Because my opinion really matters, I’ve written a quartet of quick reviews. (Is that even proper grammar?) Anyway, we’ll be covering a movie, a book, a videogame, and a television show.
DOUBT
I would love to say the movie was life-changing and amazing. In reality, the best part was acting by Philip Seymour Hoffman, Meryl Streep, Amy Adams, and Viola Davis. The story itself, while somewhat interesting but slow at times, was only brought to life by the strength of the movie’s actors. At times though, Streep and Adams are a bit cartoonish. While Streep and Davis are receiving the most praise out of the cast, I would say that Hoffman was the most convincing as a priest accused of improper relations with a student at the parish’s middle school. The climatic scene with Streep and Hoffman was amazing and the movie should be seen to experience that at the very least. Personally, I most enjoyed reliving my own Catholic school days with a principal not unlike Streep’s Sister Aloysius. I wouldn’t say you absolutely MUST SEE this movie, but check it out if you can.
HEARTBREAKING WORK OF STAGGERING GENIUS
Breaking my own personal preference of not reading multiple books by the same author, I decided to pick up David Eggers’ memoir “A Heartbreaking work of Staggering Genius” after reading his novel “What is the What” this past summer. The book is about Dave’s journey as a guy in his early 20’s during the 1990’s who is forced to care for his middle school aged younger brother after the sudden death of his father and then mother within a month of each other. The book’s best part is the opening which recounts his father and mother’s dying days, the subsequent funerals, and the aftermath. Once Dave and his younger brother, Toph, move to California, the book moves at a crawling pace and the characters become less sympathetic. The Real World interview scene was painful to get through as were other parts of the book. I can usually fly through a book within a week and this took me well over two months. “Staggering Genius” is filled with what seems like inside jokes and stories that I’m supposed to care about but just did not. I really just cannot recommend this book, and while I did not LOVE “What is the What”, I definitely enjoyed Egger’s novel far more than the memoir when I expected the opposite to be true.
LUMINOUS ARC 2
I am a sucker for strategy RPGs. Typically I love the micromanaging and the long drawn out chess-like battles, and Luminous Arc 2 is no different. Like many SRPGs however, the story comes second to the gameplay and I found myself frustrated by the long dialog scenes in between battles that were not very visually stimulating and only occasionally peppered with voice acting. Additionally the story was cliche as they come with character deaths being made very obvious before they occur, characters who seem like they might be bad unsurprisingly joining your party later on, and characters who you thought were on your side being so obviously shady from the get go. If you can get past the typical corny anime dialog scenes, the battle system is pretty fun. My one suggestion… KEEP YOUR ARCHER-TYPE CHARACTERS LEVELED UP. The entire game makes it a pain to ever bother using the archer typer characters so I let them collect dust the entire game and then the very final boss essentially requires that those characters are leveled up. I ended up just giving up and watching the (awful) ending on YouTube rather than spending several hours just to level up those characters at the very end of the game for one battle. Weak, I know.
REAL WORLD: BROOKLYN
This IS the best season of Real World I can remember; easily the best season of this decade. For some totally unexplained reason, the cast has been expanded to eight for this twenty-first season. For the first time ever there is a transgender roommate. These are the two things MTV did to get people talking about the season. It’s not like it really matters that there’s eight instead of seven now, but we MTV viewing folk are creatures of habit and we want all our Super Sweet Sixteen birthday girls to be complete brats and we want a minimum of eight minutes of blank stares during a 20-something minute episode of Hills and we want seven roommates on The Real World. Either way, we are only two episodes in (until tonight’s third airs), so not all the characters have been really developed yet, but the four who have are all interesting/annoying/compelling people in their own right and not because they are absurd caricatures that have been the standard since Real World: Las Vegas. I’m gonna talk about this season in a little more detail when I get more into it… but watch it, okay?
