So the thing is, there are two film reviewers whose opinions I trust. One is the late Roger Ebert, the other is irrelevant because he's not available in any language most of you speak. They both gave "One Day" positive reviews - not praise, but "charming and good for a night out"-kind of thing, and this is interesting because the film was mostly ( Read more... )

I have a postgraduate degree in literature, which I got mainly because a) English was my best class in upper secondary, and b) narratology fascinates me so goddamn much. I never cared much for what my twenty year old self would dub "pretentious" literature which was bizarre and required you to look beneath the surface. Hell, I hardly read books at ( Read more... )

( Kind of OT about my experiences with and prejudices towards genre )

I saw The Hobbit and it was perfect.

Jackson's very much LoTR-ified it, topping it all off with turning Thorin into Aragorn and making things far less goofy than the novel is. And for all that I like the Hobbit better than Lord of the Rings exactly because it is goofier, he makes the film work and it works well. Anyone claiming that he's doing ( Read more... )

Morning: Took Girl Goddess #9 off the bookshelf on my way to the bathroom, sat down to read it, and almost started crying over the end of "Tweetie Sweet Pea". Resolved to make the librarian hunt down the translation that I still remember seeing but never reading sometime around the mid-nineties so that I can use it in teaching.

Afternoon: The ( Read more... )