Somusing

The Wedding by Nicholas Sparks Manipulative and sappy. The Inner Circle by T.C. Boyle Well-written but I had to force myself to finish this, because of the subject, I guess. It’s about Alfred Kinsey, the sex researcher. I think the book is ultimately pretty moral, but it was still difficult to read. Out of the Blue by Sally Mandel I think this is classified as a romance, and apparently it didn’t do very well. But maybe that’s because it has more substance than your typical romance—the main character has MS, and her struggles are eye-opening and touching. I enjoyed the story very much. The Southwest Corner by Mildred Walker I don’t even know where we got this little book published by some university press. It’s about an elderly lady who decides that she can’t live in her huge house alone anymore during Vermont winters and how she remedies the situation. I liked it. The Witch of Blackbird Pond by Elizabeth George Speare I read this a long time ago, but it...

The author and her husband have rowed something like 20,000 miles of coastline way the heck up in Alaska, northern Canada, Greenland, Norway, and Svalbard (yeah, I didn’t know where it was, either; it’s north of Scandinavia. Honestly, I didn’t know there was anything north of Scandinavia, except for the North Pole.) This book is fun to read—while it seems that she was groomed from a young age to do this kind of thing, it’s still pretty amazing, and she has great stories about run-ins with bears and whales. My complaints: she says that the earth would be better off without people, which is a ridiculous statement in my opinion. She’s pretty critical of native people who leave trash around and doesn’t like the southern part of Norway, which has oil refineries next to nature preserves, but she doesn’t seem to consider how much damage she herself might be doing to the planet by flying all over it in jet planes and shipping a huge rowboat everywhere she goes, not to mention the materi...

Now this , in contrast to almost everything else I’ve seen lately, is an important film. The filmmaker intended to do two films—one about the Israeli/Palestine conflict from the point of view of Palestinian children (this film) and one from the point of view of Israeli children. I wish he could have made that second film, but he was shot by Israeli soldiers just as he was finishing the filming for this movie. His death is not kept a secret in the film—you know from the very beginning that it ends with his death—but that’s not the only reason I was nervous about watching it. I’m not very brave about watching violent stuff. But it was fascinating, though disturbing, and not as violent as I had imagined it would be. The filmmaker and those who edited and finished the film later tried pretty hard to be unbiased. What you get seems to be, as close as it can be, the Israeli/Palestinian conflict as Palestinian kids see it—many of them have lost relatives to Israeli soldier fire; all Pale...

Superman Returns (2006) Not bad, especially for a sequel of sorts. Kind of long. The kids thought they were pretty lucky when we deemed this PG-13 movie appropriate for their viewing. Kevin Spacey was a pretty good Lex Luthor. You, Me and Dupree (2006) Pretty funny at times, though also vulgar. A positive message about marriage. I like the Wilson brothers. Luke is my favorite, but Owen can be pretty funny. Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason (2004) (TV edit) Silly but enjoyable. I really like Hugh Grant in the bad boy roles, and he was hot in this one. Colin Firth is also nice to look at. If only I liked Bridget better. The movie was very different from the book. The Triplets of Belleville (2003) This was supposed to be great, but I thought it was boring and not very cohesive, I guess. The animation looked intriguing and quite wonderful sometimes, and there were some mildly interesting and amusing moments (like the aged triplets’ diet of frogs—frog sandwiches, f...

I enjoyed this , but after I finished watching it, I realized that Cameron Diaz and Jude Law were supposed to be the sexy, happenin’ couple, while Kate Winslet and Jack Black were the slightly overweight, awkward couple, and that bothered me. I admit that my only evidence that they were supposed to be slightly overweight was a cute comment that they said to each other at two different windy parts of the movie: “Don’t blow away,” and the little black dress Kate wore later in the movie, in which one of her arms briefly looked slightly fat (by Hollywood standards). In any case, there is the overall impression that they are supposed to be kind of geeky and desperate or something, certainly not hip or cool, like the other two. And excuse me, but while Kate Winslet is a great actress, she just didn’t pull off the desperate, not-so-attractive person they were maybe going for. Yes, it’s possible that my over-critical brain is seeing something that isn’t there to see. But here’s more eviden...

The full title of this book is Beyond Fear: Thinking Sensibly About Security in an Uncertain World , and the book delivers on the promise of that title. I started it a couple of months ago, and enjoyed taking my time reading just a few chapters at each sitting. Bruce Schneier is a well-known cryptographer -- he was a major participant in the AES cipher contest a few years back -- but this is a nontechnical book. He does an excellent job of demonstrating that security is all about tradeoffs: cost vs. benefit in terms of money, attention, convenience, freedom, etc. There's no perfect security, and all security decisions need to be re-evaluated from time to time. Based on what? Bruce outlines a five-step process to evalute security decisions: What are you trying to protect? ... "So much of the bad security surrounding us is a result of not understanding exactly what is being protected and of implementing countermeasures that move the risk around but don't actually mit...

...not to say that these are official productions of the church, but made by LDS people. Money or Mission (2006) I was distracted by how much the lead character, an almost 19-year-old boy getting ready to go on a mission, looked like Meg Ryan. Otherwise, it was short and okay. But here’s a general complaint: I find almost every female character in these movies made by LDS people annoying—way too perky and cheerful and smiley. With the exception of Napoleon Dynamite , of course. Money or Mission is more like a church production than others I've seen, but that's not surprising. It was made from an article that appeared in the Ensign . Take A Chance (2006) This one was mildly amusing at times, but otherwise similar in quality to The R.M. and The Singles Ward . The religious family in this movie is generically religious, but they’re not the focus of the intended hilarity. Maybe that’s why the hilarity isn’t all that hilarious. The more I think of it, the more ...