Who doesn’t love a good Cinderella story like Jane Eyre?
I despise spineless, aimless characters like Catcher in the Rye‘s Holden Caufield; Jane Eyre is exactly the opposite. She’s stubborn, she’s principled, and in the end she gets what she wants because she’s worked hard and made the right decisions. Unlike many heroines, she’s not particularly beautiful or smart; what she has is honesty and a strong sense of justice.
The setting and many descriptive details make the book moody and atmospherically (though not thematically) dark; it’s a gothic novel complete with mysterious rooms, storms, eerie sounds and the like.
Jane Eyre is discussed throughout The Weekend Novelist Re-writes the Novel, which points out that the book has an uncommonly large number of antagonists, which means it has an uncommonly large number of subplots. The book’s complexity contributes greatly to its lasting appeal.
When and Why I Read Jane Eyre
This book was chosen by Rachel of the Hungry Hundred Book Club for May 2017. I read it in 2011 but I don’t mind reading it again.
Genre: fiction (English literature)
Date started / date finished: 06-May-17 to 15-May-17
Length: 467 pages
ISBN: Project Gutenberg 1260
Originally published in: 1897
Gutenberg link: Jane Eyre
This is a photo of a sign in a toilet stall in the Lot One shopping mall. It says:
Dear Shopper,
Please keep sight of your personal belongings while in the toilet.
For assistance, dial 5314 6211
This bit of written language inspired several thoughts.
I think “keep sight of” is or has been an idiom in some places, but it did not strike me as apt, though the negative phrasing “do not lose sight of” would have sounded okay. The phrase “keep track of” sounds better, though I wouldn’t expect to see it on a sign.
I’m imagining I hear the voice of the late comedian George Carlin mocking the phrase “personal belongings”. It isn’t as if I’m likely to have brought with me any other kind of belongings, such as public belongings, onto an airplane, he says.
Here, “toilet” is obviously being used not to mean the porcelain commode, but to mean either “restroom” or “restroom stall”, though how you could lose sight of your personal belongings inside a restroom stall is a mystery to me, especially if you have just hung them on the hook just under the sign; if you fail to notice your belongings hanging just below the sign, the sign itself isn’t likely to do you any good! (Some restroom stalls have a shelf behind the commode; the sign would be a useful reminder to check for items placed there. This stall did not have such a shelf.)
Finally, at the bottom of the sign, behold a reminder that we live in the future: it is normal (in a shopping mall in Singapore, at least) for individuals to carry personal wireless communication devices that can at any point be used to summon urgent medical assistance. Or toilet paper.
At 7:45, Sultana Book Store at the Peace Centre was supposedly already closed for the day, in spite of appearances (and eager customers).
We had better luck at Book Treasure next door in the atrium of Parklane Shopping Mall.
I bought two books from Book Treasure. I saw several other interesting used books at good prices, but they were books I already own.I say I bought two books, but actually I bought two editions of the same book. Go figure.That’s me and my friend, reflected on the underside of the escalator.
Baahubali 2, to an even greater extent than its wildly successful predecessor Baahubali (2015), broke all the records for Indian films in India and abroad, for both expense and box office receipts, if Wikipedia is to be believed. This lavish CGI-heavy epic was made not in Mumbai but in Hyderabad—with an entirely South Indian cast and recorded in a South Indian language (two, actually: Telugu and Tamil).
Though the name of the main character is the name of a Jain saint, and the whole thing feels like it’s based on a myth, my impression is that the story is original.
The movie is long, at over 160 minutes, and includes 18 minutes of songs that reinforce, rather than convey, the plot.
Speaking of plot: This second movie serves as both prequel and sequel to the first. I wish I knew why the story wasn’t made into a trilogy; the first part is called Baahubali: The Beginning, and the second part is called Baahubali 2: The Conclusion. (Is it just me, or is that really odd?)
I liked the first half of Baahubali 2, in which the violence is stylized and the hero is victorious, better than the second half, which is more somber and much bloodier, and whose final battle is fought by the main character of the first movie, which I didn’t see.
My favorite sequence was the big battle in the small mountain kingdom, which involved a lot of impressive if exaggerated feats of martial arts.
The scene in which the hero and heroine defend a hallway by shooting three arrows at a time reminded me strongly of the lobby scene in The Matrix. It’s the same idea (boy meets girl, boy fights enemies with girl, enemies all die); only the costumes, props, and colors are different.
Do I compare every movie I see with The Matrix? Yeah, maybe.
If you favor subtlety over spectacle, Baahubali 2 is not for you. Characters’ jealousies, realizations, and thoughts more often than not manifest in spoken words. The characters’ actions, too, are often explained in the dialog. For example, it’s not enough to succeed in framing someone for treason, you also have to tell him you’ve just framed him for treason, even if the next thing you do is kill him.
I don’t think anyone could succeed in making a parody of the movie by exaggerating its notable features; they’re already over the top. Wait, hang on, Robin Hood: Men in Tights did have Robin shooting six arrows at once… if you haven’t taken it up to eleven, there’s always farther to go.
Anyway, overall, I thought Baahubali 2 was worth seeing because it was so spectacular.
This sign warns pedestrians to pay attention near the entrance to a construction site between West Coast Plaza and Clementi Woods Park.
Forget your fear of swimming near sharks or camping near bears; walking around holding your phone under your nose is much more likely to kill you!
I don’t think I’ve ever seen a sign like this before, but perhaps such signs will become ubiquitous, like the mobile phones we are apparently obsessed with.
So there’s the silliness, yeah, and the comic book costumes and sci-fi setting and all, but Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2 is also about… family. There are a bunch of serious emotions in the movie, all relating to what it means to feel a sense of belonging, whether as a sister, a father, a son—or a genetically anomalous member of a tightly knit team.
How to Lie with Maps gives readers a glimpse into an arcane field whose ubiquitous products we tend to take for granted: cartography. I’ve read a lot of books, but never one with this particular focus.
You can tell the author loves maps; he wants readers to appreciate the good ones, scorn the poor ones, and be wary of those created with specific agendas in mind. His goal is to raise awareness.
Mission accomplished.
More about this fascinating subject and the author’s take on it below.
Can the movie industry please stop putting all the jokes and surprises into the previews? I would have enjoyed F8 much more if I hadn’t seen so much of it already.
It was still a surprise to me, however, when the villain got away, because that sets up another whole movie, and I was expecting this to be the last one, on account of the rather final-sounding name. I’ve now realized they chose the name because this movie is the eighth, and “F8” sounds like “fate” in leetspeak or SMS shorthand or whatever. (Letters? Where we’re going, we don’t need letters!)
In the first act, the villain (a female super-hacker, yay) tries to make it sound like Dom isn’t really loyal to his team, he’s loyal to his sense of adventure, but that interesting ambiguity doesn’t last long. By the time we reach the climax, the villain is a boring cardboard cut-out who just stands there desperately gnashing her teeth, ranting at underlings on a comm system, and jabbing buttons on a control panel. I felt sorry for her.
Still, the set pieces and humor were wonderful, and although the movie’s reveal during the resolution was pretty far-fetched, I still found it satisfying. The movie lacks plausibility and emotional depth, but it has lots of antics involving bald dudes and cars. Box office receipts indicate that this suffices.
I have re-watched the 1995 animated version of Ghost in the Shell, and I stand by what I said before: the English dialog is uninspiring, both for how it sounds and what it says.
Some of the dialog explains too much, and yet the movie is still confusing. The voices are wooden sounding and incongruously American. I should maybe have watched it in Japanese, but then I’d have been dependent on the English subtitles, which are maybe just as bad at representing what’s going on.
What’s going on is some kind of conflict between two different government departments. Something to do with an AI.
The setting is amazing, and beautiful… in a dingy, dystopian kind of way. Doesn’t make me want to move to Hong Kong.
The main character, Major Matoko Kusanagi, has a robot body with no organic human brain inside, but rather a scan of the contents of one.
The theme is how we might redefine what it means to be human—or rather, sentient, since humans are biologically obsolete; evolution is moving on to the next stage.
The theme is what was most interesting to me about Ghost in the Shell, but overall I didn’t think the theme was communicated well. I enjoyed watching this insightful analysis.
