So much stuff...Guess that's what comes with the summer...
Marwencol - The mere idea of Marwencol is fascinating: a man in upstate New York is beaten into a coma. When he wakes up, he has brain damage and almost no recognition of who he was before the beating. As therapy, he creates a village out of 1/6-scale WWII-era dolls. He and all of the people in his world become parts of the village through which he works out physical and emotional therapy.
Mark Hogancamp's story is moving and touching but never saccharine. The film doesn't present Mark as a tragic figure but rather just as a man trying to deal with his world, trying to figure out where the new version of himself fits in this world. Mark doesn't create Marwencol (the village) with any hopes of showing it to the world but rather as simple therapy, something to occupy his unsteady hands. He doesn't seem to explore any of his motivations, but those motivations are laid bare by the filmmakers as they let Mark and his friends tell his story - from the time of his beating through to his first art exhibit in a SoHo gallery.
There is a massive depth of honesty and heart in the story of Marwencol - and a couple of unexpected twists.
An outstanding documentary...
The Player - This one's a rewatch for me. I first saw this my freshman year at Wabash, late 1992 or early 1993. It was my first foray into the Robert Altman oeuvre, and I've come to be a big fan every since.
The Player sees Tim Robbins play a high-rolling, powerful studio executive who is stalked by a writer with a grudge and menaced by studio politics as the new, hot, up and coming executive is threatening to take his job. Robbins digs himself deeper and deeper - in his social circles, in legal trouble, in romantic difficulties - and seems to be cracking in every possible way.
In the end, however, he is the titular player. He comes out on top.
The film is a reverential satire of the Hollywood scene with dozens and dozens of
cameos - many of which ended up on the cutting room floor. Altman never treats his guests poorly but does handle the Hollywood habit of pitching movies in 25 words or less with heavier weight gloves. Throughout the film, the practice of giving elevator pitches is mocked with great glee.
The film is a dark look at a man on the edge, however, alone spot of darkness in an otherwise outwardly sunny land. It's perfect LA and vintage Altman.
Rising Tide: The Great Mississippi Flood of 1927 and How It Changed America by John Barry - Barry's tale is a political and sociological look at the America from after the Civil War through the early 1930's, at the societal an meteorological forces that combined to produce one of the worst every floods on the lower Mississippi, a flood that devastated dozens of states, shaped political careers all the way to the White House, and left us with a dramatically different Mississippi River than we'd ever had before.
The book flows through various stories that lead to 1927 and open from the flood. He opens with the battle of the great engineers whose battles formed America's first policies toward the Lower Mississippi River (from Cairo, IL on down), how they studied and attempted to master the river, bridging it at St Louis and steering it through jetties into to open passage to the Gulf of Mexico. This first section was the most scientific and hence the most fascinating to me. The struggles of Eads, Ellet, and Humphreys harkened back to an era when the builders, the designers, the Engineers were held up as examples toward which we should strive, and the outcome of their fights lead directly to the levies-only policy that lead to the 1927 flood's great level of destruction.
The book turns then toward the political forces that created Greenville, Mississippi and New Orleans, Louisiana, both of whom would turn out to be hugely important in the struggles against the Mississippi River in 1927. Greenville was as enlightened a Southern city as there was at the time, largely through the efforts of one political family, the Percys. The backdrop of Greenville shows the struggles of the South at the time - the Ku Klux Klan, the efforts to free and restrain black, sharecroppers, carpetbaggers, wealth, prohibition, gambling, drinking, whoring - and that backdrop is pushed to its limit when the levies at Greenville collapse in a mighty cavitation, washing away the glory of the city without necessarily destroying the buildings. New Orleans, then, is left to fight for its survival, to destroy the levies of its neighbors in order to save itself, an action that would be echoed in the fight against Hurrican Katrina nearly a century later. New Orleans is presented as a city in which the politicians held very little power but in which the banks and bankers held nearly total sway of the social and political future of the town, a power that was largely broken by the corruption washed ashore in the Flood.
This book is a marvel, on that was named by
GQ magazine "one of “
nine pieces of writing essential to understanding America” (along with Lincoln’s second inaugural address and King’s “Letter from Birmingham Jail”)" Anyone who wants to know how we got to where we are today should be reading this book. It's outstanding.
It didn't, however, sate my curiosity about the policies that are now being enacted on the lower Mississippi.I want to know how we chose to build Old River Control and the Morganza & Bonnet Carre Spillways, how we chose to hold back the Atchafalaya. This book told me how we got to the 1927 flood and how those forces shaped policy going forward, but I want to know how the final decisions were made.
For that information, I'm still searching and have a few more leads.
Spider-Man: New York Stories - Fun stories here, mostly focusing on Spidey's supporting cast or his interactions with those folks.
The stories are taken from various eras - some from the Gauntlet-era, some from well before that, some flashbacks (including a nice one with Cap'n America). Interesting to see so many different artists' takes on the Spidey world, too, something that's working well in the Gauntlet story arc that I'm currently reading, too.
Worth a read...not series redefining by any means but fun...
Spider-Man: The Gauntlet (all 5 parts) - I'm so thrilled that PLCH does a good job of completing most series. I'm trying to get them to continue on with the
Invincible ultimate editions, but that's another story.
I grabbed all of Spidey's
The Gauntlet story arc and probably should have done so before I read
Grim Hunt as one lead into the other, but such is the way of the wait-for-trader world.
The Gauntlet puts Spidey through a constant run of some of his most classic villains, nearly all of whom have been expertly reimagined in a series of escalating, great tales. As we go along, Spidey/Peter becomes more and more despondent and exhausted, readying him for the Grim Hunt that is to come.
In order then...
- Vol 1 - Electro/Sandman - The Sandman issues are surprisingly touching, lending Marko a nicely emotional tone as he just tries to protect and raise the young girl that he sees as his own. The Electro mini-arc touches an interestingly contemporary tone as Electro taps into the anger of common people who see corporations getting bailouts while they struggle to make ends meet. It's a nice touch for the authors to connect to current reality. Electro as a villain is interesting, but his story isn't as interesting as Marko's.
- Vol 2 - Rhino/Mysterio - Phenomenal cover...seeing Spidey surrounded by the blood that he has shed from his foes is achingly effective. This was the best of the volumes.The story of the Rhino is spaced out nicely as the former Rhino is doing everything he can to live a normal, non-criminal life because he has fallen in love and wants to do right by his woman. The tale is tragic, of course, as a new Rhino comes to challenge him, forcing him back into the criminal world. It's a great showing of emotion from Spidey as he can't save one of his former foes who has tried to take the high road. Tough emotional blow for PP. The Mysterio arc is a bit sketchier as it includes lots of feints and fakes of the typical Mysterio style: undead gangsters, false deaths, faked poison gas. Nice to see the Black Cat continuing to be around, however. The new 'relationship' between Cat and Spider is intriguing and shows a side of PP that we rarely get to see: the carnal one.
- Vol 3 - Vulture/Morbius - Morbius isn't a villain here and is a weak spot in the Gauntlet other than giving Black Cat another chance to visit Spidey. The new Vulture character is flat out disgusting. Weakest run of the bunch.
- Vol 4 - Juggernaut - A titular sequel to "Nothing Can Stop the Juggernaut" but far weaker. Something about the Juggernaut having broken the tectonic plates under NYC in that tale and needing to fix them, so a new Captain Universe drops down to smack the Juggernaut around. Spidey gets in the way. Meh
- Vol 5 - Lizard - Outstanding conclusion to the Gauntlet as the Lizard sheds any human pretension and finds a way to command the reptile brain parts of the human brains around him, sending NYC into an instinctual frenzy of fighting, fleeing, dominance, and reproduction in the streets. Great, kinetic artwork helps this one along, and it ends appropriately: with Spidey exhausted and barely victorious, ready for the Grim Hunt.
All in all,
The Gauntlet was an excellent if sometimes fractured (various artists taking turns sometimes works and sometimes doesn't) storyline.
Keys to Good Cooking: A Guide to Making the Best of Foods and Recipes by Harold McGee - I found this text by McGee both incredibly useful and boring.
The book is organized into thematic chapters - breads, eggs, meat, etc - each of which presents a series of tips and explanations about important bits of knowledge about the foodstuffs of the chapter. McGee's knowledge about food is encyclopedic, and his advice incredibly useful and science-based. He offers tips on how to best use the ingredients of the chapter and only the briefest explanations as to why those tips work.
I was looking for more of the science as I had checked this out to review for possible inclusion into a science reading project that I have coming up for honors chem this year, and it's not fit for that. There's simply not enough science overtly presented for this to work for the project.
This book would be incredibly useful, and I'm sure I would be a better cook if I could train myself to skim through each chapter before diving into using the appropriate foodstuffs, but I can't imagine trying to read much of it in one sitting. Like a poorly stored loaf of bread - which McGee can help you cure, by the way, wet the crust and bake for 15 minutes - the book is dry.
I Love You Phillip Morris - sorry, I just like that poster way better than the
American version.
I like the Rotten Tomatoes summary of the film "This fact-based romantic comedy has its flaws, but they're mostly overcome by its consistently sweet, funny tone and one of the best performances of Jim Carrey's career."
That's about right. It's far from a perfect film - the pacing particularly in the third act is rough - but it's enjoyable and helmed by two strong performances by Carrey and Ewan McGregor. McGregor's titular Phillip Morris is a simpleton who is taken advantage of at every turn until Carrey's personable, gay protagonist comes into his life. From there forward, Carrey does everything he can to shelter Morris from the harsh world - even if
everything means defrauding a huge corporation and faking his own death.
The film is a chance for Carrey to show both sides of his acting character: dramatic and over-the-top kinetic, and he does a great job here. The film is loosely based on a real pair of people, one of whom is still locked up drum tight with only an hour a day out of solitary confinement, and it's a fun little romp.
Hulk Broken Worlds - This one's a jumble but one worth flipping through. The Hulk has been Marvel's unstoppable force, supposedly the strongest, the hardest to kill, the one who will outlast all the other superheroes or villains. Because of this reputation, The Hulk's ultimate future has been explored in dozens of possible futures. In the first two issues of this tpb, each of those futures is revisited to see how things are going since we last saw them. The most interesting to me were the revisit to House of M and Future Imperfect, both of which see the Hulk's rule starting to show a few cracks.
The other issues collect short tales of the Hulk family and a retelling of an early encounter with the X-Men (shown on the cover to the left).
Treat this tpb as a short story collection and don't go looking for a single story arc. It's a thematic collection, and it's a fun one.
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