7-20August2011 :: These (Winter, Returned) Weeks

21Aug2011 [weekly]

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These weeks were Watch the Throne, Blackout, Game of Thrones, Blade, Muriel's Wedding, The Lovely Bones, Shostakovich's Leningrad Symphony.

• Listening to Kanye West and Jay-Z's Watch the Throne (iTunes/amazon); a bit fast and raw in places, but a very entertaining album all told, with some great hip hop with a very old school funk feel, complete with an awesome selection of funk samples and grungy beats; certainly my favourite of Jay-Z's work, and quite possibly of Kanye's straight hip hop (808s and Heartbeats the exception).
• Read Connie Willis' Blackout (amazon); an interesting concept, and story, but it's awfully frustratingly plotted, full of characters who fail to grow or learn, full of plot twists that are just repeated over and over (I left one note part way through, "we know!", as a character observed for the fiftieth time, "but this was time travel!"); worse, it's only half a book, and it doesn't deserve to be — one gets the impression Willis slowly plotted out the first half, realised nothing had happened, tried to progress things, finally getting out the complications that should have been presented in the first Act, before realising she had no room left in the first book; I won't be picking up the follow-up, All Clear, in any hurry; (Addendum: Blackout/All Clear just won Best Novel in the 2011 Hugos; I'm still not convinced).
• Started reading George R R Martin's Game of Thrones (amazon), while watching the first few episodes of the HBO series (imdb); found the number of dots against the book on the Kindle awfully daunting, but it hooked me only a few pages in, and I'm really enjoying the read; Martin's understanding and depiction of myth and spirituality and power is incredibly nuanced, and the book, at least so far, doesn't feel so long; the TV show, however, isn't so nuanced, its first few episodes largely lazy plotting, just attempting to establish the world and the players; it shows promise around the fifth episode (as I was about to abandon the series), finally going into the intrigue and power plays we're previously just told are going on, but it's still a little unsteady.
• Re-watched Blade (imdb); silly, but good fun, and reasonably well plotted, and it's always good to get a throwback to the violent vampires and their hunters.
• Watched Muriel's Wedding (imdb); good little Aussie flick, with classic quirky characters; Toni Collette and Rachel Griffiths are both excellent, both very early in their careers, but the remaining cast are fairly one-dimensional.
• Watched The Lovely Bones (imdb); really disappointing; it's visually stunning, its creation of an imagined limbo with totemic connections to the real world gorgeous, and in its visuals it has a lot in common with Beautiful Creatures and their imagined world; it's way too long though, taking a while to get started, and then at the 95-minute mark when it should really be wrapping up, it introduces a whole new plot point out of nowhere, which it eventually really lazily resolves.
• The Lovely Bones plays the stranger-danger over-much, with an older single man automatically suspicious, and it got really tedious; I am, on the other hand, looking forward to the new Fright Night — Colin Farrell's single man really is a dangerous neighbour, but it looks like they'll be playing that for fun.
• Watched Sydney Symphony performing Shostakovich's Leningrad Symphony (his 7th), preceded by Brahm's Double Concerto, with Alban Gerhardt and Karen Gomyo on cello and violin respectively; I didn't think I was much a fan of Brahms, but loved the concerto, especially the way the solo violin and cello play off each other and the orchestra; the Shostakovich was staid at times, but interspersed with incredibly interesting passages, playing with discordant or simply unusual sounds; the ending threatened to be a bit too over-glorious, but redeemed itself by pushing beyond its limits, the whole enormous orchestra playing at once, the celebration of victory becoming a blind cacophony.