Okay, lets make this a habit again...

In an effort to resume blogging at a reasonable pace: here goes.

For all that they rail against it, Wikipedia has proved a really valuable tool in studying for my International Relations final, with good little summaries of many of the 50 odd million major theories.

Stephen Colbert and the Daily Show are back in business, though still without proper writers. The result? Lots of cheap gags, not as much really good irony or anything particularly funny. Oh, well. Still not entirely shabby. I've been watching standup by an English comedian named Jimmy Carr, who has some funny stuff and the exact same accent and mannerisms as one of the guys who was in my show.

I'm gonna rail off a few quick reviews of things I've watched/read over break. Because I can, and in a year when I can't remember it I can come back to this and go "oh. right."

Sweeny Todd: Decent movie, excellent actors. Tim Burton's goth approach works well for the most part, but by removing the ensemble and the intro/finale where they call on the audience to "attend the tale", he achieves what I assume to be his goal of shortening and humanizing the show, but also somehow makes it less relevant. Onstage, it is a cautionary tale, almost a fable or allegory about human nature. Onscreen, it's just a lot of blood and some 17th century emo's.

I Am Legend: Better than your standard zombie movie in the suspense department, inferior on gore. The first half-2/3 is promising, but the ending absolutely stereotypical.

Juno: Tries too hard. We know you are an Indie film. Now, some dialogue that is a little more believable...please? Although the dialogue bugged me, all fantastic actors, some really funny moments, and a decent amount of (Indie) human truth mired up in the fucking dialogue. In the end worth it for the beautifully awkward characters.

Once: This really didn't feel like a movie. Fun, pretty good, and probably more believable than anything I've seen in a while. Basic premise: boy meets girl, boy and girl sing and play guitar/piano, sorta kinda fall in love. Completely broke the feel of a "movie experience" for me, I think because of the lack of any blatant structure or drama.

Birdsong: Long book about World War I. Fairly good writing, good structure, decently well plotted. But I wouldn't necessarily recommend it--felt more like an homage than an original work. There is so much writing from the trenches that still feels alive that a work simply ABOUT the trenches feels somehow dated. It held my attention and offered up a good story, but I wanted something more.

The Raw Shark Texts: Excellent writing. Definitely. Funny, great metaphors and descriptions. Does some new things. And that's good, because the book is really largely about the writing. The whole thing mixes its reality and metaphor, so that in the "sea" of human interactions, there is a "shark" out to get the protagonist--and that's the conflict. Starts amazingly with a fresh take on an amnesiac waking up and slowly being filled in on what's going on by letters pre-written and arranged to be sent by his former self. When he goes out adventuring and finds a love interest and blah blah blah it gets a bit "we've done this before," but its worth reading for the beginning--and once you've read that, you want to read the rest.

Right now I'm reading The Unbearable Lightness of Being and Watchmen (a comic book-well, a "graphic novel"-but really good, I promise) so I'll probably write those up in between procrastinating for exams.

Meanwhile: “The Cold War system was so profoundly stable, both within and between blocs, that its end was justifiably unpredictable.”-Discuss. And, "Can appeasement ever be a legitimate policy option for states in the current international system? "