Movies, Books, Etc: Summer 2007

S watched Ocean's Eleven while we were away. He said I had to see it. He was right. I definitely did not follow the whole thing, but cool crime + hot guys = satisfaction. Brad Pitt totally has it going on, and I wonder if I'm the only one who thought of The Great Train Robbery, one of my favorite movies ever.

You'd think I would have read Monkeys, but I hadn't, and now I have, and that's about it. Oddly timeless, oddly flat.

I read most of The Dogs of Babel, and it's still by my bed, but though K said it's one of her favorite novels, I'm not so enamored. The love story engages me, but the talking dog stuff bores me, and that pretty much sums up my approach to fiction.

I finally read Murakami, and yes, he is that great.

E and I saw Ratatouille. Fabulous animation and excellent depiction of restaurant life (and the two come together brilliantly when the rats get it on in the kitchen), but my inner kneejerk feminist couldn't take the tough butch chef girl losing it for the lame guy.

Harry Potter finally entered our world. M has refused to go there, but E and S read the first book and are well into the second, and E and I just watched the first movie. The whole thing has never particularly appealed to me, but I did enjoy the movie, and now I am thinking that I will go completely heretical and just watch all the movies. My nephew tells me that this is a mistake because the books have a lot more description, but, heretically, I don't particularly care.

This book is so bad I can't name it and I couldn't read it. I'll just quote the first two sentences which I had to read about half a dozen times because I couldn't believe a copy editor hadn't done something about them (and if you don't see the problem, maybe you shouldn't be reading this blog): Laurel Estabrook was nearly raped the fall of her sophomore year of college. Quite likely she was nearly murdered that autumn.

It makes me really happy to know that Phil Rizzuto is the announcer in "Paradise by the Dashboard Light." Probably I should have known that already, and now he's dead, which is why the topic came up and I now know it, but it only makes me like him and the song that much more.