Giant Squid Creations

I'm sitting on a train with tears in my eyes. Gene Wilder died. I didn't know him. I believe he was a good man. He was old and unwell, now he's at peace. He's passing is therefore sad but well earned. Not enough for me to be near tears for a stranger. So why am I? While he was brilliant in all the roles I've seen him in, I think my grief stems from Willy Wonka. Gene Wilder was not Willy Wonka, he didn't write his dialogue, and through technology Willy Wonka will always roam the chocolate factory, but Gene breathed life into the character. He took the words on the page and made them live. That breath is gone. Perhaps it is that I mourn. I don't remember when I first saw the movie. Its images and scenes have always floated in my mind. I didn't really remember the kids or the sentimentality of Charlie and his family. I remembered the man in the purple suit with the top hat. He was wise, he knew how things worked. And he lived in a factory where things wer...

The Reader by Bernhard Schlink My rating: 4 of 5 stars What to say about The Reader? Unsettling, thought-provoking, uncomfortable. They all come to mind as ways to describe it. It's also well written, compelling and convincing; while I know the line between truth and fiction is always blurred and especially so in historical fiction, there was a need to remind myself this is not autobiography. Not directly anyway. But even now as I sit here, having finished it 12 hours ago, I don't know how to feel. But, that's the point isn't it? Schlink has thrown out the rule book on how to feel about such a sacrosanct subject. I do not know Hanna, cannot know her, the narrator in the end does not know her and he knew her better than anyone else. We don't know what she did, why she did what she did or anything else. Only that what she did was, by usual standards unconscionable. Should I even want to understand what can only be condemned? There are no answers here. Only the ques...

With the success of superhero movies of the past few years mostly down to Marvel, it was important for DC to do something to level the playing field and, Suicide Squad , the third movie in its series, certainly sets itself apart. First, there are the heroes, a group of infamous villains co-opted to work for the ‘good guys’; it’s the old Dirty Dozen concept but with meta-humans, as characters with super powers are called these days. That in itself can be a tricky task for a story in any medium but Suicide Squad does it well by humanizing the meta-humans in simple but effective ways, Killer Croc, for instance, is the downtrodden outsider, the mistreated freak with an understandable grudge against everyone, rather than simply a mutant killer who lives in the sewers. Second is the movie’s place in the current DC film universe. Not only is it a notably darker universe than Marvel’s, or most versions of DC’s own, it’s a series that focuses not on the real-world potentialities of meta-...

The Lover by Marguerite Duras My rating: 3 of 5 stars This is a book I wish I could have read in one sitting. I think it needs that to achieve its full effect. The fragmenting of time is what made this book for me, seeing the scattered memories come together had its own special fascination. Unfortunately, possibly because I did read it in a number of sittings, it lost my interest toward the end. View all my reviews

26 Views of the Starburst World: William Dawes at Sydney Cove 1788-1791 by Ross Gibson My rating: 2 of 5 stars I found this book frustrating as it swung from fascinating history with interesting musings to wild conjectural ramblings that had no basis and seemed to contradict some of the actual history. At the same time, it could just be a historical fiction novel written with the wild conjectures as a given, and then I'd think there was basis and accept things that could be fanciful, so I'm glad Gibson flagged his 'divinations'. On the other hand, he'd then make statements about Dawes with no reference to how he knew such things about him, were they conjecture or based on what few accounts he had to draw on? I may never know. View all my reviews