Not to mention her heavy-handed, didactic, and humorless prose. (Kurt Vonnegut’s “Harrison Bergeron” told basically the same story but was funnier and managed to be far more effective in just a few pages than Rand was with 100.) As someone who had to read this absurd tract in high school, I still found it about 99 pages too long. Still, in terms of being introduced to Ayn Rand at a young age, it was better than having **Atlas Shrugged ** dropped on me.
I was not forced, at gunpoint, to watch Gone With the Wind.
I am reminded of the late Mike Royko’s “review” of then-New York Mets’ first baseman Keith Hernandez’s book. Cub-fan Royko called Hernandez’s effort, “A Very Solid Book,” by virtue of the fact it survived repeated hurlings at Royko’s brick wall.
Ha ha ha ha ha!
Jane Auel does her research, and communicates it well.
(Five books in one sentence! Yeah!)
The sequence toward the beginning of the recent Phantom of the Opera movie where the theater transitioned to the “past”, going from burnt out shell back to a functioning theater was pretty cool. Even made the music palatable at that moment.
As for the rest… good god could they have found worse singers???
I’m hijacking my own thread here, but there’s something about the very title of that movie that drives me bonkers. I cannot see it without thinking of it as I Am Curious (Yellow) (WhatEVER).
In Highlander 2; I thought Sean Connery scenes were funny and well paced.
As I have posted before, while Dan Brown is a terrible fucking writer, I will give him props for coming up with some interesting (at their fundamentals) ideas, such as the Da Vinci Code.
Basic premise = great idea.
Actual execution = piece of shit.
“Breaking the Waves” has a scene where Emily Watson gives heartfelt, effusive thanks for shagging her brains out. EVERY movie should have a scene where the heroine gives heartfelt, effusive thanks to some guy for shagging her brains out. Sadly, the rest of the movie is total crap.
(insert title of book you hate) is really handy to drop on cockroaches.
(I actually keep a book for this purpose, and also as a paperweight, but it’s not one I hate, just one I don’t care about. I will consider replacing it the next time I find myself hating a book. And I have very few roaches; I just don’t want to clean roach guts off any more books than I have to.)
Jude the Obscure was the last novel Hardy wrote.
Stephen King’s Insomnia cured mine.
Reading The Andromeda Strain kept me from wasting my time watching the movie.
(Actually, I enjoyed that book right up till the end–which sucked so bad that it ruined the entire story.)
Terence’s Malick’s The Thin Red Line had a good movie poster.
Okay - First The Phantom Menace and Clone Wars
Darth Maul was a very cool character
And the Yoda fight was awesome
Much of Dean Koontz work has inspired me to write, after all, if he can get published with some of the dreck he is putting out then I should have no problems when I actually finish something, right?
It’s worse than snot! It’s poop!
Ambergris (ăm’bərgrēs) , waxlike substance originating as a morbid concretion in the intestine of the sperm whale. Lighter than water, it is found floating on tropical seas or cast up on the shore in yellow, gray, black, or variegated masses, usually a few ounces in weight, though pieces weighing several hundred pounds have been found. Ambergris has been greatly valued from earliest times. It is now used as a fixative in perfumes. Its active principle is ambrein, a crystalline alcohol with the empirical formula C30H51OH.
The films Battlefield Earth and Starship Troopers both made me laugh a great deal.
I can’t remember the title, but it was a non-fiction (overheard anecdotes, actually) book about the Singapore underworld. After reading it, I felt much more confident about my own writing attempts, thinking “hell, if that crap can get published, how hard could it be for me?”
Dumb and Dumber made my twin brother laugh.
I would not rather have explosive diarrhea than watch Batman and Robin.
Attack of the Clones established a handy metric by which I can judge all other bad movies.
One more I forgot. Le Divorce gave me an idea for a new business (which actually had next to nothing to do with that crappy movie).