Film Review: Son of Rambow (2007)

Directed by: Garth Jennings

This charming coming-of-age drama was quite a surprise, an interesting story of two unlikely friends finding common ground in their estranged parents and coming together over the filming of a sequel to Rambo that they undertake (not bad for 11-year-olds). The arrival of a French exchange student and his new-found entouarge creates a seam between the two, only for it to be healed by a handful of altruistic acts. The film is delicately produced, not relying on cheap editing and heavy conflict to bring the drama, and the characters, though quite light in the plot, are colourful, interesting and have well-developed arcs. In a similar way to Slumdog Millionaire, the film never seemed to reach the deep emotional levels that it could have, but was colourful with interesting interjections (such as Will's imagination finding its way into the mise-en-scene). This may, I'm beginning to feel, be a symptom of British understatement, and perhaps I'm too seasoned to the empathy-enforcing Hollywood machine, but it takes a while to feel the sentiment. Overall an enjoyable film and well worth watching.

100 Collectible Modern Firsts

Below is a list of my most-wanted Modern First Editions.

2001 A Space Odyssey – Arthur C Clarke
A Clockwork Orange – Anthony Burgess
A Farewell to Arms – Ernest Hemingway
A is for Alibi – Sue Grafton
A Pale View of Hills – Kazuo Ishiguro
A Passage to India – E M Forster
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man – James Joyce
A Room with a View – E M Forster
A Touch of Frost – R D Wingfield
A Town Like Alice – Nevil Shute
A Wild Sheep Chase – Haruki Murakami
A Wizard of Earthsea – Ursula Le Guin
After Hours / Carlito’s Way – Edwin Torres
Alexandria Quartet – Lawrence Durrell
American Psycho – Bret Easton Ellis
Animal Farm – George Orwell
Anthem – Ayn Rand
Atlas Shrugges – Ayn Rand
Babbling April – Graham Greene
Being and Nothingness – Jean-Paul Sartre
Beloved – Toni Morrison
Birdsong – Sebastian Faulks
Blood Meridian – Cormac McCarthy
Brave New World – Aldous Huxley
Breakfast at Tiffany’s – Truman Capote
Brighton Rock – Graham Greene
Carrie – Stephen King
Casino Royale – Ian Fleming
Catch 22 – Joseph Heller
Childhood’s End – Arthur C Clarke
Crash – J G Ballard
Cup of Gold – John Steinbeck
Dandelion Wine – Ray Bradbury
Day of the Triffids – John Wyndham
Dead Babies – Martin Amis
Death of a Salesman – Arthur Miller
Disgrace – J M Coetzee
Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep – Philip K Dick
Doctor Zhivago – Boris Pasternak
Dune – Frank Herbert
Dusklands – J M Coetzee
Early Japanese Stories – Kazuo Ishiguro
East of Eden – John Steinbeck
Fahrenheit 451 – Ray Bradbury
Fatherland – Robert Harris
Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas – Hunter S Thompson
Fight Club – Chuck Palahniuk
First Love, Last Rites – Ian McEwan
Foundation – Isaac Asimov
Gabriel Garcia Marquez – One Hundred Years of Solitude
Gravity’s Rainbow – Thomas Pynchon
Grimus – Salman Rushdie
Hear the Wind Sing – Haruki Murakami
I am Legend – Richard Matheson
I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings – Maya Angelou
I, Robot – Isaac Asimov
If on a Winter’s Night A Traveller – Italo Calvino
In Patagonia – Bruce Chatwin
Invisible Cities – Italo Calvino
Invisible Man – Ralph Ellison
Justine – Lawrence Durrell
Lady Chatterley’s Lover – D H Lawrence
Last Bus To Woodstock – Colin Dexter
Laughter in the Dark – Vladimir Nabokov
Legend – David Gemmell
Life of Pi – Yann Martel
Lolita – Vladimir Nabokov
Lord of the Flies – William Golding
Lucky Jim – Kingsley Amis
Metamorphosis and Other Stories – Franz Kafka
Metroland – Julian Barnes
Midnight’s Children – Salman Rushdie
Naked Lunch – William Burroughs
Nausea – Jean-Paul Sartre
Nineteen Eighty Four – George Orwell
Northern Lights – Philip Pullman
Of Human Bondage – W Somerset Maugham
Of Mice and Men – John Steinbeck
On The Beach – Nevil Shute
On the Road – Jack Kerouac
One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest – Ken Kesey
Out of Africa – Isak Dinesen
P D James – Touch My Face
Pinball, 1973 – Haruki Murakami
Psycho – Robert Bloch
Rabbit, Run – John Updike
Rebecca – Daphne Du Maurier
Red Mars – Kim Stanley Robinson
Ringworld – Larry Niven
Salem’s Lot – Stephen King
Siddhartha – Hermann Hesse
Slaughterhouse Five – Kurt Vonnegut
Steppenwolf – Hermann Hesse
Stranger in a Strange Land – Robert A Heinlein
Strangers on a Train – Patricia Highsmith
The Alchemist – Paulo Coelho
The Assassin’s Apprentice – Robin Hobb
The Big Sleep – Raymond Chandler
The Bridge – Iain Banks
The Castle – Franz Kafka
The Catcher in the Rye – J D Salinger
The Collector – John Fowles
The Color Purple – Alice Walker
The Colour of Magic – Terry Pratchett
The Crying of Lot 49 – Thomas Pynchon
The Dispossessed – Ursula Le Guin
The English Patient – Michael Ondaatje
The Fountainhead – Ayn Rand
The Girl at Lion D’or – Sebastian Faulks
The Godfather – Mario Puzo
The Gormenghast Trilogy – Mervyn Peake
The Grapes of Wrath – John Steinbeck
The Great Gatsby – F Scott Fitzgerald
The Gunslinger – Stephen King
The Handmaid’s Tale – Margaret Atwood
The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy – Douglas Adams
The Hobbit – J R R Tolkien
The Left Hand of Darkness – Ursula Le Guin
The Light Fantastic – Terry Pratchett
The Lord of the Rings – J R R Tolkien
The Maltese Falcon – Dashiell Hammett
The Martian Chronicles – Ray Bradbury
The Moon is a Harsh Mistress – Robert A Heinlein
The Name of the Rose – Umberto Eco
The New York Trilogy – Paul Auster
The Old Man and the Sea – Ernest Hemingway
The Orchard Keeper – Cormac McCarthy
The Outsider – Albert Camus
The Plague – Albert Camus
The Plant – Stephen King
The Rachel Papers – Martin Amis
The Remains of the Day – Kazuo Ishiguro
The Restaurant at the End of the Galaxy – Douglas Adams
The Shining – Stephen King
The Sound and the Fury – William Faulkner
The Stamboul Train – Graham Greene
The Third Man – Graham Greene
The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch – Philip K Dick
The Trial – Franz Kafka
The Unbearable Lightness of Being – Milan Kundera
The Wasp Factor – Iain Banks
The World According to Garp – John Irving
The World Jones Made – Philip K Dick
To Kill a Mockingbird – Harper Lee
Trainspotting – Irvine Welsh
Two Stories – Salman Rushdie
Ulysses – James Joyce
V – Thomas Pynchon
White Noise – Don Delillo
World of Chance – Philip K Dick

Book Review: Disgrace by J M Coetzee

J M Coetzee's 1999 Booker-winning novel about the often brutal life in South Africa is deservedly one of the major influences on his endowment of the Nobel prize. The story takes place in Cape Town and on the Eastern Cape and revolves around a university professor his later-life sexual encounters and the grissly side of African life. But it is also a message about the sociohistorical legacy of European settlement and it's fallout. Delicately written with many levels and intricacies, this is one of the best novels I have read for a long time. A detailed and wonderfully designed piece of work, describing the brutality of African settlement with the most brutal aspects of the European legacy. An excellent read.

Book Review: John Steinbeck: The Red Pony

The Red Pony is a novella broken down into four episodes outlining the maturing of a young adolescent boy. The stories all take place on the ranch belonging to the child's father. Each episode presents the child with a challenge, be it phyiscal or emotional. And with each challenge the child adjusts and responds in an independent manner and not just in reflection of his father. It's a delicately written story, with not much in the way of detail, rather it is a story with a moral. Within the space of a hundred pages we see the young child develop into a young man. An interesting read with some rarely examined growing pains. Beautifully written in Steinbeck's inimmitable prose and a stark outline of the hardships of growing up in a young California.

A Small Part

Six billion people inhabit earth. Or thereabouts. Solomon was only one person and average in all respects. He represented one six-billionth of the collective conscience of humanity. He was the guy who filled the inkpads with ink; all the inkpads in the world. The only guy. That was the part he played in it all.

Film Review: Vantage Point (2008)

Director: Pete Travis



I admit that I was not giving this film my full attention, but then it never demanded it. The film revolves around an assassination attempt of the US president in Salamanca, Spain. It's an interesting concept revolving around vieiwng the event from the perspective of several different people. The concept itself is nothing new, but it always makes for an interesting whodunnit. But whodonewhat? The individual stories each tell a certain part of the story, however this is never fully exploited, we rarely see alternate angles revealing something previously unknown or assumed, timelines seem staggered and the story really just unfolds in a linear fashion. This is nothing like the sublimity of Christopher Nolan's Memento. So, that's the primary selling point out of the way, what else is there? Well, unfortunately, very little. The film plays like an episode of 24, or Lost or Prison Break. It has that same feel, only you know you aren't in it for the long run and you don't really care, so tension is never built (except the car chase, which was pretty good.) And when characters are in an unfortunate situation, you don't really care. In fact I wanted it to end like The Departed, with Forest Whitaker in shoe covers instead of Marky Mark. Whilst I'm talking about characters I should really mention that this film has none. The film was so much about this vantage point concept that all (and I mean all) characters are flat, uninteresting and lacking in context, and their personalities are revealed only fleetingly. That, coupled with the simple plot, issues of believablility and cut and paste character traits, make this film one to miss.

Words: Chimerical

chimerical [ki-mer-i-kuhl, -meer-, kahy-]
–adjective

1. unreal; imaginary; visionary: a chimerical terrestrial paradise.
2. wildly fanciful; highly unrealistic: a chimerical plan.

Also, chimeric.

Origin:
1630–40; chimer(a) + -ical

Related forms:
chimerically, adverb

Synonyms:
1. illusory, fantastic.

Antonyms:
1. real.

In My Head

As a child, it was always nursery rhymes. And then it was pop music, for a short time it was rock. Then, as I moved from my teens, it was jazz, with a slow tendency toward classical, and ever so briefly opera. Now I find myself back once more with nursery rhymes in my head.

Children's First Edition Collection

Excellent collection here of collectible children's books. This is by far the best collection of children's books I have ever seen.

Words: Dilettante

[dil-i-tahnt, dil-i-tahnt, -tahn-tey, -tan-tee] noun, plural -tantes, -tanti
[-tahn-tee] adjective

–noun
1. a person who takes up an art, activity, or subject merely for amusement, esp. in a desultory or superficial way; dabbler.
2. a lover of an art or science, esp. of a fine art.

–adjective
3. of or pertaining to dilettantes.

Origin:
1725–35; < It, n. use of prp. of dilettare < L dēlectāre to delight

Related forms:
dilettantish, dilettanteish, adjective

Synonyms:
1. amateur.