Z/Web

Funnier and more serious than I remembered, this movie actually had a decent plot/mystery. Very cool. Chevy Chase at his best.

Vacation started today! I drove 750 miles to my grandfather’s retirement home on the beautiful Oregon coast where I’ll be spending the next nine days. Far too short, of course.

Author: John Grisham

Strangely predictable tale (very much like Grisham’s The Runaway Jury in that respect). Two days before reading this I watched an episode of Law and Order which featured prison inmates pulling the exact same scam as those in this book. It’s an interesting idea, but difficult to sustain for a whole novel, especially when there’s little else going on. But at least a Grisham book doesn’t take more than an hour to read.

This was a made-for-USA movie I missed the first time around. I rarely pay attention to scandals, but this story was interesting, mostly because Mary didn’t think she’d done anything wrong as the sex had been consensual. Oddly, she was treated as a rapist, which shows us the silliness of our judicial system. Well done TV movie, with good (if lurid) performances from the boy, Penelope Ann Miller (who played Mary), and the boy’s mother (who was the best).

Very entertaining, though 400 pages too long. Hubbard seems too full of himself to see the preposterousness of his premise (like library books and nuclear bombs would survive 1,000 years of decay). Still, it’s all good fun as long as you don’t take it seriously. Very much a pulp novel. Hubbard is obviously good at plotting (he’s just not much of scifi writer). I was especially impressed with the way he tied all the loose ends together via the characters’ psychology. In other words, the plot came from the characters, not from an arbitrary need to force the action in a certain direction. Example: the evil alien, Terl, is a conniving schemer who’s own paranoia and distrust for his fellow aliens help cause his downfall. So even though some things seemed to work out ideally for the humans, it wasn’t a coincidence — it was caused by the greed and hubris of the aliens.

Rather boring film about slackers. At least, I think that’s what it was about. Only notable scene was when main character did the bit with the answering machine.

Really good film. Seemed like it should be talky and boring, but kept my interest. Ironic in that most of the film was good in that it showed there were no pat answers, then it tried to rush in some pat answers for a stilted conclusion. Still, decent overall. I liked it.

Very cool film. I was expecting something David Lynchish, or perhaps a black comedy, but it’s really a fairly normal story about identical Siamese twins and their relationship and the way people treat them. Excellent.