Orlando

I wasn’t expecting to like this; it’s an extremely political film, to the point of bordering on manifesto, and centres on a supremely obnoxious character. And yet, I did like it. I really did. Reality and film blends, person and character blends, and it’s such an intelligent, but delightful romp, that I really couldn’t help enjoying it.

3/5

I am Curious (Yellow)

I wasn’t expecting to like this; it’s an extremely political film, to the point of bordering on manifesto, and centres on a supremely obnoxious character. And yet, I did like it. I really did. Reality and film blends, person and character blends, and it’s such an intelligent, but delightful romp, that I really couldn’t help enjoying it.

4/5

Past Imperfect

I picked this up at random, mostly because I liked the cover. And this is a case where judging a book by its cover was absolutely the right decision. This is one of the greatest collections of poetry I’ve ever come across, and certainly the best in the past year or two. I can’t pinpoint what I like about it so much, so I’m just going to buy it and then read it again and again until I can properly enunciate what is so amazing about this. But it is amazing.

5/5

The Picture of Dorian Gray

This was my second time reading Wilde’s magnum opus, and it stands up well to a second reading. Wilde writes fiction in a lush, heady manner, immersing the reader in the aesthetics he espouses via his characters. There is so much talent put into this it is insane. However, despite all this, I still can’t entirely fall into this book; I always remain at the edges, far too alert for my own good.

3.5/5

A Precocious Autobiography

I’ve never read Yevtushenko’s work, so I can’t comment on his poetry; however, his autobiography is very, very good. I admit to crying multiple times, particularly in his depiction of Stalin’s funeral, however, it collapses toward the end, wherein Yevtushenko spends twenty pages being very smug, very self-congratulatory, and very, very arrogant. When he writes about the Russian people, he is incredibly moving; when he writes about himself, he just comes off like a pompous ass.

3.5/5

Surviving Desire

I’m unsure if this was adapted from a play, because if it wasn’t, it should certainly be revised and performed theatrically. The entire thing smacked of theatre, down to overblown gestures that would have been much more acceptable on a stage. While I understand that this was a purposeful move by the director, it was still jarring, and the slim amount of plot was not enough to carry the hour long short film. There were inspired moments, but that too was not enough to sustain this.

2.5/5

Home of Sudden Service

I had to write an essay on two of the poems contained within this slim little volume, and I was so excited by them that I picked up Bachinsky's book. All I can say is that my professor has good taste, because those were the best poems in the collection. While her poetry is certainly not bad, the collection runs unevenly, and I was generally underwhelmed. Mediocre, though I don’t mean that in a bad sense, just a bland one.

3/5

Barometer Rising

Oh lord, this is awful. A historical romance set around the Halifax explosion sounds like a terrible concept, and the execution is equally bad. The setting feels forced; McLennan is very focused on making it authentic, at the expense of the storyline and general readability. The characters are, on the whole, extremely unlikeable, especially the "hero". And McLenna's prose is unbelievably melodramatic; he adores his adjectives, which is, honestly, an awful way to write. When the description of a tragedy as powerful as the Halifax explosion has me rolling my eyes at how even a tragedy is overwrought, that is an awful sign.

1/5

Death at a Funeral

If this was a Hollywood film, it would be awful. The script is certainly not the strong point. What is, is the British sensibility that permeates the film. There are some very strong performances, Alan Tudyk's springing to mind, but really, at its heart, this is just a slightly dark, very British comedy.

3/5

Waking Life

Apparently, Waking Life was very well received. I really don't understand it. Waking Life is a mess of extremely pretentious monologues, seemingly only held together by the filmmaker's desire to show off. Obstensibly, it's held together by rhetoric involving dreams, but really, it only hangs together in the loosest sense, and bores the shit out of the audience before finally reaching its point. Masturbatory cinema at its worst.

1/5

Bloodletting and Miraculous Cures

Within the first twenty pages I was going to give this collection up. It got better, and I'm glad it did, but the writing style certainly leaves something to be desired. Luckily, Lam has some very interesting ideas, so the stories did keep me immersed, however, I am unsure why this got so much praise from literary circles. These are interesting stories, but this is not literature.

3/5

Pygmy

I am officially finished with Chuck Palahniuk. I loved him at fourteen, liked him at seventeen, but at nineteen, I'm finished. Snuff was absolutely awful, but I still picked up Pygmy, hoping I could return to loving Palahniuk, a trait that I'm increasingly starting to believe was a sign of immaturity in my reading habits. Instead, I gave up after twenty pages of broken English, anti-American litanies that could horrify a Canadian (and that is saying something), and one graphic rape scene. Goodbye, Chuck. Goodbye forever.

1/5

Birds of America

I have a special place in my heart for short story collections, and Moore's brilliant collection epitomizes why. Each story deals with different sorts of helplessness and unhappiness in gently different ways, and the tenuous threads of other themes--feminism in particular--are exposed over the course of the collection. I'm very, very excited to read more of Moore's works (no pun intended).

4/5

The Things They Carried

Tim O'Brien brilliantly brings the Vietnam war to life with a book that blurs the line between novel, collection of short stories, and memoir. I have read a great deal of war novels, and watched a great deal of war films, and O'Brien's work is one of the best, if not the best, lenses into the unimaginable horrors, comedy, tragedy, and boredom of the front. Each note is struck with the particular skill of a man who has lived through a war, and who inserts reality into fiction in a way that carefully blurs the realities of war in a very interesting way.

4/5