I haven't done one of these in a few months, so I thought it might be fun. Here goes!
Music
The kids have discovered that there are other Foo Fighters albums besides Echoes, Silence, Patience and Grace, so we've been hearing The Color and the Shape quite a bit. (Since I love both albums, I'm not inclined to stop them from playing them, over and over and over and over...) We're waiting for our new Gnarls Barkley album to come from Amazon, so we've been playing St. Elsewhere in anticipation. (If you haven't seen their videos yet, head over to the web site now and play them. Now. I'll wait, it's ok. ... Welcome back! Wasn't that cool?) I recently took a break from audiobooks to listen to something completely different: Yo Yo Ma's Inspired by Bach. A recent post of Brenda Tremblay's reminded me that I hadn't heard that in a while.
TV
30 Rock is still the funniest thing on television, however I've found myself making time on Friday nights to watch The Soup with Joel McHale. (Booya!) Top Chef is keeping itself interesting this year, even with a good batch of chefs and no real bad guy. We powered through season 2 of Weeds on DVD; Season 3 is being released soon! We're still catching up on our Venture Brothers as well.
Movies
We haven't set foot in a movie theater in a long time, so it's all DVD and tape for us. We recently watched all 3 original Star Wars movies with the kids, and I must say, they aren't holding up to time the way most classics do. By the end of Jedi, I had the idea for a new drinking game: every time someone called someone else an "old buddy," or every time the Emperor reminded Luke that his friends (said with demonic derision) were going to die, you had to drink. You'd be so drunk you'd never even wonder how the Ewoks put up such a well-organized and well-equiped attack in the ten minutes they had to plan.
The kids are now asking to watch the three newer movies. It's not very responsible of me to play a drinking game with the kids in the room, so I'll just have to sit through them sober. I don't know how I'll manage. (Maybe episode three will save me; I heard it was better than the other two, but episode two sucked so bad I never went to see it.)
We have two grown-up movies to watch in the next week; Jamie Fox's The Kingdom, and No Country for Old Men. It will be a week of intense movie drama, to say the least.
Books
I've been ripping through books lately and I wonder if I can remember all I've read. Born Standing Up was interesting and well-written. My Horizontal Life: a Collection of One-Night Stands was popcorn and fun. I tore through Power Down, the most recent graphic novel in the Ex Machina series. The Red Tent was a fantastically well-told story from a new point of view. In Defense of Food was common sense codified, and The Year of Eating Dangerously was cute, self-deprecating food and travel writing.
I listened to His Dark Materials (The Golden Compass, the Amber Spyglass and The Subtle Knife) The production was fantastic, but "disappointed" doesn't even begin to describe how I felt when I was done listening to them. "Annoyed" is close. As a family, we listened to Inkheart and are deep in Inkspell; different readers change the feeling of the characters, but the books are really good. I'm listening to Neil Gaiman's short story collection Fragile Things, which has some high points, some low points, and is beginning to run together too much. I would have rather read them one at a time in their original collections, I think.
I have several books on tap to read now: The Brief Wondrous Live of Oscar Wao is top of that list, but I'm afraid to start it. See, when the list at the library for it was so long, I picked up Junot Diaz's book of short stories Drown, and I couldn't finish it. It was brutal, both in its level of violence and its tone. I also have Predictably Irrational and The Geography of Bliss to start- I may not finish it all before it has to go back to the library.
So, that's the last couple of months of media around here. What's in your Media-verse now?
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
3 comments:
My advice is to stall the girls as long as possible on the new Star Wars movies. And really avoid the 3rd at all costs. Very violent, very graphic AND complete and utter proof that Lucas was talking out of his (ahem) butt when he told us for all those years that he had this whole story in his head the whole time. I felt pissed and betrayed when we walked out. (However, in the interest of fairness, I do know others, my husband included, who didn't have such a violent response to it. But I still don't think it's appropriate for young kids.)
Thanks for the heads-up. Most of their friends have seen them; sometimes it surprizes me what movies parents will let their kids watch. Maybe I should do a pre-screen on Episode 3, just in case.
We watched the Kingdom last night. The word "intense" sums it up pretty well. It was very good, with only a few formulaic plot twists and to mar the surface.
I felt exactly the way you did at the end of His Dark Materials.
Adam and Eve? Are you kidding me?
Seriously?
And what was with God? Wasn't that a little pointless?
I should have stopped after "The Golden Compass".
Who thinks that those are books for kids? I have to stop ranting now, because I can go on and on about what was wrong with them.
Post a Comment