Books/TV/Music/Movie Recs, as of 1/11/11
Tuesday, January 11th, 2011 09:42 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
retsukoIn Books:
Soulless, Gail Carriger: A wonderfully funny steampunk paranormal romance with a decidedly spunky heroine and her reluctant lover. It's a little tempting to write this book off as a send-up of Victorian manners and mores, but Carriger has included enough interesting paranormal details to add a lot of authenticity to the plot. I like the heroine very much, especially since she's proactive for the most part about facing danger. A book group read, and a pretty darned good one (although I suspect the group may not think so.)
On Video:
2012: For a movie that claimed to have the survival of the human race as one of its core themes, the value of human life in this film was almost less than a penny per person. There was some laughably terrible science in it, too, including tsunamis in the open ocean knocking over cruise ships, which is ludicrous. The few characters I liked or cared about suffered horrible deaths. I guess the disaster porn genre and I are not destined to be friends. The dog survived, though!
On TV:
The Cape: This is cheesetastic comic book fun, not deep or meaningful, but full of classic comic conventions, including ugly villains, noble motivation on the part of our hero, and all sorts of father issues. I love that one of the central images of the show is the father reading to his son, which is way more touching than I expected it to be. Unfortunately, the rest of the ideas don't have the same emotional resonance, but no matter. The bad guys are bad, James Frain gets to be menacingly charming, and there's lots of action in the form of circus performers, illusionists, and good old fashioned smackdowns between our hero and the assorted villains. Summer Glau appears to be wasted as a Oracle-like scientific genius with a vendetta against the Big Baddie, but perhaps her role will expand in future episodes. So far, it's good fun, which is more than I can say for a lot of shows on TV these days. (I am well aware that last statement made me sound like an old lady, waving her cane at those kids on her lawn!)
In Music: I am horribly late to the party on this, but Neko Case's beautiful album "Middle Cyclone" is well worth its purchase price and features some wonderfully catchy music and hauntingly lovely lyrics. ("Never Turn Your Back on Mother Earth" is deceptively earwormish and I have caught myself humming it in the shower several times since I downloaded the album.) It also features a half-hour track of crickets chirping, to the consternation of some listeners. At first I was a little weirded out, too, but the crickets turn out to be oddly soothing. In the end, I'm glad it was included.
Soulless, Gail Carriger: A wonderfully funny steampunk paranormal romance with a decidedly spunky heroine and her reluctant lover. It's a little tempting to write this book off as a send-up of Victorian manners and mores, but Carriger has included enough interesting paranormal details to add a lot of authenticity to the plot. I like the heroine very much, especially since she's proactive for the most part about facing danger. A book group read, and a pretty darned good one (although I suspect the group may not think so.)
On Video:
2012: For a movie that claimed to have the survival of the human race as one of its core themes, the value of human life in this film was almost less than a penny per person. There was some laughably terrible science in it, too, including tsunamis in the open ocean knocking over cruise ships, which is ludicrous. The few characters I liked or cared about suffered horrible deaths. I guess the disaster porn genre and I are not destined to be friends. The dog survived, though!
On TV:
The Cape: This is cheesetastic comic book fun, not deep or meaningful, but full of classic comic conventions, including ugly villains, noble motivation on the part of our hero, and all sorts of father issues. I love that one of the central images of the show is the father reading to his son, which is way more touching than I expected it to be. Unfortunately, the rest of the ideas don't have the same emotional resonance, but no matter. The bad guys are bad, James Frain gets to be menacingly charming, and there's lots of action in the form of circus performers, illusionists, and good old fashioned smackdowns between our hero and the assorted villains. Summer Glau appears to be wasted as a Oracle-like scientific genius with a vendetta against the Big Baddie, but perhaps her role will expand in future episodes. So far, it's good fun, which is more than I can say for a lot of shows on TV these days. (I am well aware that last statement made me sound like an old lady, waving her cane at those kids on her lawn!)
In Music: I am horribly late to the party on this, but Neko Case's beautiful album "Middle Cyclone" is well worth its purchase price and features some wonderfully catchy music and hauntingly lovely lyrics. ("Never Turn Your Back on Mother Earth" is deceptively earwormish and I have caught myself humming it in the shower several times since I downloaded the album.) It also features a half-hour track of crickets chirping, to the consternation of some listeners. At first I was a little weirded out, too, but the crickets turn out to be oddly soothing. In the end, I'm glad it was included.
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Date: 2011-01-11 08:01 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-01-11 08:04 pm (UTC)