11th Hour

Recently saw this movie & it did get me thinking.

I can't say I think it's a great popcorn movie, it's rather dense contentwise, but it is thought provoking and at the end of it, I felt like I wanted to do something about the problem.

At the time, I found myself comparing it to The Day After Tomorrow, because while the Roland Emmerich potboiler has zero credibility, it is a good popcorn movie. I've probably watched it 20 times (if not more), because I think Dennis Quaid and Jake Gyllenhall are both really good in it, acting their hearts out over a script that is actually overly praised if you call it drivel. Also, the effects are wonderful, though they are used to fairly stoopid ends.

11th Hour has the exact opposite problem. It's a long 2 hours of talking heads, interspersed with stock footage of various environmental disasters (boy are there a lot of environmental horrors in this world right now). It's a very heady film, without a lot of emotional lift.

Of course, the best environmental film out there is The Al Gore Flick, which begs the question "Do we need another one of these, only half as good?" I think the answer is yes.

What I'd like to see is a good ecological thriller, one with three dimensional characters, emotional and intellectual logic, based on good science and worthy of a bucket of popcorn.

Dream on, right?

The Game Of Thrones

I have only nice things to say about the series A Song of Ice and Fire by George R. R. Martin. I am currently most of the way through the 4th and most recent book in the series, A Feast For Crows. I am a fan of fantasy to begin with: Yes, I am the dork who's been through the Lord Of The Rings extended edition on DVD 20 or more times. As you would expect, this series is marketed to the modern fantasy reader by equating it to Tolkein, and yes, this is medieval high fantasy, complete with dragons and wights and magic, but it is also an entirely different animal. It's lurid, gory, mystical, spiritual, huge in scope, and completely enthralling.

Four books in, the character arcs have had time to mature: some of these characters are little kids at the beginning, but time is passing so they're slowly becoming adults during a protracted civil war over the course of years. Martin is a gifted storyteller, and is able to move his nicely three dimentional characters through the bloody wartorn landscape of his well imagined world at their own leisure. He deals with it by jump cutting, and also by shifting perspective at chapter length, so the story is told as a series of vignettes.

Very ingeniously created, very human stories, great characters...

I am so looking forward to this as a tv series

Minneapolis

The rot is coming around. When are we gonna stop lying to ourselves? To be a Republican today, you absolutely have to be lying to yourself, imo.

I think we need to get out of Iraq and raise taxes. And we have to find a way to limit corporations' power, too.