trinityvixen (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
trinityvixen) wrote2009-01-05 02:11 pm
trinityvixen) wrote2009-01-05 02:11 pm
Entry tags:
- batman,
- books,
- bsg,
- dexter,
- doctor who,
- firefly,
- heroes,
- iron man,
- lost,
- movies,
- prison break,
- pushing daisies,
- scc,
- smallville,
- supernatural,
- tv,
- wall-e
Another year
...another thousand movies I've watched. No, not really. Since I can't possibly capture your attention or wow any of you with my books-read-this-year total, time to do my annual recap of media I've consumed in 2008.
There seems to be a cap fast approaching, as I saw only three more movies in 2008 than I did in 2007. Television, however, fell off dramatically (25 seasons this past year versus 46 in 2007), and frankly, I'm astonished. I've been exercising regularly while watching episodes of television since July. I suppose the caveat there is that since I've been forcing myself not to watch shows when not exercising, I haven't been breezing through entire series of shows in a weekend. (::coughcoughDoctorWhocough::)
My recs and trends beneath the cut!
Movies:
I fell off seeing movies in the theater this year (21 vs 29), thus proving that there is no correlation between quality and quantity when it comes to me seeing movies in the theaters. I'd be hard-pressed to say 2007 was a better year for movies than 2008 (in fact, it wasn't), yet I saw eight fewer movies in the theaters this year. Granted, the economic downturn made losing $12 a pop to things like Punisher: War Zone less than appealing, and![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
feiran and I managed to kick the Saw tradition (wish we'd done it years ago, really). Still! Wall-E! Iron Man! The Dark Knight! They were all really great films! Why did I only see them 1.6 times each? (That's twice for Wall-E and Iron Man, once for TDK.) This past year, I even went to the Oscar showcase where I saw five films in the theater on the same day! 21 films? Crazy! There's no excuse for some of the ones I saw either. Yes, The Clone Wars, I'm looking at you. ::shudder::
Best Movies:
The best of the new movies this year that I saw in the theater would be Wall-E and Iron Man, with Wall-E being the absolute best because I could watch it a hundred times and never stop being in love with it. (Iron Man is awesome, but I'm not sure that the humor will last forever on that one.) Otherwise, besides Sweeny Todd and TDK, most of what I saw in the theater fell into the "good" but not outstanding category. Worth a rental would be Hellboy II: The Golden Army, if only for the production/character design; The Incredible Hulk for being surpassingly average but still fun and amusing; and Get Smart and Mamma Mia! for being good for some laughs (and lots of singing in the latter case).
The best I watched on DVD this year, new or new-to-me:
Lucky Number Slevin: An engrossing mystery about a guy in a wrong place, wrong time, wrong guy situation. It's slick, fascinating, and fun, even though it has a cast that mostly annoys me in everything else. (Josh Harnett, Lucy Liu, Bruce Willis)
The Lion in Winter: It's an oldie but a grand oldie. There's nothing quite like watching the completely berserk performances of Katherine Hepburn and Peter O'Toole in this movie. It makes absolutely no sense whatsoever that their characters go from being mad in love to just mad (in the anger and insanity senses of the word) every time they change rooms, but the dialogue is so tart and acidic, it's a sadistic treat to watch them savage each other. They're really just chewing scenery and spitting it at one another for the entire movie. Awesome.
Wit: Another uncomfortably forthright film, and Emma Thompson's performance is cutting. I cried over and over as much for the loss of her genius as the tragedy of her circumstances.
Bigger Stronger Faster*: A documentary about steroid use that astounds with the loads of stupidity abounding about this class of drug. It's not even about drugs, really, it's about addiction and our societal tolerance or lack thereof for people we perceive as "weak" even as we raise standards so high that it is impossible to achieve them without chemical aids. If women are subject to the double standard of body consciousness--you have to be a size four, but eating disorders are gross and unhealthy so you can't have one to get it--men have the "cheaters never win, but winners always cheat" standard. Meaning, if you cheat and win and are caught, shame shame shame, but good fucking luck ever winning unless you use steroids. It's just boggling. A definite must-see.
Dan in Real Life: I come from a big family, so the big-family dynamic felt really authentic in this movie. And it was really awesome to see Steve Carell not having to be crazed in this. He's a decent actor, and his smiling sadness is so effective in this movie, you wish he'd never run afoul of comedy in the first place because, as good comedians know, the comic is the tragic with a different inflection. Really brilliant, for all that it's fairly fluffy and has Dane Cook in it.
Honorable mentions: Waitress, Uncounted, Stardust, Air America, Across the Universe, The Lives of Others, But I'm a Cheerleader, No End in Sight, M*A*S*H
**********
Television:
It was the year of the comeback, it seems. Prison Break, LOST, Smallville, Doctor Who, and Battlestar Galactica had all failed me in their seasons before last, and all have substantially improved. Oddly, Smallville excepted, all three had gone to the toilet in their third season. (Smallville having been in and out of the toilet since season four. Its current season, the best of the last three is not over, so perhaps I should be careful what I say.) Interesting as I've fallen off Dexter in its third season.There must be something about season three that is a killer. Aside from the ending, I liked season four of Doctor Who over and above the continuing inanity and outright shit that was season three. (Save for "Blink," of course.) LOST recaptured a lot of its mojo, and BSG managed, despite "Sina Qua Non" and the rushed last episode, to move along at a decent clip. I have my issues with some of the decisions made, and, as I said, meandering at the beginning meant they sped through a lot of really important reveals at the mid-season finale. But overall? I love the Cylon war!
Of course, not everything improved this year. (Why, yes, Heroes, I mean you.) And 2008 pretty much marked the end of greatness where Pushing Daisies is concerned. There are still new episodes, yes, but the hope for miraculous renewal has died a slow and painful death. Torchwood was pretty excruciating, and I spent most of Extras groaning. True Blood's first season was half engrossing (anyone except Bill or Sookie) and half snooze-a-riffic (Bill and Sookie.) There should be a separate series where all the awesome characters just don't talk about the heroine or her lover. Because they are awesome and funny and witty and Sookie...isn't. And what possessed me to revisit Earth 2, I cannot say, but that series really faulted on what might have been a decent premise. How you can waste Clancy-motherfucking-Brown on a nice-guy, useless role is beyond me.
Speaking of older television, I finished Newsradio this year, which was depressing. It was hard to even work up interest in season five because I knew Phil Hartman would be gone. Jon Lovitz wasn't awful, but he just wasn't good enough. I assume I'll be similarly heartbroken whenever it is I finish off all of Tales from the Crypt. I've slowed down on consumption of those so that I might savor them. I'm far enough behind on Sarah Connor Chronicles that it counts as old TV. I still cannot work out quite why the show is so entertaining--I find Sarah a tad preachy instead of kick-ass; the "unexpected" fact of someone as slight as Summer Glau being an evil killer robot was sorta pre-empted by having seen Firefly; John steadfastly refuses to be fucking JOHN CONNOR, SAVIOR OF US ALL; a million and one terminator robots have been playing merry hob in the time stream and this doesn't twig anyone ever. I must be surviving on Brian Austen Green and Shirley Manson alone at this point, and that is a thought almost too frightening to contemplate--a has-been dweeb star from the 90s and a singer are more awesome than the combined forces of Sarah and John Connor and a billion killer robots!? WTF!?
**********
Books:
Of the few I read, most were either really worth my time or else really not but fun enough to justify the expenditure. I did, finally, read Catch-22, something which everybody everywhere who has met me seemed to think was perfect for me. It took me almost as long to read as Nixonland despite being a third of the latter's length. I just didn't twig with the humor as well as I imagined I was supposed to have done.
I did better with the nonfiction this year. Nixonland completely consumed my October-November reading period, what with the election craziness and it being scarily relevant. I was fascinated to be so immersed in the period and character of Nixon's rises and falls (before his very large fall from grace). It's a period of history that, much like the ones immediately before it, is almost gone. Sure, people remember it, but it's hardly an active memory any longer. (Probably, in some cases, directly because of certain behaviors engaged in during said period.) It is more a theme we apply to things now--mod clothing/housewares, the "spirit of the 60s" idea--rather than a time that was. That's really one of the best things about Nixonland outside of the awesome character study: the idea that the 1960s weren't just radicalism out the ass, but in fact a time with people as complex as they are at every time, any time. There were conservatives as much in force as there were liberals. There were riots but there were people who still got up and went to work every day, untouched. Amazing.
If Nixonland wasn't the best book I've read this year, I'd say The Devil in the White City by Erik Larson was. Strangely, though, Larson takes the opposite tack from Rick Perlstein and very consciously appeals to modern understanding to understand a time that has decidedly faded from all living memory: the turn of the 20th century. He starts with the sinking of the Titanic to tell the story of the Chicago World's Fair that took place a full decade before. He uses that touchstone of relevance--surely, everyone knows about the goddamned Titanic--to backtrack to the players he will put to use in the chief of his story.
And what could be more modern in sensibility than sexing up the story of the impossible dream to turn dirty, corrupt, notorious Chicago into the White City than by pairing it with the story of the country's first serial killer? I have to be honest: the bureaucratic nightmare of pulling off the World's Fair, the grandeur of what the planners eventually accomplished despite repeated attempts to sabotage artistic vision--all of that is damned interesting history. But it's dry history, too. It's the story of egos and artists (and sometimes both), most of which were put to work on something which has left nary a trace on Chicago, let alone the country, today. Against the impermanence of the White City, you have the history of H.H. Holmes, a lasting legacy of seduction, torture, sadism, and murder--things of which we never tire, if our news and entertainment outlets of choice are any indication. (I do find it funny, however, that despite that claim, I had to look up Holmes' name because I couldn't recall it off of the top of my head. Perhaps this was because he had about thirteen different aliases that he put to use to continue his murder spree.)
I think I still put Nixonland before The Devil in the White City in terms of immersive style and sheer output of information, but The Devil in the White City might have the edge in terms of readability. A shorter, even more readily readable nonfiction book would be My Lobotomy by Howard Dully. It's another look at history, but living history as much as anything. The author received a lobotomy at twelve, but the real heartache is not his age but the fact that a modern reader can see the train wreck coming even if the outcome were not known. It's impossible to ignore, even accepting that the author is biased, the fact that the step-mother who marched him to his fate was seriously disturbed. You can see her steering him to disaster--as one physician precisely puts it, "she is trying to destroy him"--and are helpless to watch as the medical establishment of the day doesn't act in time to reject this sort of barbarism. That's the saddest part--to realize that, if his father had resisted his wife's unstable assertions that this procedure was necessary for only six months longer, lobotomy wouldn't even have been an option. It's like asking a man to be the last to die in a war, only this one is a war against bad science, bad medicine and he doesn't get to die. (Given some of the worse problems that occur, he's sort of a saint for never wishing to die. A better person than me, I would say.)
Also fabulously readable, absorbing stories: The World Without Us by Alan Weisman and Catch Me If You Can by Frank Abagnale Jr. The World Without Us has beautiful writing and a cheeky sense of humor. The attraction for me was the impossibility of imagining life after people despite knowing full well how temporary we are as a species in the grand evolutionary scheme. (To say nothing of the geological or astrological timelines.) Catch Me If You Can may have worked fabulously as a movie, but the book has its own charm, given the upfront, completely un-sly manner in which the con man confesses himself. That's the fun part: he's not really a liar or a cheat. He did lie, and he did cheat, but no bit of him is dishonest. He lets others try to trick him and outthink him and goes merrily on his way. Some of the most outrageous stunts he pulled never even made it into the movie, if you can believe it.
Those were my most memorable books this year. I read most of the Old Man's War by John Scalzi, which are good, but I'm not entirely blown away by them. The concept is decent, the writing too, but something is just off that I can't put my finger on. The first one struck me as being almost a little too "Military: yay!" for me, and that did get better with time and with each book, becoming more of a fading echo even though it's definietly not voiced in the later books. Part of my objection might be the technology. I had a serious problem with reading fantasy a lot of the time because I really dislike the fact that magic, almost by definition, has no rules. Similarly, I get annoyed at science sufficiently advanced and under-explained that seems as good as magic. Old Man's War is choc-a-block with that sort of technology, concerning itself only in passing with some of the ethical and philosophical questions raised by technology that can do some extraordinary things. It's a little too easy, in other words.
However, the concept of inter-species competition for habitable planets and life-sustaining raw materials is a great one, one that inspires all sorts of adventures. I almost wish, though, that humanity were as unsuccessful as they repeatedly are reported to be. True, it would be a very boring series if the hero couldn't ever win, but it would be nice to show the futility of competition in some cases. Perhaps that's the pacifist in me?
In the silly-buggers book category, I sped through Jo Walton's alt-history of World War II, as ended with the British peace accord with Nazi Germany. Entirely fluff, entirely harmless, and fairly...shall we say "depth-challenged"? Not shallow per se, just not anything that causes you to have to work to stay above water where any of the characters are concerned. Likewise the Eragon books. I don't get why people HAAAAAAAATE this books. They're not egregiously bad, they're just a tad slow and derivative. I'll especially thank those who defend Twilight to step off bad-mouthing the books (if they are so doing) because what the fuck? Twilight was written by an adult who published her sexual fantasy; Eragon is a teenage boy's self-insert fantasy that (miraculously) spares me from any uncomfortable, unintentional personal reveals. I expect that, with time and some classes, Christopher Paolini could improve his writing. Stephanie Meyer hasn't shown half the interest in fixing her atrocity of a style as she has in bitching out the internet for spoiling her bestest plans to re-make her own Bestest! Series! Ever! Also: dragons. Beat vampires. Always.
And that's the year that was.
There seems to be a cap fast approaching, as I saw only three more movies in 2008 than I did in 2007. Television, however, fell off dramatically (25 seasons this past year versus 46 in 2007), and frankly, I'm astonished. I've been exercising regularly while watching episodes of television since July. I suppose the caveat there is that since I've been forcing myself not to watch shows when not exercising, I haven't been breezing through entire series of shows in a weekend. (::coughcoughDoctorWhocough::)
My recs and trends beneath the cut!
Movies:
I fell off seeing movies in the theater this year (21 vs 29), thus proving that there is no correlation between quality and quantity when it comes to me seeing movies in the theaters. I'd be hard-pressed to say 2007 was a better year for movies than 2008 (in fact, it wasn't), yet I saw eight fewer movies in the theaters this year. Granted, the economic downturn made losing $12 a pop to things like Punisher: War Zone less than appealing, and
feiran and I managed to kick the Saw tradition (wish we'd done it years ago, really). Still! Wall-E! Iron Man! The Dark Knight! They were all really great films! Why did I only see them 1.6 times each? (That's twice for Wall-E and Iron Man, once for TDK.) This past year, I even went to the Oscar showcase where I saw five films in the theater on the same day! 21 films? Crazy! There's no excuse for some of the ones I saw either. Yes, The Clone Wars, I'm looking at you. ::shudder::Best Movies:
The best of the new movies this year that I saw in the theater would be Wall-E and Iron Man, with Wall-E being the absolute best because I could watch it a hundred times and never stop being in love with it. (Iron Man is awesome, but I'm not sure that the humor will last forever on that one.) Otherwise, besides Sweeny Todd and TDK, most of what I saw in the theater fell into the "good" but not outstanding category. Worth a rental would be Hellboy II: The Golden Army, if only for the production/character design; The Incredible Hulk for being surpassingly average but still fun and amusing; and Get Smart and Mamma Mia! for being good for some laughs (and lots of singing in the latter case).
The best I watched on DVD this year, new or new-to-me:
Lucky Number Slevin: An engrossing mystery about a guy in a wrong place, wrong time, wrong guy situation. It's slick, fascinating, and fun, even though it has a cast that mostly annoys me in everything else. (Josh Harnett, Lucy Liu, Bruce Willis)
The Lion in Winter: It's an oldie but a grand oldie. There's nothing quite like watching the completely berserk performances of Katherine Hepburn and Peter O'Toole in this movie. It makes absolutely no sense whatsoever that their characters go from being mad in love to just mad (in the anger and insanity senses of the word) every time they change rooms, but the dialogue is so tart and acidic, it's a sadistic treat to watch them savage each other. They're really just chewing scenery and spitting it at one another for the entire movie. Awesome.
Wit: Another uncomfortably forthright film, and Emma Thompson's performance is cutting. I cried over and over as much for the loss of her genius as the tragedy of her circumstances.
Bigger Stronger Faster*: A documentary about steroid use that astounds with the loads of stupidity abounding about this class of drug. It's not even about drugs, really, it's about addiction and our societal tolerance or lack thereof for people we perceive as "weak" even as we raise standards so high that it is impossible to achieve them without chemical aids. If women are subject to the double standard of body consciousness--you have to be a size four, but eating disorders are gross and unhealthy so you can't have one to get it--men have the "cheaters never win, but winners always cheat" standard. Meaning, if you cheat and win and are caught, shame shame shame, but good fucking luck ever winning unless you use steroids. It's just boggling. A definite must-see.
Dan in Real Life: I come from a big family, so the big-family dynamic felt really authentic in this movie. And it was really awesome to see Steve Carell not having to be crazed in this. He's a decent actor, and his smiling sadness is so effective in this movie, you wish he'd never run afoul of comedy in the first place because, as good comedians know, the comic is the tragic with a different inflection. Really brilliant, for all that it's fairly fluffy and has Dane Cook in it.
Honorable mentions: Waitress, Uncounted, Stardust, Air America, Across the Universe, The Lives of Others, But I'm a Cheerleader, No End in Sight, M*A*S*H
Television:
It was the year of the comeback, it seems. Prison Break, LOST, Smallville, Doctor Who, and Battlestar Galactica had all failed me in their seasons before last, and all have substantially improved. Oddly, Smallville excepted, all three had gone to the toilet in their third season. (Smallville having been in and out of the toilet since season four. Its current season, the best of the last three is not over, so perhaps I should be careful what I say.) Interesting as I've fallen off Dexter in its third season.There must be something about season three that is a killer. Aside from the ending, I liked season four of Doctor Who over and above the continuing inanity and outright shit that was season three. (Save for "Blink," of course.) LOST recaptured a lot of its mojo, and BSG managed, despite "Sina Qua Non" and the rushed last episode, to move along at a decent clip. I have my issues with some of the decisions made, and, as I said, meandering at the beginning meant they sped through a lot of really important reveals at the mid-season finale. But overall? I love the Cylon war!
Of course, not everything improved this year. (Why, yes, Heroes, I mean you.) And 2008 pretty much marked the end of greatness where Pushing Daisies is concerned. There are still new episodes, yes, but the hope for miraculous renewal has died a slow and painful death. Torchwood was pretty excruciating, and I spent most of Extras groaning. True Blood's first season was half engrossing (anyone except Bill or Sookie) and half snooze-a-riffic (Bill and Sookie.) There should be a separate series where all the awesome characters just don't talk about the heroine or her lover. Because they are awesome and funny and witty and Sookie...isn't. And what possessed me to revisit Earth 2, I cannot say, but that series really faulted on what might have been a decent premise. How you can waste Clancy-motherfucking-Brown on a nice-guy, useless role is beyond me.
Speaking of older television, I finished Newsradio this year, which was depressing. It was hard to even work up interest in season five because I knew Phil Hartman would be gone. Jon Lovitz wasn't awful, but he just wasn't good enough. I assume I'll be similarly heartbroken whenever it is I finish off all of Tales from the Crypt. I've slowed down on consumption of those so that I might savor them. I'm far enough behind on Sarah Connor Chronicles that it counts as old TV. I still cannot work out quite why the show is so entertaining--I find Sarah a tad preachy instead of kick-ass; the "unexpected" fact of someone as slight as Summer Glau being an evil killer robot was sorta pre-empted by having seen Firefly; John steadfastly refuses to be fucking JOHN CONNOR, SAVIOR OF US ALL; a million and one terminator robots have been playing merry hob in the time stream and this doesn't twig anyone ever. I must be surviving on Brian Austen Green and Shirley Manson alone at this point, and that is a thought almost too frightening to contemplate--a has-been dweeb star from the 90s and a singer are more awesome than the combined forces of Sarah and John Connor and a billion killer robots!? WTF!?
Books:
Of the few I read, most were either really worth my time or else really not but fun enough to justify the expenditure. I did, finally, read Catch-22, something which everybody everywhere who has met me seemed to think was perfect for me. It took me almost as long to read as Nixonland despite being a third of the latter's length. I just didn't twig with the humor as well as I imagined I was supposed to have done.
I did better with the nonfiction this year. Nixonland completely consumed my October-November reading period, what with the election craziness and it being scarily relevant. I was fascinated to be so immersed in the period and character of Nixon's rises and falls (before his very large fall from grace). It's a period of history that, much like the ones immediately before it, is almost gone. Sure, people remember it, but it's hardly an active memory any longer. (Probably, in some cases, directly because of certain behaviors engaged in during said period.) It is more a theme we apply to things now--mod clothing/housewares, the "spirit of the 60s" idea--rather than a time that was. That's really one of the best things about Nixonland outside of the awesome character study: the idea that the 1960s weren't just radicalism out the ass, but in fact a time with people as complex as they are at every time, any time. There were conservatives as much in force as there were liberals. There were riots but there were people who still got up and went to work every day, untouched. Amazing.
If Nixonland wasn't the best book I've read this year, I'd say The Devil in the White City by Erik Larson was. Strangely, though, Larson takes the opposite tack from Rick Perlstein and very consciously appeals to modern understanding to understand a time that has decidedly faded from all living memory: the turn of the 20th century. He starts with the sinking of the Titanic to tell the story of the Chicago World's Fair that took place a full decade before. He uses that touchstone of relevance--surely, everyone knows about the goddamned Titanic--to backtrack to the players he will put to use in the chief of his story.
And what could be more modern in sensibility than sexing up the story of the impossible dream to turn dirty, corrupt, notorious Chicago into the White City than by pairing it with the story of the country's first serial killer? I have to be honest: the bureaucratic nightmare of pulling off the World's Fair, the grandeur of what the planners eventually accomplished despite repeated attempts to sabotage artistic vision--all of that is damned interesting history. But it's dry history, too. It's the story of egos and artists (and sometimes both), most of which were put to work on something which has left nary a trace on Chicago, let alone the country, today. Against the impermanence of the White City, you have the history of H.H. Holmes, a lasting legacy of seduction, torture, sadism, and murder--things of which we never tire, if our news and entertainment outlets of choice are any indication. (I do find it funny, however, that despite that claim, I had to look up Holmes' name because I couldn't recall it off of the top of my head. Perhaps this was because he had about thirteen different aliases that he put to use to continue his murder spree.)
I think I still put Nixonland before The Devil in the White City in terms of immersive style and sheer output of information, but The Devil in the White City might have the edge in terms of readability. A shorter, even more readily readable nonfiction book would be My Lobotomy by Howard Dully. It's another look at history, but living history as much as anything. The author received a lobotomy at twelve, but the real heartache is not his age but the fact that a modern reader can see the train wreck coming even if the outcome were not known. It's impossible to ignore, even accepting that the author is biased, the fact that the step-mother who marched him to his fate was seriously disturbed. You can see her steering him to disaster--as one physician precisely puts it, "she is trying to destroy him"--and are helpless to watch as the medical establishment of the day doesn't act in time to reject this sort of barbarism. That's the saddest part--to realize that, if his father had resisted his wife's unstable assertions that this procedure was necessary for only six months longer, lobotomy wouldn't even have been an option. It's like asking a man to be the last to die in a war, only this one is a war against bad science, bad medicine and he doesn't get to die. (Given some of the worse problems that occur, he's sort of a saint for never wishing to die. A better person than me, I would say.)
Also fabulously readable, absorbing stories: The World Without Us by Alan Weisman and Catch Me If You Can by Frank Abagnale Jr. The World Without Us has beautiful writing and a cheeky sense of humor. The attraction for me was the impossibility of imagining life after people despite knowing full well how temporary we are as a species in the grand evolutionary scheme. (To say nothing of the geological or astrological timelines.) Catch Me If You Can may have worked fabulously as a movie, but the book has its own charm, given the upfront, completely un-sly manner in which the con man confesses himself. That's the fun part: he's not really a liar or a cheat. He did lie, and he did cheat, but no bit of him is dishonest. He lets others try to trick him and outthink him and goes merrily on his way. Some of the most outrageous stunts he pulled never even made it into the movie, if you can believe it.
Those were my most memorable books this year. I read most of the Old Man's War by John Scalzi, which are good, but I'm not entirely blown away by them. The concept is decent, the writing too, but something is just off that I can't put my finger on. The first one struck me as being almost a little too "Military: yay!" for me, and that did get better with time and with each book, becoming more of a fading echo even though it's definietly not voiced in the later books. Part of my objection might be the technology. I had a serious problem with reading fantasy a lot of the time because I really dislike the fact that magic, almost by definition, has no rules. Similarly, I get annoyed at science sufficiently advanced and under-explained that seems as good as magic. Old Man's War is choc-a-block with that sort of technology, concerning itself only in passing with some of the ethical and philosophical questions raised by technology that can do some extraordinary things. It's a little too easy, in other words.
However, the concept of inter-species competition for habitable planets and life-sustaining raw materials is a great one, one that inspires all sorts of adventures. I almost wish, though, that humanity were as unsuccessful as they repeatedly are reported to be. True, it would be a very boring series if the hero couldn't ever win, but it would be nice to show the futility of competition in some cases. Perhaps that's the pacifist in me?
In the silly-buggers book category, I sped through Jo Walton's alt-history of World War II, as ended with the British peace accord with Nazi Germany. Entirely fluff, entirely harmless, and fairly...shall we say "depth-challenged"? Not shallow per se, just not anything that causes you to have to work to stay above water where any of the characters are concerned. Likewise the Eragon books. I don't get why people HAAAAAAAATE this books. They're not egregiously bad, they're just a tad slow and derivative. I'll especially thank those who defend Twilight to step off bad-mouthing the books (if they are so doing) because what the fuck? Twilight was written by an adult who published her sexual fantasy; Eragon is a teenage boy's self-insert fantasy that (miraculously) spares me from any uncomfortable, unintentional personal reveals. I expect that, with time and some classes, Christopher Paolini could improve his writing. Stephanie Meyer hasn't shown half the interest in fixing her atrocity of a style as she has in bitching out the internet for spoiling her bestest plans to re-make her own Bestest! Series! Ever! Also: dragons. Beat vampires. Always.
And that's the year that was.
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More than that, though, is his enthusiasm. Whether he's being manic like the squirrel in Over the Hedge or as Maxwell Smart in Get Smart, he does seem genuinely engaged by what he's doing. And you can play that for humor or not, and I liked that Dan in Real Life gave him a chance to play it bittersweet. It was really adorable and melty-making at the same time.
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Actually, you picked a bad time to do that. The last movie was on par with (or better) than the first. It also tied up all the loose ends from previous movies (it's almost like they planned it).
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Re: Scalzi I don't want to get into spoilers, but you and I need to talk more about it.
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And let me finish Zoe's Tale before I get into any heavy Scalzi discussion. That way, there is no need to worry about spoilers.