The first time I saw this movie, in the theater, I swear I got high on it. I left the theater staggering around and wondering what the hell just happened to me. My friend who saw it with me, not a PKD fan, was only in slightly better shape.

An hour later over coffee, I still felt weird and couldn’t shake the notion that the theater management had pumped something into the ventilation system. This is of course impossible. But still.

It’s one of the strangest experiences I’ve ever had.

As for the movie itself, it’s PHENOMENAL. A. Absolutely the most faithful adaptation of a Philip K. Dick novel ever. B. Gorgeous – the rotoscoping technique is also perfect for the subject matter. C. Keanu Reeves is perfectly cast, for the first time since the Bill and Ted movies. Robert Downey Jr. and Woody Harrelson also perfectly cast, as is D. Rory Cocharane who deserves a letter all his own. E. Richard Linklater found a hidden plot possiblity in the narrative (I won’t spell it out because that would be spoiling) and dropped it like an exquisitely well-placed bomb on the ending. F. Yay! They kept the bicycle scene in all its brain-twisting weirdness…

I could go all the way to Z but you get the idea.

The ending is obvious a mile off, the riff on crime witnesses hiding out in a subculture ghetto is old, but there is still some entertainment to be had from this charming bit of fluff. Toni Collette is an absolute chameleon of an actress; she can pull off the “ugly” nerd and the gorgeous femme fatale and makes a credible drag queen, too, even though the audience does know she’s a woman playing a man dressed as a woman. Nia Vardalos less so. But it’s fun watching them mug and prance their way through a whole lot of show tunes, fight bad guys in the midst of a floor show, kiss David Duchovny and squabble like sisters. Cute.

A second person narration is meant to be terribly evocative, but it rarely works. Even when masterfully handled as in Italo Calvino’s On A Winter’s Night A Traveler it’s pretty distracting.

Charles Stross is no Calvino, but seems to have decided he’s better than Calvino, because this book is very distractingly written in the second person—with three different point-of-view characters! Thus at some points the reader “is” Sue, a police detective, Jack, a hacker/gamer, and Elaine, a forensic accountant with a taste for medieval swordfighting. Supposedly this is meant as an homage to those old ADVENTURE computer games, which, ok. But as a noveling technique? Meh.

That aside, this is a GREAT read. Stross found a great angle on the old “bank robbery with global implications” bit—the bank is within an MMORPG and the robbery a tiny part of a fractally weird uberplot. Second person narrative aside, the characters are really well-drawn and cool, and their secrets are well kept until they detonate satisfyingly at the end (where they should).

All in all, a good little bit of info-age sci-fi. William Gibson recommended it, and Amazon has been recommending Stross to me for a while now.

I see why, yes I do!

Anyone who enjoys comics/graphic novels/your name for them here should have a look at this book; it’s always nice to see well-expressed appreciation of what we ourselves love, and this is a nicely done and thoughtful book.

Anyone who doesn’t enjoy comics/etc. should also have a look at this book to gain a good understanding of the people who do.

Wolk has no chip on his shoulder, is not out to defend the medium as inherently respectable or to preach and preach that it is an art form. He just loves comics of all kinds, great, good, and bad, superhero and arty and autobiographical, short-form and multivolume. He has something wise and insightful to say about them all, and even communicated (to me, at least) a new appreciation of some work I’d forgotten (Ed the Happy Clown, a sick nightmare from college days) or have put off as a someday read (Cerebus), as well as of work I, too, love (Alan Moore, Frank Miller, that French guy who did Leviathan).

Hooray!

I first saw this movie almost fifteen years ago at college. It impressed me then and still impresses me now. I’ve lost count of how many times I’ve taken it in. I love everything about it—the performances (especially Bernard Hill), the light, the insect/snail/soap bubble/etc. imagery, the games, the story… It’s one of my favorite films of all time to absorb closely, to giggle at, or just to look at as a piece of visual art in motion.

It’s strange little ties to another favorite, Greenaway’s The Falls (the water tower, a character named Cissie Colpitts, etc.)only enhance the experience.

This is a desert island movie and then some.

I recommend this rather than the excreble film made from it. But, if you’ve already seen the movie, don’t bother. Half of the fun of the book is figuring out the secret, which is truly kept in this nice little novel. Unlike the film. Grr.

The book did a wonderful job of keeping the secret. The film hit you over the head with the secret in the very first scene, and that was just unnecessary.

I expected SO much more from Christopher “Memento” Nolan, especially with such a good book from which to work.

It only gets a second star for David Bowie’s all-too-brief turn as Nicola Tesla. Inspired casting, that.

This is the album to which I suffered under the toil of writing my senior project, a year-long hell inflicted on senior undergrads at liberal arts colleges like Beaudacious Bard College, back in 1992 when the album was new.

Really, it’s the only thing that kept me sane. And I’m not the only one. My best pal Buzzmo was in the same situation and sought a remedy in the same music.

Now it’s a rite of spring. On the first truly beautiful spring day I bust out this disc, open up my windows, and blast it for all my stereo is worth. Their soaring harmonies and unbelievable guitar work rain down in my neighbors and I’m glad again that I’ve made it through another hard, sad winter.

Spring officially and orbitally starts on March 22. For me it doesn’t start until King’s X by King’s X, followed over the next few days by all their other albums, sounds out in my dwelling.

That day is today, April 20. A Sunday.

Which I’m sure Doug, Ty and Jerry would dig if they knew.

Side note: Buzzmo and I saw them in concert in a little club in Boston a few years after we graduated from Bard, and he told them before I could that “I couldn’t have made it through college without you.”

Amen.

So, I had never heard of Paraclete Press when I picked this book up at my local library. I had a hint from the name of the publisher, naturally, but still.. it should have been more of a warning than it was.

The cover art is misleadingly charming, with its flavors of the fantastic Showtime series “Dead Like Me”—a grim reaper sitting on top of a washing machine in a laundromat. Hmm. The liner notes, too, only hint at what the reader really has in store for him.

Basically, this is a big fat parable in novel form. I’m not entirely against the odd dose of religion in my art, but I do at least want it to be art. This is to literature what the crappy cartoony stained-glass windows they put up in my home church when they remodeled it in the 90s are to Caravaggio. The old simple two-tone panes were much better, and so is the actual Bible.

(For the record, I am a filthy unbeliever but not one of those religion-haters like Richard Dawkins et al)

This had moments of humor and some fun ideas—I liked the mystics at the Instant Coffee cup, very Church of Fred Mertz Bodhisattva—but all in all, pretty bland and a bit too preachy.

Sigh.

By the time the MegaZeppelin gets blown out of the sky, you realize that is absolutely the visual metaphor for this movie. I commit no spoilers in this because the destruction of the big shiny blimp of the future is completely irrelevant to what I can make out of the plot.

We’ve already seen that Richard Kelly is a deft hand with the contradictions and possiblities of time travel. I had to keep telling myself that as I watched this film; it was what kept me patient enough to slog through the incoherence, the seemingly irrelevant stunts. Well, that and the very cool imagery.

My patience was paid off—by the end of the film I’d learned to pay very close attention to little throw-away remarks so I understood what was going on in the ice cream truck and why it mattered… but I had to watch the whole thing again to piece together how it related to everything else.

So, nowhere near as good as Donnie Darko but it wasn’t really trying to be.

I’m going to hunt down a second hand copy of the prequel graphic novels and see if they help. I had a very deep feeling that Kelly was really trying to do something with all of these characters (like the Kevin Smith cameo guy who pops up out of nowhere in the last act but whom everyone treats as very important indeed) and still have that one shred of faith in him, enough to give it this last chance.

On the plus side, as I said, some very cool imagery, some very engagingly weird performances (especially Jon Lovitz and, surprise since he usually annoys me to no end, Seann William Scott) and some truly hilarious bits. I speak namely of the Justin Timberlake/The Killers music video drug trip, which made me laugh so hard I scrolled back and watched it a few times in a row.