Books and Movies While I Was Away

As planned, I read quite a bit of Love in the Time of Cholera on my trip. I'm more than halfway through it, and I'm finding it very hard to stay interested. Marquez' literary abilities are amazing, but while I was enthralled by One Hundred Years of Solitude and its plot, I cannot same the same of Love. On the way home, I picked up Stevie King's From a Buick 8, which made fine airplane reading. King's certainly mellowed out in his later years, and 8 is a pretty mellow, short book. It's not really horror per se, but it's good some very nice, sinister elements, and a sci-fi twist that's more Dark Tower than anything else. In fact, I'd be willing to bet there's some kind of connection there.

As movies go, I watched League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, which wasn't as bad as everyone says, so long as you can forget the comic book. I also saw 21 Grams, which was a pretty good movie with one of the best acting performances I've ever seen. I'm referring to Naomi Watts' amazing job as a traumatized housewife. Granted, Benicio del Toro and Sean Penn both did great jobs as well, but Watts really stole the show. The movie itself was pretty good, but suffered from two things: its focus on fate, for which I have an existential problem, and its composition. The story was told in a non-linear fashion, which is fine if it has some bearing on the story (example: Memento) but here it only seemed to serve to muddle things up. I'd figured out the plot 20 minutes in, even though the non-linearity of the film made it seem like a big mystery until the last 20 minutes. The story would have been stronger without that distraction, and in a way it only served to de-emphasize the excellent storytelling and acting.

Someday, I'll write something about Mexican cinema and its obsession with fate, but not today.