Somusing

I took my four-year-old and six-year-old to see this at the theater. They liked it, but they pretty much like everything they get to see. I thought it was okay. Funny sometimes, and it had some pretty impressive animated scenes of the Antarctic landscape. It's fun to hear the singing voices of actors I only know from regular movies: Hugh Jackman, Brittany Murphy, Nicole Kidman, and Robin Williams.

This is an entertaining but unremarkable remake of a 1965 film with Jimmy Stewart. I haven't actually seen the original , but I've heard that it's really great. This one has a few great songs in it, like "I've Been Everywhere" performed by Johnny Cash and "Angel" by Massive Attack, and you get to hear the songs in their entirety, which I appreciate. I thought the movie was fun. We'll have to see the original sometime.

While this is ultimately inspiring, it's pretty painful to watch, because it's really about Chris Gardner's struggle, not about his triumph. It made me feel like I don't work nearly hard enough for what I have. Which is certainly true, but I try not to dwell on it. Except that I try to be grateful. Some of the amazing scenes in the film--like when Chris has to spend the night in jail for parking tickets and shows up at his interview for an internship at Dean Witter wearing the painting clothes he had on when he was arrested--aren't even as amazing as what happened to the real Chris Gardner. He was arrested for parking tickets and spent 10 days in jail, came home to find girlfriend, son and all of his clothes gone, and had to show up at his interview in the same clothes he'd been wearing when he got arrested. He told the truth and got the job. In every article I read about the real Chris Gardner, there was the same basic information, but the details and ...

I read this book because of the title. It's young adult fiction, and Jon brought it home from the library (because of the title). "Schwa" is such a cool word, don't you think? It's that little upside-down e in phonetics, a sound that is barely there, like the "i" in pencil, or the "o" in convince. Just a little sound that gets you from one consonant to the next in an unstressed syllable. So I thought I'd better read something that uses that word in the title. While some of the book was clever, and it was mildly interesting to read, it was just okay. I should explain that I was reading it with our almost-11-year-old in mind, wondering if it would be appropriate for him. (He reads a ton , and I don't try to read everything he reads, but occasionally I'll read something before he does, to approve it or not.) My conclusion is that it's not appropriate--there's a lot of talk about these 14-year-old characters dating each ot...

A few years ago I read The Coming Anarchy: Shattering the Dreams of the Post Cold War by Robert D. Kaplan. I had never heard of him and it just looked interesting (and was a free library discard, so how could I resist?). It was interesting, and presented me with an unconventional approach to the world. It reminded me of what little I'd read of Niccolò Machiavelli (which wasn't a lot): a pragmatic, not idealistic, view of politics and world events. Eastward to Tartary: Travels in the Balkans, the Middle East, and the Caucasus has a similar underlying view of the world, but is a solid travelogue focused on the author's travels through Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria, Turkey, Syria, Lebanon, Israel, Georgia, Armenia, Azerbaijan, and Turkmenistan. Most of those places he'd visited before at least once, so he was partly comparing his experiences in those places during the 1970s or '80s to the late 1990s, close to 10 years after the collapse of the Soviet Union. The wri...

This Woody Allen movie is pretty good--funny and entertaining. Woody Allen is annoying, of course, but that's his comedic method. Parts of the movie were even funnier this morning, as Jon and I talked about it. Scarlett Johansson's character was different for her, a young and enthusiastic journalism student who's trying to break away from the dental hygenist profession her family expects of her. And I like Hugh Jackman better all the time.

I just read this autobiography of Hiroo Onoda, a Japanese soldier sent to the Philippines in 1944, and ranking officer in a group of soldiers who didn't believe the war really ended in 1945. He didn't surrender till 1974 . The Wikipedia article about him gives a nice summary of his story. I heard about him a few years ago, on Slashdot , I think, but never followed up on it till now. I finally read his book, and it is simply amazing. It's a fairly quick read, but very engaging, and he gives enough background and explains what they were thinking, so it starts to make sense that they thought the war had not ended. He doesn't ignore the many bad parts about his time on the island, but there's not much self-pity either. He and his fellow soldiers thought they were fighting in a very long-running war, with guerrilla tactics, and evidence to the contrary was thought to be an elaborate enemy trick. His experience raises some good questions about how you can find the t...