I fell asleep halfway through the first “Pirates” movie. Same thing happened with this one. Woke up after a nice nap, only to find that the movie still wasn’t over.

Too long. Too many stunts, not enough story. No resolution to any of the major plot points. The grotesqueness of the Flying Dutchman crew consistently grossed me out. And I did not like the cliffhanger ending at all.

I felt conflicted about this movie. The best I can say about it is that Pixar did a fairly decent job with a story that was utterly formulaic and unoriginal. Although I liked the movie well enough, I felt this nagging sense of faint disappointment. I thought that the movie could have been better, but on the other hand, I couldn’t see how it could have been better, given the triteness of the script material. Still worth a viewing, but not up to usual Pixar standards for freshness and fun.

One unqualified positive comment. I watched it with my boyfriend (who calls all animated features “cartoons”), and during the opening moments of the film, he looked at me and said “You told me this was a cartoon; this isn’t a cartoon, it’s a real movie.” The animation was that good.

Probably the worst movie I’ve seen all year. First of all, Milla Jovovich’s character seemed like a rehash of the one she played in the Resident Evil movies (particularly Res. Evil 2), and the story itself seemed similar. Second, the dialogue was brutally awful. I mean, really really really really bad. Third, the acting sucked (with the exception of the dude playing the friendly, helpful scientist guy—my annoyance at the movie abated a little whenever he was on the screen). Fourth, the plot was incomprehensible. Things happened, but they just didn’t make sense. The movie finished and I felt like I had no grasp of what the point of it was or what it was really about. Fifth, the soundtrack was irritating. Sixth, for what I assume was supposed to be an action move, the “action” scenes were boring as hell, and ridiculously poorly choreographed. Seventh, it felt like the movie was actively trying to substitute style for substance; it was like the makers knew it was crap and were hoping to distract us from its crappiness by making it look cool. They failed miserably.

Overall, a really terrible movie. Nothing whatsoever to recommend it. Avoid at all costs.

Ake is Wole Soyinka’s memoir of his childhood in Egbaland, Nigeria. As I neared the end of the book, I began to realise that the events he was narrating, involving a protest organised by a woman’s group his mother was a member of, were reminiscent of something else I’d read recently in other books, both histories of Africa. And the name of the leader of the protest, Ransome-Kuti, sounded awfully familiar too. It only took a few minutes to research for me to realise that Soyinka’s aunt, his Beere, was the renowned Funmilayo Ransome-Kuti, women’s activist, anti-colonial crusader, and mother of Beko Ransome-Kuti, Olikoye Ransome-Kuti (who is briefly mentioned in the book), and of course the famous Fela Kuti. And the protest he writes about was indeed a seminal moment in Nigerian history, made more real to me somehow by his matter-of-fact narrative.

Reading the book, putting the pieces together and making the connections got me thinking about history and how history is created. Ake is a simple memoir, about young Wole, his friends, his family, the place and time in which he lived, the people he lived with. It just so happened that those people, in that place and time were changing the face of colonial Nigeria. They were doing extraorinary things, but Soyinka doesn’t write about it like he’s relating History, like he’s telling us about amazing auspicious events, he’s just telling us what happened to be going on around him.

Anyway, I’ll stop babbling on. Soyinka himself expressed it much better than I could, in this interview:

...There was an ordinariness about it because it was taking place with my aunt, with my mother, with their womenfolk, with my formidable uncle who also treated me as a friend. So there was a whole domestic ambiance. And at the same time, there was this epochal quality about the whole thing. And perhaps that sense of proportion, that combination of ordinariness and monumentalism has stayed with me as far as history-making is concerned, an awareness that history very often is made up of the most mundane events which grow into formidable historic proportions.

Now that I’m reading more and more non-fiction, I am making a real effort to read more consciously and more actively. This is the first book I’ve tackled using my new approach (using advice from Adler’s “How to Read a Book”). Read it through once the normal way, and now I’m trying to read it more analytically. It’s been slow going, but worthwhile.

One outcome of my effort with this book so far, is that it confirmed something that I felt when I tried (three times) to finish Carter’s “Integrity”. He has a tendency to belabour a point; many times in my reading and my notes, I found myself thinking But he already said that? Why does he have to say it again (and again and again)? Despite that, it’s an interesting book. I find that Carter’s books and articles make me want to think about them, to read them carefully and thoughtfully, and that’s why I chose one of his books to kick off my little reading project. When I’m done with this, I want to tackle some bell hooks, specifically “Rock My Soul: Black People and Self Esteem”, which I recently bought.

I recently finished reading The Parish Behind God’s Back : The Changing Culture of Rural Barbados, a book about life in (as you can guess from the title) rural Barbados, specifically life in St. Lucy, Barbados’ northernmost parish. Written by American anthropologists George Gmelch and Sharon Bonn Gmelch from Union College, the book was written partly to fill the need for “an up-to-date ethnography of an eastern Caribbean culture” for students in the authors’ anthropology courses. The Gmelches have brought students to Barbados since 1983 (I’m not sure if the trips continue today), they’ve stayed with host families in St. Lucy and other northern parishes, and the book draws extensively on their experiences and research during these field trips.

The book has been praised as “sensitive”, “appreciative”, “lively” and “well-written”; and in my view, these accolades are well-deserved. What I liked the most about the book is that it portrayed a Barbados I could recognise as the island I live on, not a Barbados as perceived by a couple of foreigners from a university in the States. It doesn’t portray Barbados, or Barbadians, as exotic or backward or foreign. The Gmelches take the country and the people on their own terms and write about them with respect, with affection, with honesty. And the book they’ve produced is a good one, very accessible and highly readable. Even the appendix and the annotations at the end are interesting.

The Gmelches, George in particular, have written several other articles and books about Barbados and Barbadians, among them Double Passage : The Lives of Caribbean Migrants Abroad and Back Home and, more recently, Behind the Smile : The Working Lives of Caribbean Tourism, both of which have already been added to my (ever-expanding!) Amazon wishlist.

I generally like Anne Tyler’s books very much despite the fact that there tends to be a certain same-iness about them. I guess that there are a fair number of people out there who dislike Anne Tyler’s book for precisely that reason. Digging to America deftly looks at what it’s like to be a foreigner in America and at the ideas of belonging and not (quite) belonging. It has the elements of a classic/typical Anne Tyler book, but there is something new and different about it as well. Something I can’t quite put my finger on, but something that I like very much.

P.S. As I read the descriptions of Iranian meals and culture and history, I recalled that Tyler’s late husband was himself Iranian; I think that coloured the way I read the book, because I could see a personal connection between the author and her subject and I found that quite touching.

I found this book to be disappointing; all the flattering things I heard about it led me to expect much more than I got. It was mildly interesting in parts, but I really don’t think it merited all the media adulation. It’s barely average, and I regret having spent money on it.

I can’t call this a review really, and I feel it may be a bit unfair for me to have said that this film isn’t worth consuming. I mean, I have a feeling that it is actually quite a decent film, a good film even. I’ve read reviews on Amazon where people rated the film poorly and called it/the behaviour of its characters morally depraved and despicable and disgusting. I don’t feel affronted by the film in that way. I just felt like I couldn’t appreciate it because I couldn’t relate; I found myself oscillating between finding the characters foolish and self-indulgent and annoying and not actually giving a damn. The actual squid and whale thingy was pretty cool though; I’d like to go take a look at that someday.

I bought this entirely on impulse, based on nothing more than a brief review in a British Airways in-flight magazine and the way the title struck me at first as just three random words strung together, and I’m so glad that I did. This is the first book I’ve read this year that, at its conclusion, made me feel entirely satisfied and like starting it all over again from the beginning. Really lovely book.