The Best Friend’s Guide to Planning a Wedding

by Lara Webb Carrigan

This is another in the pile of wedding books that I’ve been reading. This one is fun and easy to read, and doesn’t take itself too seriously. It’s sprinkled with cute, romantic wedding tales along with a few horror stories. There are some lists of questions for various vendors, but I found these to be less complete than those in other books. However, at the end of each chapter on the various vendors, Carrigan includes a list of things that should be present in the contract with the vendor. This is unique to this book (at least, of the books I’ve looked at so far), and could prove to be quite useful.

Big Fish

4/5 stars

Will Bloom only knows his father through one tall tale after another. As a child, he enjoyed his father’s tales, but over the years he finds them tiresome and longs to know his “real” father. When his father becomes very ill, Will returns to work out their differences.

Big Fish was a fun movie with the tall tales weaved through the story of Will and his father. I kept finding that I wanted to believe the tall tales, and I could almost believe them.

American Movie: The Making of Northwestern

3/5 stars

I honestly don’t know how to rate this film.

It is a documentary following Mark Borchardt, an amateur filmmaker, who is trying to make a feature length film. This has been his dream. Though he can’t find the funding for the movie, so he decides to first finish a short film he had started a few years earlier (Coven, pronounced coe-ven). In the process we meet his friends who have starred in some of his teenaged efforts and his family who have financed some of his film efforts. (Though after $10k, his father was done supporting him at all). He still lives at home with his mother. He has three children, though he is not still seeing the mother. He has a girlfriend who looks old enough to be his mother (though we suspect that he’s older than he comes across). His uncle Bill is a sad old man living in a trailer with nothing in his life. It is finally Uncle Bill who comes through with the money to finish Coven.

Andrew’s comment was that this movie was like watching a very long episode of Judge Judy. Almost true, though we don’t actually have to see the white trash surroundings on Judge Judy — just the people who come out of such circumstances.

It’s hard to rate because on the one hand, it was a well-done documentary. But on the other hand, it was just so depressing that I couldn’t recommend the film to my friends.

Coven itself was a confused mish-mash of potentially scary images that never really comes together into a coherent story.

Sky Coyote

by Kage Baker

I had actually sworn off this series after reading the first, In the Garden of Iden. However, Andrew enjoyed the first book, and so this one was lying around the house and I decided to try it. How odd that the style of this novel is so much different from Iden. I quite liked this one, whereas Andrew did not.

In this novel, Mendoza’s presence is secondary, and instead we focus on Joseph, a facilitator who has been with the company for thousands of years (he was also the one who recruited Mendoza, and was there on her disastrous first mission). His job is to impersonate the coyote god of the Chumash, a native North American tribe that the Company has decided to preserve.

At first I was bothered by the dialog. The Chumash talk like modern-day teens, but I can imagine that Baker decided that making up a dialect could be tricky and potentially more jarring than using a more modern style. In the end, I quite liked this novel, and may seek out more.

The Guru

3/5 stars

This was a fun, fluffy movie about Ramu, an Indian (the country, not a Native American), comes to New York to become a movie star. Instead, he finds success as a sex guru, spreading his philosophy (borrowed from a porn star) to the masses. The random scenes mirroring an Indian movie (seen at the beginning of the film) with a big dance number are hilarious. Lots of fun, but likely soon forgotten.

Paycheck

3.5/5 stars

While I was hoping for a good sci-fi flick when I went to see this movie, I certainly wasn’t expecting much. I’m not usually a big Ben Affleck fan, nor do I particularly like Uma Thurman much. (One might ask, then, why I went to see Paycheck in the first place.)

If I ignored the science in the movie (which I usually have to do, even though it’s really hard), it was actually a good thriller. Neither Ben nor Uma annoyed me as they usually do, which might be due to John Woo’s direction, or maybe I’m softening up. This was a fun Saturday afternoon flick.

Stomp!

I dragged Andrew to Stomp today. I’ve wanted to see them for years, but was too poor the other times they came through town. When I heard the radio ads last November, I called and got us tickets. Good tickets — we were in row C, which was actually the fifth row, though after the show I was glad we weren’t any closer.

The show was very high energy with rhythms created by various and sundry objects — matchboxes, cardboard tubes, lighters, trash cans, trash can lids. They even threw in kitchen sinks. With water.

Einstein’s Dreams

by Alan Lightman

I picked this book up partly because I’m familiar with Lightman’s textbook writing, and was curious to see how he would do with a novel. Einstein’s Dreams is a series of short dreams that Lightman imagines Einstein may have had while developing his special theory of relativity. These dreams explore the different aspects of space and time that Einstein’s theory imply. In one, time is felt by all people at all times to pass in the same way — it this world, there is no “time flies when you’re having fun.” In another dream, the difference in time experienced by people living in a valley versus those living on a mountaintop is noticeable. Most people try to live in the mountains, and come down only when pressed by business.

At first I was jarred by each dream, wondering what exactly was going on. But after reading a few, I started to see the different concepts of relativity that Lightman was exploring in each dream. I wonder, however, if this novel would be completely lost on someone without at least a passing knowledge of relativity.

The Last Samurai

4/5 stars

I went into this film not expecting much more than another Tom Cruise vehicle. Fortunately, I was pleasantly surprised. Cruise is a true American hero recruited to help train the Japanese forces to combat the Samurai. He is captured during the first battle between the ill-prepared Japanese army and the Samurai, and is forced to live among them until the winter snows pass.

This one definitely needs to be seen on a large screen.

The Mystery of the 99 Steps (Nancy Drew Mystery #43)

by Carolyn Keene

I haven’t read a Nancy Drew novel since I was a little girl. The only book I remember was the one Mom had on her bookshelf, The Hidden Staircase, though I no longer remember the story. When I saw this at a local library book sale, I couldn’t resist.

Nancy is asked by her friend, Mrs. Blair, asks Nancy to help her understand a dream she’s been having about her childhood and a staircase with 99 steps. Mrs. Blair grew up in France, and since Nancy’s father is in Paris on a case of his own, Nancy and her friends, George and Bess, join him for their own French adventure.

It was a fun read. I enjoyed the mystery, and solved it about the same time as Nancy did. Keene has an easy style and keeps just enough of the mystery up her sleeve to keep me interested. I’ll certainly be reading more — maybe I can find that copy of The Hidden Staircase at Mom’s house on my next visit.