Here We Go Round the Micro Reviews, Micro Reviews, Micro Reviews…
Movies
Adaptation (**** – liked)
Plan 9 From Outer Space (**** – liked)
The Secret World of Arrietty (***** – loved)
Hugo (**** – liked)
Video Games
Professor Layton and the Last Specter (**** – liked)
Books
YA/MG fiction:
The Inquisitor’s Apprentice (***** – loved)
Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children (*** – enjoyed)
The Book Thief (**** – liked)
Adult fiction:
The Southern Vampire Mysteries (vols. 2-11) (**** – liked)
The Magician King (**** – liked)
Adult non-fiction:
Out of Character: Surprising Truths About the Liar, Cheat, Sinner (and Saint) Lurking in All of Us (**** – liked)
The Penguin and the Leviathan: How Cooperation Triumphs Over Self-Interest (***** – loved)
Being Wrong: Adventures in the Margin of Error (***** – loved)
Adaptation by Spike Jonze (film, 2002) – I’m not accustomed to seeing Nicholas Cage, you know, acting anymore, so it was a surprise to see him play twin brothers in this meta-film about a screenwriter (who resembles real screenwriter Charlie Kaufman) trying to adapt the real novel The Orchid Thief for Hollywood. The film is quirky and thematically interesting, raising thoughtful questions about how reality gets “adapted” into the printed stories we read and the secret stories we tell ourselves about our lives. Although I liked the main character, I couldn’t help but feel a bit alienated by his sad-sack-dude-protagonist’s point of view, especially when it came to him angsting over his crushes — he’d be thinking “Why doesn’t she date meeeeeee?” and I’d be thinking “Because you are thinking of how you feel and not how she doooooesss…”
Plan 9 From Outer Space by Ed Wood (film, 1959) – Ahahahahaha! This movie is awesome. If you want to know the plot, you are better off not watching it.
The Secret World of Arrietty by Hiromasa Yonebayashi (film, 2010) – Thanks, Ryan, Natalie, and Dan for inviting me to see this! The film takes its main concept from Mary Norton’s novel The Borrowers: there are miniature people who live in the spaces of human homes and survive by “borrowing” things we never miss, like crumbs, buttons, and pins. This movie is beautiful, gentle, and thoughtful. To call it a good metaphor for the difference between people with and without privilege would give a good impression of the overall atmosphere of the film, but it would also imply unjustly that the filmmakers made anything a higher priority than telling the story of the friendship between Arrietty, a Borrower girl, and the sickly human boy who comes to stay at the house where she and her family live.
Hugo by Martin Scorscese (film, 2011) – Thanks, Ryan, for giving me the opportunity to see this in 3D! Having read the book when it came out, I knew roughly what to expect, and the film wasn’t disappointing. I loved how Scorscese incorporated the 3D organically not only in the scenes shot in the twenty-first century but also in the archival Melies footage. The only minor disappointment (for PhD-student me) was that the history of the automaton wasn’t as accurate as it was in the book.
Professor Layton and the Last Specter by Level-5 (DS game, 2009/2011) – In this prequel to the previous Professor Layton trilogy, play along as Layton and Luke work together for the first time, and meet Layton’s vivacious assistant Emmy while you solve the mystery of the weird specter demolishing Luke’s hometown. The plot is fun, though the eventual solution is off-the-wall, and the puzzles are great, with a bonus Animal-Crossing-style secondary game. I wish there was less block-sliding, though…
The Inquisitor’s Apprentice by Chris Moriarty (MG fantasy novel, 2011) – Although it seems like Jewish characters are somewhat over-represented in fiction if one goes by numbers alone, it’s seldom that I see one as a fully fleshed-out protagonist in MG fantasy fiction, and especially MG historical fantasy. The book tells the story of a Jewish boy, Sacha, who lives in a 19th-century New York City where police inquisitors are trying to stamp out the “anti-American” witchcraft immigrants bring from the Old Country — and who finds himself apprenticed to one of the best inquisitors when it turns out he can see witches. The book is packed with exciting plot and with historical and cultural details.
Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children by Ransom Riggs (YA fantasy novel, 2011) – This book is about Jacob, a teenager who discovers that his grandfather was from a secret outside-of-time enclave of magically gifted children and goes off in search of his roots. I’m not sure how I feel about it. On the one hand, it was creative and fast-paced; on the other, I felt like it was restricted, not enhanced by the author’s technique of building a story around found inspiration (in this case, real vintage photographs of kids doing weird things).
The Book Thief by Markus Zusak (MG fantasy novel, 2006) – Because I’ve read/seen enough stories set during the Holocaust and/or Second World War, it takes something special to make a book set in that time and place feel fresh to me, but this one about Liesel, a German refugee girl who makes friends with the Jewish man her foster parents hide in their basement, pulled me in. The book is narrated poetically by Death, which is as hard-to-get-into as it sounds and a little confusing. But it’s worth it to see how Zusak makes the reader feel for Leisel’s suffering without ever losing sight of the fact that, y’know, millions of other innocents are being murdered elsewhere, and how he weaves in subplots like the her growing love affair with books and words.
The Southern Vampire Mysteries vols. 2-11 (fantasy novels, 2007-2011) by Charlaine Harris – The adventures of Sookie Stackhouse continue. Sometimes it seems like our favourite psychic waitress is a literal magnet for every hot male vampire, shapeshifter, Were, and fairy in a ten-mile radius, but, you know what? I’ve read this kind of mystery at least twenty bazillion times from a dude protagonist’s perspective where Special! Male! Magic! Detective! (*cough* for example, Harry Dresden *cough*) meets dozens of babes in his travels, so as long as both kinds of stories can co-exist (with each other and with any male-male, female-female, etc. versions anyone might want), live and let live.
The Magician King by Lev Grossman (fantasy novel, 2011) – In this sequel to The Magicians, we reunite with twenty-something Quentin as he and his friends recover from the traumatic events of the previous book by being kings and queens of the Narnia-esque fantasy country Fillory. I enjoyed this novel much better than its predecessor, in part because Quentin has matured enough to not be such a cock. The darker scenes and the lighter scenes are still equally disturbing, although sometimes the alternate chapters telling the parallel upsetting story of Quentin’s old friend Julia seemed to cut to the bone just for the sake of being deep and uncomfortable, including a
(vague spoiler)
scene of sexual violence that seemed unnecessary to the plot.
Out of Character: Surprising Truths About the Liar, Cheat, Sinner (and Saint) Lurking in All of Us by David DeSteno and Piercarlo Valdesolo (non-fiction book, 2011) – DeSteno and Valdesolo argue that our intuitive understanding of personality is flawed; it’s not about whether people are inherently bad or good but about whether their short-term interests (their grasshopper) win out over their long-term interests (their ant) in a given set of circumstances. Interesting, but I found it kind of forgettable — it seems like so many popular psychology books retell the same set of cool experiments. I know you can’t judge a book for what it wasn’t supposed to be, but I still wish there had been a stronger philosophical aspect dealing with what moral responsibility means given the authors’ premise.
The Penguin and the Leviathan: How Cooperation Triumphs Over Self-Interest by Yochai Benkler (non-fiction book, 2011) – I know I’m biased when it comes to judging this book because it’s selling what I want to buy, but I did think the author argues well that abstractions of individuals who maximize personal profit are not good models of overall behaviour. The author does concede that, yes, always-selfish people exist, but they are not the majority. His examples of businesses and projects that do well through cooperation and social rewards are a nice rebuttal to the idea we so often see in pop culture that rationalism = being a douche.
Being Wrong: Adventures in the Margin of Error by Kathryn Schulz (non-fiction book, 2010) – Some critics say that this book exploring the nature of what it means to be wrong, how it makes us feel, and how we should approach the experience meanders a bit, and I’d have to agree. But that was kind of what I enjoyed about it: how it flitted from field to field. If it didn’t quite bring everything together into a cohesive whole, well, part of the joy was working out the slight contradictions between different perspectives.