to make didn’t call for a yarn that’s now off the market in Canada and even proved impossible to track down in the suggested colours in the US. As is, she’s given lengths of yarn required by just tallying up the total lengths of the balls of suggested yarns; if a hat requires three colours and each ball of yarn in the brand she’s suggested comes in 200 yard balls, she’s going to tell you you need 600 yards of yarn for it, even though 600 yards of yarn ain’t gonna be necessary for any hat short of one you’re making for an elephant. Nuts! Found it hard to trust her as a pattern writer, which makes any project difficult and in the end just stressful.

Dragged a bit towards the end and could have done with being shorter, I think, because of it, but was still fascinating.

Recycled jokes, one-dimensional characters and no character development, and a strange cocktail of (not very funny) comedy cum Michael Mooreish political satire cum John Grisham thriller. Didn’t work for me at all. Much laughter from the rest of the cinema made me think it was a nationality thing even though I’d been informed by the friend who dragged me along what the premise meant given the existence of a similar celebrity character in the US (I’m Australian, was watching it in Canada), but my flatmate told me later the critics slammed it too. Re the laughing from others, I wouldn’t take that to mean anything good either. I’ve since learnt that people here just seem to laugh a lot in the cinema. It’s like having a laugh track on a prime time comedy: it erupts periodically but it doesn’t mean it’s funny. :P