October's list

Music

1. When The Night Feels My Song – Bedouin Soundclash
2. Raya songs – Various artists. Dear God! Why do raya songs have to be so maudlin and depressing? Why are these people permanently di perantauan and not in their own homes? Why do they keep mooching about the past? Lighten up and stuff your face with ketupat, why don’t you?

Uhhh, that’s it really. Haven’t been listening to the radio much lately.

Movies

1. Lucky Number Slevin – This movie, chock-full of quality film stars like Morgan Freeman, Ben Kingsley and Bruce Willis, wasn’t the box office smash its producers hoped for, which is a shame because I quite like it. It centres on Josh Hartnett turning up in a new town to visit a friend, only to be mistaken for his missing friend by two local gangsters. His friend owes each gangster a whole load of money and in order to save his life, Hartnett has to murder two people. But all is not as it seems as Bruce Willis, a notorious hitman absent from the city for many years, is whispering directions in the ears of the two gangster bosses. Try as he might to look sinister and mysterious, Bruce Willis still looks cuddly and infinitely huggable. Maybe it’s the egg-shaped head and the naughty boy smile.
   Good fun, a bit twisty and worth a second viewing.
2. The 40 year old Virgin – With a title like this one, I was prepared for a puerile jock movie, but The 40 year old Virgin is a surprisingly touching, gentle film of one man’s quest to not so much lose his cherry but to grow up and develop a meaningful relationship with a woman he meets at his workplace, played wonderfully by Catherine Keener. Though I’m sure he wouldn’t mind some sex.
   Warm, fuzzy and no masturbating with pies. (although some might find that a bad thing)
3. Edison – with a cast which includes Morgan Freeman and Kevin Spacey, you wouldn’t think this movie could go far wrong, but it has, because it’s boring. Even trying to watch Justin Timberlake act loses its fun after a while.
   If the film gets better after 20 minutes, please tell me as I lost the will to watch it after.
4. The Devil Wears Prada – such a good title wasted on a mediocre, girl-makes-it-good-in-the-big-city movie. You know this one: Young innocent Anne Hathaway goes to work for dragon-lady Meryl Streep, editor of the fashion magazine ala Anna Wintour of American Vogue. Ooh she has such a hard time in the beginning, people make fun of her because she’s fat (helloo, if Anne Hathway is fat I must be the size of America) or didn’t pluck her eyebrows or wore the wrong type of heel with the wrong type of trousers.
   Yawn, yawn, yawn – I didn’t even finish watching this movie, it was too lame.
5. Wicker Park – They’ve been showing this for ages on the Astro movie channels but all the times I’ve been back in my parents’ house, I’ve never managed to sit through the entire film. It looked so interesting too, the bits that I managed to watch. Who is this girl that squinty-eyed Josh Hartnett is looking for? Why did she disappear? Is she real? Has she really come back after 2 years? Is she a ghost or the result of his fevered imaginings? And who is the mysterious new lady with the same name as Josh’s lost beloved who befriends him? Has she something to do with the lost lady’s disappearance and re-appearance? The real reason turned out to be not very interesting. The whole situation is so contrived and I couldn’t help but be left with the feeling that everybody in this affair behaved rather stupidly. The only character that garnered any sympathy from me was the one played by Matthew Lillard who was so badly used by mystery lady, Rose Byrne.
   An alright movie but you need to be patient to watch this one.
6. Tesis – Thanks to one sister’s persistence in raiding another sister’s dusty collection of pirated VCDs, I got to watch this rather good thriller of Alejandro Amenabar’s. A Madrid film student, Angela, is writing a thesis on violence in the visual media and ropes in her professor to help her find adequate source material. Her corpulent professor discovers a collection of tapes in a hidden passageway in the college’s archives, nicks one but subsequently dies while watching it. No, it’s not a murderous Japanese teenager reaching out of a well to kill people but a recording of a girl being hideously beaten, then killed by a masked man. It turns out that the girl was a student at Angela’s college who disappeared two years ago. With the help of resident weirdo, Chema, Angela tries to discover the makers of the tape, but things become more dangerous the deeper she digs and Angela finds diminishing numbers of people she can trust.
   Heart-thumping, hide under the blanket thriller, although a tad too long towards the end.

Books

The Dispossessed - Ursula Le Guin
A futuristic environment is a setting for lots of philosophical and ideological musings but don’t you let that put you off reading this book. It is a thoughtful, touching, thoroughly humane story (no robots, promise) about a man and his vision to not only pull his fellow man out of poverty and hardship, but to foster solidarity among peoples of all planets and bring prosperity, freedom and equality to all. It’s all rather sobering and reminds me of Mary Doria Russell’s The Sparrow (reviewed last month). Human kind can achieve great things if they set aside their differences and work for the common good of all man.

The protagonist of this tale is the physics genius, Shevek, from the anarchic desert planet of Anarres, where there is no government, no crime and no private ownership. Its inhabitants are descendants of an ideological group that left their capitalist home world Urras 200 years ago because of their unhappiness and unwillingness to live in a society where materialism prevailed and the rich have power over the poor. Life is hard on the new planet of Anarres with few natural resources, and Shevek who is working on a revolutionary physics theory that promises to change interstellar communication forever, finds his colleagues jealous and hostile to his plans. Hoping to be able to finish and share his theory on rich, powerful Urras, Shevek leaves Anarres, but finds himself as a political pawn as various parties attempt to gain control of the new technology.

The wonderful thing about Ursula Le Guin is that the plot never overshadows the human factor. The plot may be high concept but all the characters, even the peripheral ones behave and speak as you would expect normal human beings to – driven by their own ambitions, hopes, greed and compassion. Shevek might seem a rather dry character in the beginning but like a lot of Le Guin’s heroes, they gradually show their human strengths and failings.

Le Guin also brings up some interesting points about democracy - does majority rule make majority right, and if so does this invalidate the opinions of the minority?

It took me two weeks to finish this book, not because I found it tedious but because this is the sort of book you can’t rush through. Give it a read, it’s worth it.

Angels and Demons – Dan Brown
Unless I’m completely tired, I find it difficult to go to bed without reading something, so this was the only light read I could find while staying at my older sister’s house. What can I say about Dan Brown’s books that you don’t already know. I read this book more than three weeks ago and I’ve nearly forgotten the plot. Something about a secret society, the Catholic Church, a man trying to break a code…. sound familiar? You got to hand it to Dan Brown though. He sure knows how to write a tight thriller. I can imagine him typing at his computer and shouting, “Keep them coming!” and throwing scene after scene of car chases, gun fights, brawling men, foot chases etc, etc. But really, the hero is some geeky professor of religious symbology? Can you actually make a living out of that? Next you’ll be telling me that an archaeology lecturer will be jumping on horses and raiding tombs….

Starter For Ten – David Nicholls
I just have to buy a book in an airport and this was it. At the time I had The Dispossessed still to finish, but I figured I needed a light read post The Dispossessed, and I might as well use that book voucher that my consultants gave me last Christmas. It’s been turned into a movie now, starring the not unlovely James McAvoy, as Brian – a total loser-geek from the wrong side of town with the worse case of acne this side of the Atlantic and his attempts to woo the gorgeous Alice and to get on the University Challenge quiz show.

You see, there are some underdogs who you can’t help but root for because you feel that they deserve it, that they only need a break in order to make it. With Brian, sympathy soon runs out because you cringe and literally hide your face with shame for him every time he cocks things up and feel ‘Dear God! Can he really be that hopeless? He really deserves to be in this mess.’ Add to that, his terrible sense of personal is very off-putting.

This isn’t all that bad a book, it made me laugh out loud several times and I really enjoyed the part where they make it on to University Challenge. However, having a hero who is so gross and disgusting was very off-putting and didn’t warm me to the book. I was happy to leave Brian’s world.