Movies In August

I went to an actual movie theater in August! The whole family went to see Ponyo. I would say it was completely enchanting, animated with such a loving attention to detail, with warm-hearted characters and beautiful storytelling. But I could just say "it's the new Miyazaki film" and if you know Miyazaki, the rest is redundant. It's not my favorite of his, but that still makes it superior to most of the rest of what's out there. I can't wait for it to come out on DVD so I can watch it again.

TV on DVD this month: two more seasons of Two and a Half Men. Still funny, still no real character growth here. Comfort TV, I guess. It's not really a show to watch all the episodes back to back. But it is just amusing enough to have running in the background while you balance the checkbook or make dinner.

Battlestar Galactica 4.5 I found disappointing. On the one hand, each individual character finished off their arc nicely. but it never resolved any of the issues that were the themes of the show. Instead of learning to live together, they basically hit the big REBOOT button and started all over again. Lame. Plus I hate Adam and Eve stories, even if they are mitochondrial Eve. (And I'm totally not buying that all the survivors who couldn't agree on anything for five years all agreed to forgo civilization in favor of the short life spans and high infant mortality and lack of higher culture that goes with deciding to blend with the neanderthals).

Of course Dollhouse was better. I'm not sure about that last episode; postapocalyptic stories are nearly as over done as Adam and Eve. But it's Joss Whedon, I'm willing to withhold judgement until I see what he does with it.

Cinematic Titanic: The Blood of the Vampires. Filipinos pretending to be 19th century Mexican hacienda owners? Other Filipinos in blackface pretending to be the servants? How could that ever be cheesy?

In brief, movies I didn't like at all: Revolution Road. I kept hearing Spike's voice in my head: "And by the way, I would be insanely happy if I heard bugger all about sodding France." Boondock Saints. Because life would be so much better if we got rid of the police and court system and just killed all the bad guys ourselves. There's never any mystery who they are, and innocent bystanders would never get hurt. Sounds like a plan. Fast & Furious (Reloaded) has none of the cheesy goodness of the second F&F movie, and is not fresh and new like the third. It's not exactly a rehashing of the first one either, though. The characters have evolved. It wasn't bad, just completely superfluous. Expelled, where Ben Stein insists that teaching evolution will make us all Nazis. Quin wanted to watch this one. I found it silly and depressing.

The Wrong Guy was nice low-key comedy from Dave Foley. He plays a fellow who thinks he's been mistaken for his boss's murderer and goes on the lam, when in fact no one actually thinks he did it. He falls in with Jennifer Tilly, a narcoleptic, and her father Joe Flaherty, who owns an S&L in a farm town where he's bullied by the local farmer who runs the town, buying up businesses so he can turn them into more fields. Not hardhitting comedy by any means, but I enjoyed it more than I expected to.

An even bigger surprise was how much the whole family is loving the Marx Brothers movies. In August we watched Duck Soup, Animal Crackers and Horse Feathers, three of the early films from when there were still a foursome. I'm actually crushing on Harpo Marx a bit.

OK, finishing off as always with Bollywood. I saw two Salman Khan films, one old and one new. The new was Yuvvraaj, which had elements of Rain Man, Shine, etc. with Anil Kapoor from Slumdog Millionaire playing a man with some sort of autism-type thing who inherits all of his father's money. The other two brothers, Salman and Zayed Khan, at first attempt to find a way to get the money from him but of course grow to love him as a brother in the end. But music is what eventually brings them together, particularly Salman and Anil with Katerina Kaif as the cello player that is the bridge between them. I've never been particularly impressed with Kaif; she's a model turned actress who started out having her dialogue dubbed over by better actresses. She does her own lines now and she's not sounding too bad here. But in particular I was impressed with her ability to pretend to play the cello. In most Bollywood movies, the instrument playing makes Robert Palmer's backup band look like masters of the craft. But Katerina Kaif manages to look like she's seen a cello before, and knows where the high and low notes are and how to move between them. Of course I don't actually play the cello, but she looked pretty good to me. And she is gorgeous.

Chal Mere Bhai was an older Salman Khan movie, and it's a total bromance with Sanjay Dutt. Sure, the story is about two brothers in a love triangle with Karishma Kapoor, who is cute as a button as always. But really, this movie is all about Khan and Dutt being affectionate with each other. It was one of the first cultural differences Quin and I found when we started watching Bollywood movies with Andaz Apna Apna and Sholay. Are these two guys supposed to be gay? I later found that gay characters in Bollywood films are done so broadly there is never any question. Think Hollywood Montrose in the movie Mannequin. The men in Bollywood movies are just much more comfortable being physical with each other than Hollywood men are (hobbits aside).

Sometimes it's not just a matter of tickle fights in bed or getting up on each other's shoulders, though. Point in fact: Zayed Khan's beret and neckerchief:

Honestly, I love this song. All of the music in Yuvvraaj is fantastic (by Oscar winner AR Rahman), which in a movie about the power of music to connect people is a good thing.

Books in August

Is September the month from hell much? Or is it just me who's crazy busy?

At any rate - books. In August it was three nonfic and four fic books read. The nonfic books were all in the aetheist/freethinker vein.

Letter to a Christian Nation by Sam Harris. Well. I largely agreed with him in content, but not in tone. Those reading this on Blogspot are familiar with the quote that I've put in my banner:

Every time somebody opens their mouth they have an opportunity to do one of two things—connect or divide. Some people inherently divide, and some people inherently connect. Connecting is the most important thing, and actually an easy thing to do. I try to make a connection with someone every time I talk to them, because a connection can be made. People can be treated with respect. I'm shocked that there are so many people that live to divide. - Joss Whedon

Even more to the point, or at least my point is this clip of Joss talking about cultural humanism, which really gets to the core of what I feel, that the enemy of humanism isn't faith:



I fared better with Raising Freethinkers by Dale McGowan. I enjoyed his earlier collection of essays from various people, Parenting Beyond Belief. This is sort of a practical guide on that subject, with lots of books and weblinks for further exploration. And he gets a huge thank you from me for putting secular homeschooling in the spotlight for a moment. We're in the minority, but we do exist!

Your Religion is False by Joel Grus is perhaps even more divisive than Sam Harris, but it's just so damn funny. Grus is an equal opportunity offender. Richard Dawkins often point out that atheists only don't believe in one more god than most folks; Grus runs with that premise, with chapters on all of the religions we don't believe in and why, including the flying spaghetti monster.

And then it was back at the Niven. I read an omnibus of The Magic Goes Away, The Magic Returns, and More Magic. A novella and two short story collections from various writers all set in the same world where magic is going out of the world and it's resetting itself to become the world as we now know it. It's a cool premise. I don't often like fantasy written by sci-fi writers, but these stories I enjoyed. My favorites were "Manaspell" by Dean Ing and "Talisman" by Larry Niven and Dian Girand.

Burning City and Burning Tower by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle are set in the same world. Burning City I liked up until I looked it up on Wikipedia and discovered it's meant to be an allegory about LA riots. Gah, I hate allegory. But I didn't catch the allegorical elements until after the fact, so it can be safely ignored. It's not like LA is the only place where people went batshit crazy and went after their neighbors under indefensible pretexts (I'm looking at you, Partition). Read in that universal sense, I like it. Read as a commentary on just one event, not so much.

Also some of the fantasy elements weren't thought through. If you're going to set a story in ancient CA, make it feel like CA, not like Europe. I was happier when I was wondering what the redwoods were doing in the Mediterranean. Also, there's a moment when a character wonders when someone is going to "turn off" the ocean. Where did he form this concept? And elsewhere someone's drawing is described as "cartoonish". They have cartoons in this world?

Back in the world of sci-fi: The Legacy of Heorot by Niven, Pournelle and Steven Barnes is all kinds of awesome. How has no one ever made this into a movie? Plus there were women here who felt real and complicated and genuine, particularly Carolyn whom no one likes and is sent off on a suicide mission with a bunch of horses and to everyone's shock survives. I liked her immensely. Perhaps just because she was unpopular.