The Secret Thread: Literature & Spiritual Life: Two interesting book reviews to check out

Thursday, August 11, 2005

Two interesting book reviews to check out

There are two new book reviews on the Guardian UK book page, which I found to be of interest... one for Jonathan Lethem's The Disappointment Artist (hilarious cover art!!), and one for Michael Cunnigham's Specimen Days.

Lethem's Motherless Brooklyn was an interesting and inventive book, and I know Mutt has read at least Gun, With Occasional Music as well. I know because I gave him that one... as for the second, I've never read him before, but this genre-blending book sounds creative and ambitious.

Click on the link for the Guardian (UK) book page to the right here to read the reviews. Not life-changing, but both books certainly sound like a departure from the ordinary... normally I preserve a healthy skepticism for "critic's darlings" like Lethem and Cunningham, but these books look intriguing.

Pax Christi,
Duke Altum

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Duke Altum's Recommended Films

Monsters (2010) – As many have already said, calling Monsters a movie about an alien occupation of Earth seems to do this fascinating, original film a disservice. Certainly the fact that huge, bioluminescent squid-like extraterrestrials are running amok through the jungles of Central America is an important (and entertaining) element of the plot, but anyone coming into this one looking for non-stop, Aliens-style action or special effects eye candy a la the concurrent alien invasion flick Skyline is going to be sorely disappointed. Instead, what you have with Monsters is an intriguing and meditative hybrid of road movie, post-apocalyptic thriller and surprisingly believable human drama. Director Gareth Edwards wrote, edited and created special effects for the film on his own, which gave him the freedom to make exactly the kind of movie he wanted to make - that is, a love story that just happens to feature alien life forms ominously howling and lurking in the background (this approach, by the way, gives the film its pervasive suspense and intensity, as you are as in the dark as the characters are about when the next encounter with a pissed-off, tentacled alien might occur). The many scenes of unscripted, natural banter between the lead actors as they trek across the "infected zone" and get to know one another help you, crucially, to identify with them enough to care by the final act - which provides an unexpected, subtle twist that gives the entire story added poignancy and irony. I am sure that a great many viewers of this unusual film will come out feeling somewhere between perplexed and downright cheated, and Edwards does provide so little backstory about the aliens and what they might be up to that one may well wonder why they were in the movie at all (and, justifiably, why the film was ever called "Monsters"). But I found that their mysterious, vaguely menacing presence gave the entire story a kind of haunted and other-wordly atmosphere that reminded me a bit of the best bits of James Cameron's The Abyss. I guess you could say that early encounters with new life forms - like those with potential lovers - can be both exhilarating and weirdly disconcerting at the same time.