I’m not sure what the distorted red circle adds to the message, but in any case, “premises” is plural, so the sign should say “these premises” and not “this premises”.
More on this error below.
Faulty premises
Handful of books from Book Treasure
Got these at Book Treasure at Parklane Shopping Centre:
- Singapore: The Air-Conditioned Nation by Cherian George
- Success with Asian Names by Fiona Swee-Lin Price
- Book of Humour, assembled by Rewa Mirpuri
- Book Uncle and Me by Uma Krishnaswami
- Singapore Siu Dai by Felix Cheong, illustrated by Pman
- Meet Me on the Queen Elizabeth 2 by Catherine Lim
Ant-man and the Wasp (2018)
Steve Krug, author of Don’t Make Me Think, says the functions of a good website are neither explained nor self-explanatory, they are self-evident.
In Ant-man and the Wasp, the sequences filled with exposition are excruciating because in them, the fake science is explained.
I felt a bit better when the fake science was lampshaded: “Do you guys just put ‘quantum’ in front of everything?” (My thought exactly!)
I felt even better during the action sequences, when the effects of the fake science were delightfully self-evident.
https://itunes.apple.com/us/movie/ant-man-and-the-wasp/id1400637562
See below for a plot summary with SPOILERS in the form of a beat sheet in the style described in Blake Snyder’s Save the Cat.
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by James Joyce
Being neither a young male Irish Catholic nor an English major and at least one even slightly acclaimed novel short of an artist, I felt lost slogging through this “more approachable” work of Joyce’s.
In praise of what I find to be an impenetrable text, Shmoop says:
This novel, the first in Joyce’s whopping hat-trick of great novels, is both shorter and more approachable than either of Joyce’s later masterpieces (for which we humbly thank him). Portrait of the Artist really unleashed the massive power of Joyce’s innovation and unconventionality upon the literary world.
Why I found A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man hard to read
Fiction has character, setting, plot, and style. When any one of these four elements is developed at the expense of the other three, you get strange fiction. Sometimes it’s good strange and sometime it’s bad strange. Joyce’s fiction is primarily characterized by style—innovative and unconventional style. The literary world considers Joyce’s fiction good strange. For me, A Portrait of the Artist was bad strange.
I’m more of a nineteenth-century Realist than a twentieth-century Modernist or Post-modernist. I don’t like unreliable narrators, stream-of-consciousness narration, or magical realism. Joyce is known for free indirect speech, which is a kind of stream-of-consciousness narration.
The edition I read in high school had an introduction and notes built in, but many free and “thrift” editions, like the one I just finished reading, do not. It would have been better (though slower) to read the novel alongside some kind of notes (e.g., CliffsNotes or SparkNotes).
See below for what stuck out as well as when and why I read it.
Continue reading A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by James Joyce
Ocean’s 8 (2018)
Your English teacher was so wrong when she said “i before e, except after c or when sounding like ay as in neighbor and weigh”. She obviously wasn’t counting on the feisty female heist in Ocean’s 8.
I was worried there would be annoying, unsubtle feminist messaging throughout, but there was only one scene where characters talked about men per se. Thank goodness someone realized there’d be no point in making a movie about a bunch of female thieves only to have them talk about men the whole time.
Clearly the writing and/or casting was done with diversity in mind: there is a black character, an Indian character (played by an actress I now recognize from A Wrinkle in Time), and an Asian character in addition to the several Caucasians, one of whom sounds Irish and one of whom speaks German in several scenes. Although Ocean’s 8 is a much higher-quality production, I’m reminded of the awkward parody Superfast! which gave its ensemble’s token characters the literal names “Rapper Cameo”, “Model Turned Actress” and “Cool Asian Guy”.
The movie had two problems, neither of which I was expecting.
One problem was that the protagonist is introduced as a skilled shoplifter. An elaborate plan to steal millions of dollars’ worth of jewels is something I don’t have a problem with, since it’s obviously fantasy. Shoplifting is, however, both real and problematic. I don’t admire people who shoplift in real life, so I don’t really want to be encouraged to admire a shoplifter on screen. I mean, yes, the character comes across as clever, but… I don’t know. It just doesn’t sit right with me.
When giving her team a pep talk, Debbie says something along the lines of “Let’s not do this for us. Somewhere out there is an eight-year-old girl who dreams of becoming a criminal. Let’s do this for her.” Maybe that was funnier than the shoplifting, but… crime is bad, y’all!
The other problem was that although the caper was exciting, and there were lots of gratifying chuckles, there didn’t ever seem to be any serious obstacles. There were little stumbling blocks along the way, but each one was overcome after a moment of panic too brief to allow the tension to build.
See below for a list of reviews as well as a plot summary with SPOILERS in the form of a beat sheet in the style described in Blake Snyder’s Save the Cat.
Exit West by Moshin Hamid
Exit West reminds me of Terry Pratchett and Stephen Baxter’s The Long Earth in that people suddenly discover a game-changing method of moving from place to place. It also reminds me of Christopher Manson’s puzzle book Maze because of the mysterious doors.
Rumors had begun to circulate of doors that could take you elsewhere, often to places far away, well removed from this death trap of a country. Some people claimed to know people who knew people who had been through such doors. A normal door, they said, could become a special door, and it could happen without warning, to any door at all. Most people thought these rumors to be nonsense, the superstitions of the feeble-minded. But most people began to gaze at their own doors a little differently nonetheless.
I love the premise, the penetrating insight, and the deadpan style. See below for what stood out as well as when and why I read it.
1984 by George Orwell
I re-read the dystopia 1984 in preparation for a talk I gave on language.
The main ideas I remembered from having read the novel at least twenty years ago were:
- the government reduced the size of the English vocabulary (to control thought)
- the government was constantly destroying and rewriting the nation’s news articles (to control facts)
I found those ideas so compelling that I forgot all about the main character’s love interest and the secret horror that proved to be his undoing.
Of course, the novel is also famous because it says that:
- totalitarian dictators like the novel’s “Big Brother” typically keep tabs on their citizens by means of ubiquitous surveillance
- you can (eventually) make anybody believe that two and two are five
See below for what stood out in the novel when I re-read it.
FINAL EXIT
Incredibles II (2018)
I felt like maybe there were too many characters who had their own subplots. Still, it was fun, and apparently it made buckets of money, which counts for something (though not a lot, since the notably vacuous Minions grossed a billion in 2015).
Not having played the video game, I’m still not sure what happens to The Underminer, but can I just say I really love that as a name for a mechanical mole villain?
https://itunes.apple.com/us/movie/incredibles-2/id1392900449
Superfast! (2015)
I’m a sucker for car racing movies. Some are Disney while others are deadly; some are comedies while others are merely laughable; some are wacky Wachowski one-offs while others are furiously approaching double digits.
The worst I’ve seen in the wake of the fabulously successful Fast and Furious franchise was undoubtedly the shoestring-budget direct-to-DVD production 200mph (2011). If any movie about a car wreck could be called a train wreck, that was it.
On the other hand, I didn’t expect to like Death Race, but it was great! The sequel was also pretty good, though the second sequel wasn’t.
Due to my hit-and-miss nature of my past experience with car movies, my expectations for this parody/spoof were extremely non-specific. I didn’t know Superfast! was, like Scary Movie, Epic Movie, Vampires Suck, et al., written and directed by the much derided team of Jason Friedberg and Aaron Seltzer. I had no interest in any of their other movies and didn’t see them.
All of which is to say that maybe I shouldn’t have enjoyed Superfast!, but I did, perhaps because the filmmakers’ humor was new to me, even if it’s stupid and old and tired to most everyone else.
Anyway, even if it was a bad movie, it wasn’t as bad as 200mph.
https://itunes.apple.com/us/movie/superfast/id1229229788
See below for some links to reviews as well as a plot summary (with SPOILERS) in the form of a beat sheet in the style described in Blake Snyder’s Save the Cat.
