Waltz with Bashir

-
Wednesday night I saw Waltz with Bashir at the Carleton with some friends. I really liked the music and sound, which the animation made stand out -- every footstep and breath and bullet all the more audible. The beach memory music in particular I found haunting. Yeah, the first half or so of the movie I felt was excellent, when the memories are still just fragments, broken pieces that don't line up. It's when they start forming a coherent picture does the movie begin to turn into this .. well, lame, boring documentary. I had hoped that the final statement would be more profound or beautiful but alas, I did not find it so. Still, overall I quite enjoyed it.

I've also been playing a bit of Mount and Blade, this neat independent game, a sandboxed action RPG. The bit that brings me back to it is the mounted combat -- there's something very satisfying about riding circles around bandits and shooting arrows at them. I just.. I can't quite explain what it is. Fun. It's just fun.

I'm all in this Cormac McCarthy phase right now, having read 3 of his books thus far (No Country For Old Men, The Road, All The Pretty Horses) and recently obtained 2 more: The Crossing and Blood Meridian. I may quite possibly read all his books, they're that good.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

April election, wiper story, tired of work

-
So the Liberals have won themselves a minority government. Or rather, the NDP, by offering lame, too-little-too-late alternatives, transferred their seats to them by people who desperately wanted to avoid having the country headed by the un-pretty hate machine that is Pierre Poilievre. I am not happy that the Liberals won but I am relieved that the Conservatives did not. However, knowing that 40% of the country wanted that unctuous cretin as leader is frankly rather alarming. Yes, the country needs real change but no-one was offering a positive one. Can Carney be pushed to alleviate the woes of his fellow countrymen? Seems doubtful -- a former banker who talks about " catalyz[ing] private investment ", which sounds a lot like subsidizing private development and is not exactly the medicine we're all looking for. Those of us who'd like Canada to avoid becoming another burning hellscape have our work cut out. I while back I wanted to mention that I had to get a new winds...
Read more

Still reading, here and there, so to speak

-
Actually I just wanted to drop a note regarding using Libby/OverDrive and my Kobo  device and the little journey it sent me on over the past hour or so. Basically, I had checked out a book  from the library but it simply would not sync onto my device, which had been working fine for as long as I could remember. Long story short, after much resetting, rebooting, and Googling, it turns out that the Kobo won't show you books that are not in Kobo library, regardless of whether the public library has them or not. I would've minded less if Kobo had at least informed me of this restriction so that I could avoid reading old Reddit posts for the answers. With that off my chest, I can give some quick reviews of my latest reads, in reverse chronological order. - The Unseen World (Liz Moore). While I had problems with the ending and the glossing over some of the technical details, I really enjoyed this story, a mystery of sorts. The relationship between father and daughter, of the father ...
Read more

Post-election blues

-
"Interesting times are here again," is what I was thinking of saying. But then I thought, "Maybe not everyone thinks so." My writing skills certainly could use some panache. The Ontario election has really bummed me out; I was in a funk a for a couple days, musing over the futility of our provincial electoral system, the apathy of the masses, the limp challenges to the Conservatives' frankly absent campaigning. Why should my soul squirm so much? Just another sad little loss in a series of terrible outcomes. I suppose everyone's news diet is sated by the clamour and spectacle going on south of us, a government fire sale that can only end in tears and tear gas, the sputtering final stages of a failed state. It seems every day brings a fresh hell. It was nice to have a winter with real snow, a spotless blanket over everything. I know some people are sick of it but I'll miss its soft stillness when it's gone, an increasingly rare luxury by my numbers. I ...
Read more