World War Z

Eeek, I just totally and utterly loved this, I listened to Max Brooks’ World War Z as an audiobook and it was pretty lengthy, but I just could not stop listening to it and finished it in just a few days. I’m sure that just conventionally reading this book would be brilliant but the audiobook format took it to another level, as the book, a ‘non-fiction’ account of World War Z, the zombie war, is a series of first person accounts and each account was read by a different narrator and they were read so well, it was like listening to a long radio documentary rather than listening to a story. Some of the chapters were almost exclusively just a retelling of that character’s story in his own words but other chapters were more like interviews, so those were read by two narrators, the book’s ‘author’, a UN employee and the interviewee.

World War Z tells the tale, through the accounts of survivors, of a massive, global zombie apocalypse, the zombies take over vast swathes of the planet, leaving humanity to cling on in a few pockets of land.  The story is incredibly well thought out; how the initial outbreaks started, how countries would initially respond, the individual human impact and how they would eventually fight back. World War Z is an allegory in a way about modern society; how we’ve lost our ability to communicate with each other, how we’ve lost our ability to be self sufficient. It was like the use of zombies was an extreme example of how we’ve got too soft and comfortable in our existence and how if any problem was to effect us globally like a (non zombie) disease pandemic or more conventional global war we would just crumble.

Anyway, I would highly recommend this book and in particular the audiobook and (and I’m normally personally strict about this anyway) definitely read the book before you see the movie, which is out next June, as from the trailer, the movie looks pretty different.

And as with all good books that people adore, when they make a movie that dares to differ from the plot, it gets slated before it’s even out (although a lot of times that slating can be absolutely justified – see the Dark Is Rising movie *shudder*), although in defence of the World War Z movie, it would be pretty difficult to stick to the format of the book, with its collection of first person recollections, although that format would have made a fantastic big budget TV series. However from the trailer the zombies do look pretty awful, I can get the use of CGI in the zombie crowd scenes but I hope there are lots of chances to see actual people playing the zombies in close ups, as the CGI zombies don’t look that realistic. And they’re fast zombies, that was a key point of the book, that they were slow! They’re also not meant to be good at climbing things hmmmmm …. have the producers thought that slow zombies that couldn’t really get you if you climbed high enough or built a big enough wall weren’t scary enough? Cos I tell you, they were still pretty scary in the book.

Still, I will so be watching this movie, if anything because I’ve been totally brainwashed by all those Chanel ads that are everywhere at the moment, Brad Pitt can go look at me with those eyes anytime and actually Hollywood superstars that actually look better as they age aside, I like a good action movie, even a bad movie but I can’t guarantee that I’m not going to moan about them slaughtering a brilliant book afterwards.

***** (out of 5)

Related articles

• world war against me: a hollywood massacre (littlebookishthings.wordpress.com)
• Full Trailer for WORLD WAR Z Unleashes a Swarm of Zombies (geektyrant.com)

Super 8

I don’t think I make a very good film (or TV) reviewer because if I like something I’m all squeeeeeeeee that was marvellous and if I don’t like something  I can’t be too bothered to write about it these days. Anyway, I watched Super 8 last night and squeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee, it was marvellous.

Written and directed by JJ Abrams (already a good sign for me), Super 8 was produced by (amongst others) Steven Spielburg and that’s what really made the movie for me, as it was such a homage to the peak of Spielburg’s movie making, set in the 70s  (tick), in small town America (tick), kids (tick), disfunctional families (tick), monster (tick). Super 8 tells the story of a group of kids making their own movie (I suspect I know what JJ Abrams was doing in the 70s) and inadvertently filming the most OTT train crash in the history of movies ever. The military (as in all good movies of this type) are instantly all over it and not telling the good old sherrif’s deputy (the recently widowed father of one of the movie making kids) a thing about it. People and objects start disappearing  and as in all good movies of this type (again) we only at first see glimpses and shadows of the monster behind it (far more scary that way).

The mainly child cast in this are fantastic, there are some great supporting characters (both adult and child) and all aided by fantastic script and direction, there’s some brilliant one-liners and it’s one of those movies where there’s always stuff you don’t want to miss going on in the background to.

Definitely my new favourite JJ Abrams movie and it could quite easily be my favourite movie of I’ve seen of 2012 (even though I only saw it on January 6th).

Related articles

• Brilliance in Storytelling – A writer’s Review of “Super 8″ (jennifermeaton.com)

Highlights of 2011

And it’s Highlights time of the year again . . .

Family highlight

Probably our first ever proper family holiday in Disneyland Paris in May (which was brilliant), alongside Boy and Girl Lacer continuing to do so brilliantly at school.

Personal highlight

Getting a ‘proper’ job! That was in July but actually this year all round has been good for work because I was very busy with tutoring to but I was never a big fan of my tutoring work and all the time whilst I was doing it this year I was repeating my own personal mantra that all I had to do was do it for two more years (as I had committed to teaching one particular student for two years) and then fingers crossed, by the time the two years was up I had hoped I would have some form of better employment. So I was really pleased that I landed the perfect job for me a year early, I still have to continue to tutor, that student I committed to two years for, but other than him I’m not taking any more students on and I’ll be doing cartwheels down the street when I finish with that student in May (not that that particular student is horrible to work with or anything, he’s actually probably one of the nicest students I’ve ever worked with, it’s just tutoring, not me, at least science tutoring isn’t me, I’d still like to run some embroidery workshops one day). But back to the ‘proper’ job, I’ve been doing it for 5 months now and I still love it, I had been beginning to despair that the ideal part time job for me didn’t actually exist, as so many part time jobs had flexible hours (i.e. working Mondays and Wednesdays one week, Tuesdays and Thursdays the next) making booking childcare a nightmare. And then there was the fact that I was still not completely comfortable putting Boy Lacer into childcare at all . . . So to find a job where my hours of work are controlled by me, so I work during the school day, in the evening and at the weekends has been a dream come true. All that and something I enjoy doing to has been amazing. And even better it’s in an industry where I can happily see myself progressing up a career ladder as the kids get older (it’s also a lovely job in that due to the flexibility and part time nature of the work, so many people I work with do something else to, just as I embroider, I work with artists, musicians and writers, it’s lovely to find such a like minded company where I can control my time so I can earn money doing something I enjoy and in my time off continue to work on my embroidery in a way that if I had a 9 to 5 job, I couldn’t).

Book highlight(s)

Nerdy book stats time again; in 2011 I read (or listened to) 34 books (which is a shocking 8 books down from last year, it would have been even less if I hadn’t managed to get lots of reading in this December). Out of those 34; 25 were adult fiction (+3 from last year), 7 were children / YA fiction (a terrible -9 from last year) and 2 were non-fiction / memoir (-1 from last year) and I note that I didn’t read any short story collections this year either.

My adult fiction favourite

I’ve read some great books this year, highlights for me included Never Let Me Go, The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet, Ours Are The Streets, A Discovery of Witches and City of Ghosts but my absolute favourite has to be Joe Hill’s Horns, which I thought was hauntingly fantastic.

My children’s fiction favourite

It has to be The Fear, may Charlie Higson go hurry up and write more

Cook book highlight

I think it has to be Hugh FWs Veg: Everyday, for being a vegetarian cookbook that isn’t really a vegetarian cookbook (but still definitely has no meat).

Craft book highlight

Only a relatively recent purchase but I’m pretty sure I’m going to use it again and again because the two things I have made from it turned out so well, it has to be Sew La Tea Do.

Film / DVD highlight

Hmmm, I think I managed to watch even less films this year, but off the top of my head I really liked Monsters.

TV highlight(s)

It feels like a lot of my favourite shows have ended over the last few years and there’s been nothing really to replace it, Doctor Who has continued to be good this year whereas Torchwood was awful (a prime example of when you take a British show and try and stretch it to American length). I think my favourite TV shows this year though was the cruelly cancelled Outcasts, may the Beeb continue to make sci-fi like that please.

Music highlights

I think my most listened to albums on my iPod this year were the entire back catalogue of Linkin Park, Eliza Doolittle, the Jack Johnson back catalogue, the Newton Faulkner back catalogue and The Defamation of Strickland Banks (my music tastes are nothing but a bit schizophrenic).

Embassytown

China Mieville had been one of those authors I had been planning to read for quite some time, I quite liked the look of, in particular, Kraken, so I’m not sure quite why I chose Embassytown to be my first Mieville read (or should I say audiobook) instead.

Embassytown is sci-fi, Mieville himself is I think a fantasy writer (although his wiki entry says he plans on writing a novel in every genre, which is I think one of those great things about being a fantasy writer, you’ve got steampunk fantasy, western fantasy, sci-fi fantasy, you name it), but maybe then I should have chosen for my first Mieville something not quite so sci-fi, as I have a rather schizophrenic relationship with the sci-fi genre. Now I always think I love sci-fi, it is pretty much my favourite TV genre in everything from Battlestar Galactica, Stephen Spielberg’s Falling Skies to of course Doctor Who (although that’s not really sci-fi) and I tend to love any rare snippet of sci-fi the Beeb puts out from Outcasts, to Pulse, to Defying Gravity, to (and plumbing the depths of time here) Star Cops, even if pretty much everyone else slates it, ach maybe they’re all reading big serious sci-fi books like Embassytown, whereas I’m happy as long as they’ve got day-glo guns and a not too dense plot. It’s not like I’ve not read sci-fi before, I used to read quite a lot of Arthur C. Clarke in my teens and twenties and I like big serious sci-fi movies like Moon, Monsters and ummm other ones I can’t remember their names of (oh I’m so a die hard fan, can’t you tell?).

So with those slightly dubious sci-fi credentials behind me I always seem to forget that I actually don’t like reading most sci-fi, it leaves me cold, all that excess detail and belly button gazing, brrrrhhhh. Sooooo for a good first third of Embassytown, a novel about an outpost city where the Hosts (the inhabitants of the planet the humans have decided to go and build a city on) are these weird insectoid creatures that speak language through two mouths and can only be communicated with by specially bred twin Ambassadors, I was a bit bored. It was ok but I thought there was an excess of detail and not that much actually happening. Mieville goes into great detail on the nature of the language and that is generally the theme of the book, language and how it can be used with a theme side helping of the effect of colonisers on native species (although not stated explicitly there is a direct correlation between the Europeans and the colonisation of America and Australia and the effect on the native peoples). However Mieville does reward those who’ve sat through the first third of Embassytown with an increasingly faster, more plot driven story for the latter two-thirds of the book and I guess the world in which the story happened and the effect of the characters’ actions would not have been so ‘real’ if Mieville hadn’t spent so much time setting up the story to begin with . . .  so after all my whinging about sci-fi that goes on a bit for most of this post, yep you guessed it, I actually quite liked Embassytown. It’s not my favourite book of the year by far but it certainly hasn’t put me off reading more Mieville (maybe I will try Kraken next time). I think most of my criticisms of the book lay with me, in that as much as I proclaim to love sci-fi, I’m a ‘lazy’ sci-fi consumer and I prefer either easier plots or failing that a cinematographer to do all the hard work for me and to convey the alien landscape visually to me via film rather than words (actually I think Embassytown would make a good movie).

PS One final note about the whole audiobook aspect of this book, the aforementioned language that features so prominently in Embassytown spoken by the two mouthed Hosts (at least I think they have two mouths, I’m getting paranoid now that I’m going to get absolutely slaughtered by some die hard sci-fi nut who reads books like Embassytown for breakfast and will of course know the precise ins and out of the entire plot, it’s just the bit where Mieville explains how language works was in the first third of the book and my mind may have been wandering, which is a danger when you don’t have to physically read the thing, just listen), anyway the language gets featured quite neatly in the audiobook as the two mouthed Hosts and the two mouthed (as they’re clones) Ambassadors each say one part of the word or name in the language together, so a name, such as the name of one of the Ambassadors, EzRa, one mouth would say Ez and the other mouth would say Ra, at the same time and obviously with a bit of dubbing in the audiobook, hearing the narrator say it how it would have sounded like, with the Ez and the Ra being spoken at the same time, is at first a bit disturbing but does turn into a really neat device that certainly added to the story.

The Adjustment Bureau

I’ve just watched The Adjustment Bureau and absolutely loved it, a sci-fi / fantasy-ish romance starring Matt Damon and Emily Blunt and based on a short story from Phillip K Dick.

Matt Damon’s character is running for Senate when by chance (in a beautifully shot hotel) he meets Emily Blunt’s character wearing a stunning evening skirt and top combo (photo below doesn’t really do the outfit justice).

The whole movie is beautifully shot and styled, with wonderful colouring. Thankfully it’s not all style and no substance, as the plot is interesting, thought provoking and gently quirky, as The Adjustment Bureau do their best to stop Damon and Blunt from getting together. I haven’t seen a movie I’ve liked so much in ages.

Monsters

It’s been a while since I’ve written here about a film, in fact I’ve been watching quite a lot, specially since we got cable last year but most films have not felt that much worth blogging about (although I really liked Never Let Me Go and Black Swan was certainly memorable). Anyway, we finally got to watch Monsters last night (it’d always been on the list of movies to watch but had always got beaten by something else, that’s the trouble with FilmFlex, too much choice and sometimes you can end up watching something completely dud instead, like most of Simon Pegg’s recent movies – haven’t watched Paul yet though).

Anyway, about the time Monsters had come out in the cinema, I’d seen a making off thing (it may have been a feature on The Review Show) and it intrigued me. Basically Monsters is a very low budget movie, with largely just two actors going through Mexico, most of the other actors were picked up along the way amongst the locals, CGI is then used afterwards to create the Infected Zone, with CGIed on warning signs, ruined buildings, planes, helicopters and of course monsters (aliens that had crashed to Earth on a space probe, 6 years previously). The monsters were very well done, working on the principal that the things you can’t see are often scarier and when you do see them it’s mostly dark (good for hiding any flaws in cheap CGI, as well as also being scary). The CGI was mostly very good, with the only thing that looked fake was some smoke in the background very early on in the movie and it goes to show how far technology + imagination has advanced to allow people to make things like this.

As for the plot; newspaper man escorts newspaper owner’s daughter out of Mexico and back to the US, I could get why they could only take boats back at certain times and why they couldn’t fly over the infected zone, but couldn’t she just have travelled a bit further south, got a plane to, I don’t know, Australia and then flown to the US? That’s the only bit that didn’t really ring true for me. Other than that, it was a bit of an obvious parable on Mexican immigration and Iraq / Afghanistan, but sometimes those things need saying.

Source Code

A rare occurrence for me, I actually went to the cinema last night and it wasn’t to see a kids movie either. I loved Duncan Jones’ Moon, a very original ‘proper’ sci-fi movie, one of those movies that demonstrated that low budget movies are often the best. So I was keen to see Jones’ second movie, Source Code, which had a much higher budget, most of which seemed to be spent on very lingering CGI explosions.

Trying not to give any spoilers here, Source Code is about a helicopter pilot in Afghanistan, who has somehow been drafted into a project where he is sent ‘into’ the last 8 minutes of the life of a teacher who had been blown up in a train explosion. Source Code may be a higher budget movie but like Moon, it has a very concentrated feel, with most of the action taking place, naturally, on the train, as those 8 minutes are repeated over and over again, linked with that the cast isn’t that big either. There is another similarity to Moon as well but if I even hint as to what it is, it will be a spoiler, so I won’t.

Overall I liked it, it’s not quite as mind blowingly original as Moon, but it would be extremely hard to top that particular movie. I thought the actors were great and I think special mention should go to the guy playing the scientist behind the Source Code project, as although this wasn’t In anyway directly related to the plot, the character was definitely (in my opinion) played as if the scientist was somewhere on the autistic spectrum. It was nothing major, just tiny mannerisms that seemed to suggest it and although I say it had nothing directly to do with the plot, I think it explained why the scientist behaved as he did to the helicopter pilot character, as what he was expecting him to do, suggested a lack of empathy, which can be an issue with some people on the spectrum.

The only negative was that there was no real explanation as to what the source code was, there is a scene of technobabble but it’s very brief and didn’t explain it in the level I wanted it explained but I guess they had to pitch it an audience who wouldn’t want too much explanation to get in the way of the action, but I did make me think of the scene in Matrix, where the matrix is explained, handled a not too dissimilar concept, a lot better.