Quick Movie Reviews (2009): Volume Four
And here are some more quick reviews from GeorgeMichael. Okay, so only the first four are from him, but still. He’s apparently seen a lot of movies this year. As have I! Anywho, enjoy: Bride WarsPros: Both Anne Hathaway and Kate Hudson are great actors who do their very best with the mediocre script that they’ve been handed. Their performances are the highlight of this otherwise disposable movie in which two best friends get their weddings planned on the same day in the same place and fight with everything they can to ensure that their own wedding wins out. Let theoretical hilarity ensue.Cons: It’s not funny and it’s not romantic. Anything that you could possibly want in a rom/com is completely absent here. You have a two hour long catfight for sure but it’s all loosely wound by a poorly written script and horrible execution.Rating: 1.5/5 I Love You, ManPros: Paul Rudd and Jason Segel give amazing performances as Peter and Sidney in the most recent bro-mance for all to enjoy. The premise surrounds Peter getting engaged and realizingthat he doesn’t have a best man so as a result he begins his search for male bonding. The script is amazing and the movie works flawlessly. Paul Rudd is great as the awkward “only had girl friends” guy who gets nervous around Sidney when he tries to be cool. Jason Segel is equally impressive as the yin to Paul’s yang as the outgoing party dude.Cons: Like many Apatow-like movies (he has nothing to do with this particular film) the movie runs a tad too long but other than that it is an amazing movie that is easily worth double the price of the admission ticket.Rating: 4.5/5 Last Chance HarveyPros: Dustin Hoffman and Emma Thompson give great performances in this substantial feel good film. Harvey (Dent… he he…) is a commercial jingle composer who travels to England for his daughter’s wedding and everything goes wrong. First he finds out that he has been left at a hotel all alone because his entire family are staying at a house that his ex wife rented out. Then his daughter tells him that she wants her step father to walk her down the aisle. To place a cherry on top of it all he gets fired. While sulking at a bar he comes across a delightful woman in misery named Kate. The feel goodiness begins.Cons: The movie moves a little slow at times and can drag in certain places. It plays the plot safe for the most part and in any other instance would be a pretty general feel good movie. What elevate Last Chance Harvey above the rest are the superb performances of Hoffman and Thompson.Rating: 4/5 Slumdog MillionairePros: A perfect love story set in the slums of India that tells the tale of Jumal Malik as he searches his whole life looking for the girl that he lost as a child, Latika. The movie is perfectly cast, directed, written, and shot. To add to all of that the movie has amazing music to go along for the ride. A movie that opens with the main character being tortured turns into one of the happiest and greatest movies in recent years. Who knew?Cons: A perfect love story. There are no cons. All Oscars were deserved.Rating: 5/5 Sex DrivePros: A couple hilarious moments, but really this is sort of a typical teen comedy/romance. Not much else to say, unfortunately.Cons: The best moments were the ones we already saw in the previews. The Amish scenes were mediocre at best and the plot was pretty much an idiotic “I’m a teenage virgin male and I need to get laid” rehash. Basically it’s unoriginal and overdone. We need more interesting teenage comedies…Rating: 1/5 And there you go!
Reader Question: Current Events and Reader Preferences and Experience
TruGenius recently left a comment asking me the following: How do current social events shape readers preferences? I’m going to start this off by saying that I am in no way a genius on this subject. I haven’t spent years studying book sales, trends, etc. So everything I am going to say on this subject is going to be based on what I know and think I know either through my readings on the Internet or interactions with friends, family, and readers. One thing that has always surprised me about the publishing industry and readers is how unpredictable they can be at times. I imagine someone saw the boom in urban fantasy coming from a mile away, but I don’t think anyone could have accurately predicted that young adult fantasy and science fiction would explode as it did, nor that young readers would be so eager to set aside their video games and cell phones to dig into a book. Looking at YA numbers is usually a jaw-dropping experience for me–I’m used to seeing 50,000 units sold as the “big number,” rather than the massive 500,000 to 1,000,000 that seems relatively common in YA these days. But is any of this indicative of social trends in response to the events of the last decade? Some of it, perhaps. There is certainly something to be said about recession and book sales. We saw the sale of e-readers spike (as well as ebooks), and polls have shown that people are reading more now than they were before the initial crash of the economy. I can’t say if these increases have remained steady: I suspect that the sales have not, but the reading has. And there isn’t anything there to indicate any specific trends (such as in genre). But this post is more about the influence of current events on reader preferences–specifically what kinds of books people are more likely to read during social, national, or global stress. From what I understand about trending, the economy can have a big influence on what kinds of books sell and what movies will succeed. io9 had a post a while ago about the trends of dystopias during economic booms and recessions that showed a correlation between strong(er) economic status and the success or rise of dystopic movies. The same thing seems true about books: dystopian fiction seems to do better, or at least is more prevalent, during economic booms (or stable trends in the economy). But this isn’t always the case. Recently we’ve seen a flood of Mayan doomsday novels (and films), most of which are doing quite well, even in these difficult times. I suspect that our relative proximity to 2012 has a lot to do with this and don’t be surprised if 2011 is filled to the brim with written works all across the board. With all that in mind, I think it’s safe to say that dystopias will shrink during this recession, Mayan doomsday fiction will remain steady, and other forms of fiction (possibly more optimistic forms) will see an increase. I could be wrong, though, and probably am. The one thing I’m not wrong about is that we will see an increase in desire for adventure-based fiction and highly escapist literature. This may not be reflected in sales, particularly because the economy is hurting just as bad as individual people are, but it will be reflected in readers themselves, who may or may not spend more time at libraries or reading their backlist of books they’ve bought, but never read. I would also suspect that Obama’s historical presidency would have some influence on books in the U.S., but I haven’t seen much in the last year in the way of future ground-breaking U.S. elections. Maybe we’ve yet to see Obama’s influence on literature. I think what I’m trying to get at here is that it’s sort of impossible to truly know what the market will do at any point (the market, of course, responds to sales, which leads directly to reader preferences). We can look back and see how major events in the world have influenced literature and reader preferences, but can any of us say that we could have predicted those changes, or that we can use what happened in the past to reflect upon the future of trends? I don’t think so. The problem is that each event is relatively unique from the one that precedes it. Current events do shape literature, but it’s hard to tell where that shaping will go. Sure, bad times seem to produce greater desire for escapism, and happy times produce greater desire for depressing fiction, but that might be the only trend we can actually pin down, with the exception to war. There are, I think, two trends in reader preferences during war: one is a boom in war-based literature with clearer indications of good and evil, and the other is a boom in war-based literature where the boundaries turn grey. We get that boost of patriotism in the beginning, and then when things turn out to be different than we imagined, we begin to see that fade. We saw this happen with the Bush Administration (at least I think so). At first, when 9/11 happened, we saw patriotism explode: readers wanted books on the subject, even when it was in their fiction; they wanted heroes of all shapes and sizes. But when things started turning ugly, when we began to see what was wrong with the war in greater numbers, then readers seemed to want something else: they desired fiction proposing “the truth” (and sometimes conspiracy theories or propaganda); they wanted stories about wars going in ways unexpected and characters who were flawed, imperfect people. This is more based on what seems “dominant” than one whether one exists and the other does not. Both exist and always have, I think, but they shift back and forth depending on what is going on in the real world. With all that I have