Miscellaneous reviews
Feb. 3rd, 2013 06:07 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
alobear Lincoln:
Very good film, excellent performances, particularly from Tommy Lee Jones, who provided a lot of the humour (along with an unrecognisable James Spader as Mr Bilbo). The film was long, but it didn't seem that way, with plenty of thought-provoking drama throughout.
Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows - Part Two:
I never went to see this in the cinema, as I decided I didn't want the suffer the trauma of seeing what I'd read in the book writ large on screen. Since a couple of weeks before Christmas, though, Dave and I have been working our way through the whole series, and it would have been weird not to finish it off, so I bit the bullet and settled in for the doom. In the end, the film wasn't as traumatic as I'd feared, and I actually thought that was a bit of a weakness. The deaths that had so affected me in the book were rather glossed over in the film, and were somewhat diminished as a consequence. So, I didn't want to watch the film as I thought it would be upsetting, and then I was annoyed that I wasn't more upset by it. No pleasing some people, apparently.
Flight:
I had to do a bit of a paradigm shift at the cinema this morning. I'd got it into my head that we were going to see Hyde Park on Hudson, and then it turned out we were watching Flight - bit of a difference! It was very good, though less about the plane crash and more about the protagonist's struggle with alcoholism than I'd expected. There was one scene in the second half that was really brilliantly done, when he was presented with a fridge full of alcohol, on the eve of an event he *really* needed to be sober for. His decision-making at that moment was very effectively conveyed and very realistically concluded, I thought. A towering performance from Denzel Washington, with scene-stealing support from John Goodman.
Mindstar Rising by Peter F Hamilton and Altered Carbon by Richard Morgan:
I've had a bit of a confusing week, listening to the former in audio format and reading the latter in hard copy - I kept getting them mixed up! Both are future set, and have protagonists with a military background who now do private investigation. Both protagonists have access to chemicals that they can inject into their brains at will to give them special abilities. On one trip home during the week, both contained graphic scenes of drug-enhanced sex and, on the following afternoon, both protagonists were captured and tortured by the bad guys.
Mindstar had more in depth characterisation and generally more likeable characters, Carbon had more graphic violence and more existential consideration of identity.
There was a scandalous moment in Mindstar where the narrator - Toby Longworth, one of my two all-time favourite narrators - made a rather major error, which was rather off-putting. A character who had been Japanese for two thirds of the book suddenly turned Liverpudlian for the last third. I expect better of Mr Longworth, who is always fantastic at making all the characters distinct.
With Altered Carbon, I occasionally questioned Richard Morgan's ability to write women realistically - the actions and reactions of a couple of his female characters struck me as less than credible at times. Also, I felt that the concept of being able to store your personality and have it downloaded into a new body was introduced with the primary purpose of allowing more intense violence in the narrative. It also actually undermined the tension somewhat - if it doesn't really matter if your characters die, as they can just be re-downloaded, it rather lowers the stakes.
Still, I really enjoyed both books overall and fully intend to pursue both series - though not at the same time!
The John Soane Museum:
We spent a very pleasant couple of hours here yesterday - the best adjective I can come up with to describe it is overwhelming. Every time you turn around there is *more stuff*. I mean, I knew Soane had an extensive collection, but it just got a bit silly towards the end. The best bit was the picture room, where the walls opened out on hinges to reveal several layers of more and more pictures. Well worth a visit, though do take a deep breath before you go in.
We were particularly amused that all the pictures and statues of Soane himself had him looking very cheery, while the portrait of his wife was decidedly miserable. I can imagine she got rather tired of him continually coming back from foreign trips with *yet more stuff*.
Finally for this week - two unfinished books (I've decided to categorise these differently this year, to make the stats more accurate):
UNFINISHED - Empire in Black and Gold by Adrian Tchaikovsky:
I read six books in two weeks in the first half of January (admittedly they were al quite short, but that's still pretty good going) - so, when it then took me an entire week to read 100 pages of this, I decided to give it up as lost. It wasn't bad, per se, just not engaging enough to make me want to spend a lot of time reading it. Standard fantasy rite of passage story, with a disparate group of youngsters going on an important mission together.
UNFINISHED - Homecoming by Cynthia Voigt:
I perhaps didn't give this as much of a chance as I could have - I only got 50 pages in - but the entire premise annoyed me so much that I just couldn't get on with it at all. Four children aged thirteen down to six are abandoned by their mother on a journey to their unknown great aunt. The oldest decides not to alert any adults to their situation in case they are split up and put into foster care, so they embark upon a several hundred mile journey on foot with about then dollars to their names. They have a living relative, they know her address - no social services system is going to put them into foster care when there is such an obvious person to hand them off to - all they would have needed to do is ask a policeman to give them a lift, and the whole book would have been over in five pages. I'm probably being unfair - I just couldn't get past it.
Very good film, excellent performances, particularly from Tommy Lee Jones, who provided a lot of the humour (along with an unrecognisable James Spader as Mr Bilbo). The film was long, but it didn't seem that way, with plenty of thought-provoking drama throughout.
Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows - Part Two:
I never went to see this in the cinema, as I decided I didn't want the suffer the trauma of seeing what I'd read in the book writ large on screen. Since a couple of weeks before Christmas, though, Dave and I have been working our way through the whole series, and it would have been weird not to finish it off, so I bit the bullet and settled in for the doom. In the end, the film wasn't as traumatic as I'd feared, and I actually thought that was a bit of a weakness. The deaths that had so affected me in the book were rather glossed over in the film, and were somewhat diminished as a consequence. So, I didn't want to watch the film as I thought it would be upsetting, and then I was annoyed that I wasn't more upset by it. No pleasing some people, apparently.
Flight:
I had to do a bit of a paradigm shift at the cinema this morning. I'd got it into my head that we were going to see Hyde Park on Hudson, and then it turned out we were watching Flight - bit of a difference! It was very good, though less about the plane crash and more about the protagonist's struggle with alcoholism than I'd expected. There was one scene in the second half that was really brilliantly done, when he was presented with a fridge full of alcohol, on the eve of an event he *really* needed to be sober for. His decision-making at that moment was very effectively conveyed and very realistically concluded, I thought. A towering performance from Denzel Washington, with scene-stealing support from John Goodman.
Mindstar Rising by Peter F Hamilton and Altered Carbon by Richard Morgan:
I've had a bit of a confusing week, listening to the former in audio format and reading the latter in hard copy - I kept getting them mixed up! Both are future set, and have protagonists with a military background who now do private investigation. Both protagonists have access to chemicals that they can inject into their brains at will to give them special abilities. On one trip home during the week, both contained graphic scenes of drug-enhanced sex and, on the following afternoon, both protagonists were captured and tortured by the bad guys.
Mindstar had more in depth characterisation and generally more likeable characters, Carbon had more graphic violence and more existential consideration of identity.
There was a scandalous moment in Mindstar where the narrator - Toby Longworth, one of my two all-time favourite narrators - made a rather major error, which was rather off-putting. A character who had been Japanese for two thirds of the book suddenly turned Liverpudlian for the last third. I expect better of Mr Longworth, who is always fantastic at making all the characters distinct.
With Altered Carbon, I occasionally questioned Richard Morgan's ability to write women realistically - the actions and reactions of a couple of his female characters struck me as less than credible at times. Also, I felt that the concept of being able to store your personality and have it downloaded into a new body was introduced with the primary purpose of allowing more intense violence in the narrative. It also actually undermined the tension somewhat - if it doesn't really matter if your characters die, as they can just be re-downloaded, it rather lowers the stakes.
Still, I really enjoyed both books overall and fully intend to pursue both series - though not at the same time!
The John Soane Museum:
We spent a very pleasant couple of hours here yesterday - the best adjective I can come up with to describe it is overwhelming. Every time you turn around there is *more stuff*. I mean, I knew Soane had an extensive collection, but it just got a bit silly towards the end. The best bit was the picture room, where the walls opened out on hinges to reveal several layers of more and more pictures. Well worth a visit, though do take a deep breath before you go in.
We were particularly amused that all the pictures and statues of Soane himself had him looking very cheery, while the portrait of his wife was decidedly miserable. I can imagine she got rather tired of him continually coming back from foreign trips with *yet more stuff*.
Finally for this week - two unfinished books (I've decided to categorise these differently this year, to make the stats more accurate):
UNFINISHED - Empire in Black and Gold by Adrian Tchaikovsky:
I read six books in two weeks in the first half of January (admittedly they were al quite short, but that's still pretty good going) - so, when it then took me an entire week to read 100 pages of this, I decided to give it up as lost. It wasn't bad, per se, just not engaging enough to make me want to spend a lot of time reading it. Standard fantasy rite of passage story, with a disparate group of youngsters going on an important mission together.
UNFINISHED - Homecoming by Cynthia Voigt:
I perhaps didn't give this as much of a chance as I could have - I only got 50 pages in - but the entire premise annoyed me so much that I just couldn't get on with it at all. Four children aged thirteen down to six are abandoned by their mother on a journey to their unknown great aunt. The oldest decides not to alert any adults to their situation in case they are split up and put into foster care, so they embark upon a several hundred mile journey on foot with about then dollars to their names. They have a living relative, they know her address - no social services system is going to put them into foster care when there is such an obvious person to hand them off to - all they would have needed to do is ask a policeman to give them a lift, and the whole book would have been over in five pages. I'm probably being unfair - I just couldn't get past it.
