Book Review: Thumbs up!

Roger Ebert is one of America’s best-known film-critics and you will spot his name at the top of the list of reviews for just about any movie on the Internet Movie Database.

He became a part of American pop-culture with the program Siskel & Ebert where he and fellow reviewer, Gene Siskel, argued with each other about the merits of movies and judged them the good old Caesarian way; by giving them a ‘thumbs up’ or ‘thumbs down’. Siskel has since passed away. Ebert is still at it with Richard Roeper as his new sparring partner.

Ebert has a refreshing, open-minded attitude about reviewing and he keeps his sense of humour on hand. Though his many viewing hours may make him more qualified to judge the comparative merits of a film than the average viewer, he is the first to admit that the judgement of a critic is ultimately just another opinion. However, Ebert’s love for the medium is so infectious you might find yourself coming down with a bad case of cinemania.

On the site of the Chicago Sun-Times, he has a forum where readers can argue with him or ask questions breaking the usual one-way communication between a reviewer and his audience. A collection of past entries is out in bookform: Questions for the Movie Answer Man. It is full of titillating trivia on a wide variety of cinema topics, with plenty of off-the-wall questions. The back-and-forth on the forum also resulted in Ebert’s ‘Bigger’ Little Movie Glossary, a conveniently indexed collection of movie-clichés, including entries by Ebert’s readers. This book vastly improves any bad movie you might see, since you can entertain yourself by tallying up every cliché you spot. It is currently hard to get hold of, but ask our staff and they’ll do their best.

Ebert’s reviews are collected every year (latest addition: Roger Ebert's Movie Yearbook 2007) and a good addition to any bookshelf. For the newcomer, however, I would recommend starting with one of these two collections: The Great Movies or I Hated, Hated, Hated this Movie. The former is a collection of one hundred essays originally published on the Sun-Times site, about – well, duh – Great Movies that no one should miss out on. The latter is a collection of reviews of bad, BAD movies. Why would you want to read a review of a bad movie you wouldn’t want to see anyway? Because Ebert’s enthusiastic, funny rants are entertaining in their own right and are often so intriguing that you end up feeling like you want to witness the awfulness for yourself!

Books by Roger Ebert:
Questions for the Movie Answer Man
Ebert’s ‘Bigger’ Little Movie Glossary
Roger Ebert’s Movie Yearbook 2007
The Great Movies
I Hated, Hated, Hated this Movie

Book Review: A Star is Porn

If you get bored in the summer and regular hobbies like reading, crochet, animal husbandry and churning butter fail to provide adequate relief, why not round up a group of people to make your very own porn movie?

As Victoria Coren and Charlie Skelton discovered - it can be quite an adventure. Paired up to review porn videos for the periodical The Erotic Review, they decided they could do better and would make the best porn movie EVER!! One with a real plot and everything: ‘telling a story to people who just want to watch sex, and are sitting through the narrative bits under duress, is truly ambitious.’ Ultimately this lead to The Naughty Twins, a celluloid gem about, well, twins who go on a quest to find a mystical artifact and discover the world – especially its sexy parts – as they go. Victoria and Charlie went on a parallel journey of naughty exploration making the movie, being pretty much wide-eyed and naive at the beginning. What will their families think? Especially Charlie’s dad, the vicar?

To distance themselves from friends and family they decide to shoot in Amsterdam, even though they feared that they ‘might get stabbed and thrown in a moonlit canal’. After agreeing on what’s ‘hot’ and what’s ‘not’ (‘boredom’ and ‘death’ are both ‘not’) they decide to write the script in Las Vegas, because “Porn needs to be written in a porny place.” They talk to some veterans from The Biz for advice on their project and come face to face with the realities of the large-scale porn industry – which has a habit of chewing people up and spitting them out.

Then there’s assembling a crew and cast, finding locations, and all the technical hoopla; no mean feat for two directors who don’t know the difference between a ‘boom’ and a ‘gaffer’. They mingle with a variety of oddball characters as they enter a new and morally ambiguous realm. To add to the confusion, Vicky has a dalliance with the bi-sexual, strongly religious, Yugoslavian rent-boy who stars in their movie.

Once More with Feeling is an open, sweet confessional that oozes charm and is drenched in very British irony. Light and entertaining, it makes for perfect summertime reading while containing plenty of funnysophical musings on the topics of morality and sex. Does porn have to be soulless and exploitative?

By the way, the word ‘porn’ only appears on the cover in small letters so you can read it in a train, on the beach, or on a plane without blushing. To read it without laughing out loud is more of a challenge.

Once More with Feeling: How We Tried to Make the Greatest Porn Film Ever - Victoria Coren, Charlie Skelton

Pod People

It has been going on for quite some time now. Pay attention on the streets and you'll notice the proliferation of distinctive white earplugs. The attached technology is hidden within the folds of coats. The owners resist the temptation to show off in order to protect it from the weather and from grabbing hands. This summer there will no doubt be a grand revelation as extra layers of clothing are shed and the Apples are brought out into the open. I will be one of the people displaying the fruit, for I am now one of them: the Pod People.
With the arrival of the iPod Shuffle, the iPod Nano and the iPod Video, the Apple Mp3 brand has reached an all-time high of hipness and portability. This trinity has the market covered: the sturdy, relatively cheap Shuffle on one end, and the more vulnerable and expensive Video on the other, with its video capabilities and enough memory to suck up the average person's entire CD collection. The Nano holds the middle ground in price and memory, packing a large amount of music - and pictures - into a tiny gizmo.
As apparent in the significantly titled booklet Your iPod Life, these are not just mp3-players, they are a lifestyle and it's all about the accessories! There are protective jackets, special iPod speaker-sets, fancy earplugs, all kinds of nifty cables and doohickeys to give your iPod extra capabilities or longer battery-life. Author Dan Frakes has picked what he considers the best items and shows you where to find them both on and offline. You could easily bankrupt yourself buying all the neat stuff available.
Once you have pimped your iPod and feel ready to actually start using it, there are several guides to help you get the most out of it, and of its conjoined twin, the music managing program iTunes. Three of these guides are listed below. You might want to flip through them to be sure they cover 'your' iPod - in the current editions, only some cover the Nano and none cover the Video.
When your ears start to bleed from incessantly listening to music and you need a change, why not start the aural equivalent of a blog and make a Podcast? In Podcasting: The Do-It-Yourself Guide you will learn how to find and download podcasts, as well as how to make your own and start sharing your dazzling thoughts with the world.
And if that starts to bore you, why not hack into your iPod to make it do things that Apple failed to put on the menu, like reading e-mail? You can also learn how to open it up and replace the battery, saving yourself a bundle of cash. Not for the faint of heart or technophobic, iPod & iTunes Hacks has the goods on modding your Pod. If you don't know what modding means then you should give it a pass.
As with all things hip, a countermovement has emerged. Members scoff at the leader of the pack and proudly tote the 'superior', lesser known brands favored by those in the know. I do not claim to be a hardware expert and they may well be right to scoff. But I'm off to buy a bumper sticker that says: 'iPod, do you?' And then I suppose I'll have to go and buy myself a car…

Books Reviewed:
Your iPod Life
The Pocket Idiot's Guide to the iPod
iPod and iTunes Quicksteps
The Rough Guide to iPods, iTunes & Music Online
Podcasting: The Do-It-Yourself Guide
iPod & iTunes Hacks

Facing Facts: Most writers were not made to model

It can be quite a shock to finally see the face attached to a literary or actual voice. Sometimes, it suddenly becomes clear why a radio-personality chose to avoid a medium where he had to show himself or why that successful novelist spent more time behind his word processor than frolicking with cheerleaders. Not only do some of them turn out to be gut-wrenchingly ugly, but being confronted by the physical reality of a writer shatters the image we had formed of him or her in our head.
The mental picture
Writers, especially fiction writers, generally remain an undefined but all-pervading presence in the background of the story. Unless we know more about the author beforehand, they start out as blanks in our minds, to be slowly painted in as we travel through their prose, subconsciously piecing together a personality from the writing style. Pretty much all of the 'discovered' characteristics are mental, not physical. One would have a tough time deducing an author's crooked nose or frizzy hair from a novel. Our self-made mental image of the author can, of course, be wildly inaccurate. Somebody who writes funny books can actually be a depressive and someone who seems like a nice chap to hang out with can actually turn out to be a recluse. It is quite easy to draw the wrong conclusions. But of course, fond as we are of the images we came up with, it can be very disappointing if the author doesn't live up to them. We can feel that, just as a fictional character can be miscast in the tv- or film-version of the book, the actual writer was somehow wrong for the part.
Putting a face to the name
This is why some publishers go to great lengths to create an image of their authors that they think would suit their audience. Instead of simply keeping the back-covers faceless, the writers-especially the more famous ones-are posed in suitable locations and given props. A romance novelist beyond a certain age is posing in a long, bright pink coat in front of a grand iron gate, supposedly leading to her mansion. A thriller-phenomenon is posing next to a helicopter in a windbreaker, just short of waving the American flag. Another thriller-writer appears on each of his covers with his mean-looking bulldog, both looking ready for a bar-brawl. A self-help guru is 'spontaneously' holding his reading glasses, as if he was caught in the act of taking them off. Vast amounts of books show their authors with toothy, awfully strained smiles. There are better ways of putting a face behind the literary voice. If you have a writer of kids books who looks like a Hell's Angel, don't put an unflattering picture of him on the back-cover, where he will be giving kids nightmares. Try to make him as presentable as you can. In general, a low-key, classy just-the-face picture will be quite enough for the reader. Or if you want to get creative, hire an artist to draw up a portrait that will suit the book's design. If they want to take examples from the way pop-stars and painters are getting themselves immortalised, they should check out the two titles below. Bestselling authors have no excuse for misguided vanity publishing.

Book Review: Better Buy the Bulk

Comics: quality and quantity on the cheap


The line between comics and graphic novels has started to become blurry. Now that the average age of comic readers has gone up, the themes have gotten more mature and the format has started to change. Most comics used to be never-ending soaps with superpowers. But since most adults like their entertainment in bite-size chunks and don't feel like chasing after issues of comics they might have missed, more and more comics have rounded off story arcs that can be easily gathered in trade paperback. It has become much easier for the audience to dip into a series for a single story, rather than being committed to it for life (to see how it ends, if ever). Now the publishers are one-upping each other by publishing comics that were previously on sale in trade paperback and bundling them up in cheap editions. For little money, you can buy yourself a hell of a lot of story. Comic giant Marvel has been at it for a while already, with several black-and-white reprints of 'the best of' their main titles. But now both BONE and Strangers in Paradise, lesser-known stars in the comic firmament, have also been given this treatment. Since they were already black-and-white to begin with, they don't lose much in the transition.
At the heart of Strangers in Paradise is a slightly pink love triangle: artistic, sensitive David loves hard-boiled, cynical Katchoo, who loves innocent, sweet Francine, who - in turn - doesn't know who to love. Surrounding them is a cast of flaky, well-drawn (literally and figuratively) characters. There are plenty of great riffs on relationships and the tension gets upped a notch when Katchoo's shady past resurfaces and threatens to drag down her and her friends. Considering that most of the male characters act like buffoons, it might come as a surprise that the writer of Strangers in Paradise is a guy. It's a very woman-friendly comic in a male-dominated field, where female characters may sometimes be strong and independent, but still need to have a waspish waist and big boobs. Four volumes have been published so far. When you get hooked by reading these, you'll be happy to know the series is still ongoing.
BONE has a lot of stock fantasy elements, such as a princess, a prophecy, a dragon, and a quest. But it also has a trio of big-nosed cartoon characters, an ass-kicking grandmother, 'stupid, stupid rat creatures', a talking bug and a sense of humor (unlike, say, Tolkien). It manages to be epic and endearing at the same time. This edition contains the complete story, from the first page of the first issue right up to the planned, definitive end. More than 1.000 pages of beautiful illustrations and quirky, heroic adventuring. Being somewhat hefty, it is also very useful for keeping on your nightstand, to bludgeon burglars with. So do yourself a favor: get BONEd!

Strangers in Paradise Pocket Book 1 -Terry Moore, paperback
BONE one volume edition - Jeff Smith, paperback

Shilly Fixion

Some science-fiction / fantasy writers treat the imaginary worlds they’ve created with such in-depth seriousness that the average reader is tempted to give them a shake and yell: ‘I don’t care about the extended family history of the irrelevant side character on page 569 or about the logistical intricacies of interplanetary Nerf-herding, just get on with the story!’Others try to avoid accusations of purple-prose seriousness by making fun of themselves and their tales of the extraordinary. However, in doing so, most prove that dreaming up fantasy stories and being funny are two very separate skills. Nothing makes for worse reading than bad jokes thrown into a story not even the writer took seriously to begin with.There exist a blessed few who manage to find the right mix of humor and commitment to the story, drawing you in enough to care about the characters and their out-of-this-world adventures, while making you laugh out loud. By my book – pun sadly intended – those who manage the best are (in no particular order):
Jasper Fforde
Not too long ago, he unleashed on the general public a sassy literary detective from a parallel dimension, where books and writers are taken very seriously. With plenty of time-bending, book-hopping and the occasional villain hiding in a footnote, expect to be baffled and entertained.Terry PratchettNo news here for fantasy aficionados. He has built a cohesive fantasy realm in his Discworld novels without being boring or taking himself too seriously. Any one of these titles can be read separately without bafflement.
Robert Rankin
Imagine Terry Pratchett on acid. Thank God for the lack of therapy that brought us titles like: The Hollow Chocolate Easter Bunnies of the Apocalypse and Nostradamus ate my Hamster. Weird, post-modern ‘hey, we’re in a book’-style jokes and off-the-cuff linguistic experiments make for some hilarious reading even if the plot sometimes seems on the random side.
Peter David
The very popular writer of comics and Star Trek novels (amongst others) was given his own corner of the Star Trek universe to play with: the New Frontier series of novels. Not confined by continuity, his stories grow more bizarre all the time, displaying a sexy streak not often seen in the franchise. Despite patches of by-the-numbers writing, this series zips along as a very entertaining space soap opera. Start at the beginning, though!
Douglas Adams
Legendary because of the multi-volume Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy and rightly so. His plotting got tighter over the years, but Adams was never funnier than in the first two volumes. The HHGTTG is being made into a movie, but it is a given that his wordy wit works better on paper. Also try his two Dirk Gently novels.
Tom Holt
He has a great sense of humour and inventive plots, even if sometimes the latter derail a bit. Still worth a read, though sometimes the whole feels lesser than its parts.

The Agony of Choice: So Much of Everything, so Little Time...

I am a man who loves too much; a pop culture junkie always in search of my next fix. This generally comes in the form of a book, a movie, a CD, a television series or a videogame. Though this endless chase already takes up most of my time, with attempts at a social life crammed in, I am still aware that I am missing out on concerts, sports, theater, musea and countless interesting hobbies. Even in the chosen field of my obsessions, it is impossible to experience everything I would want to.
Though a large portion of the books, movies, music, series and games being flung at the general populace is not worth spending time on, there is still an ever-growing amount of 'stuff', past and present, that could be enjoyed immensely. It would take several lifetimes to experience it all, so we can only hope the reincarnation theory pans out. And even then they'd better stop making new 'stuff' for a while so we can catch up.

Missing out

How do you decide what to pick and what to leave? You may have read and enjoyed certain authors, but does that mean you should go through their entire back catalogue? You might be missing out on an exciting new author if you do. Whose judgement should you trust in deciding what to read? Or should you just judge books by their cover and go with whatever lands in your path? Should you be a snob and avoid big authors, looking for hidden gems? Or should you play it safe and stick to mainstream books where you know what to expect?
There are a few recent books helpfully pointing you to the supposed good things in life, with titles like: 1001 Places/Movies/Books/Golf Courses to see/read/play before you die. You could take these as your bible and let them relieve you of the agony of choice, but that's still a LOT of books, movies and places to get through and it takes away the joy of spontaneity.
I recently came across a book called The Paradox of Choice by Barry Schwartz, who asserts that 'the culture of abundance robs us of satisfaction'. So far I have only read the back cover and flipped through the pages a bit. Schwartz gives advice on how to narrow down your choices in many areas of life and ignore the rest without regret. Inspired by this, I will take a deep breath, begin anew and stop wondering why I do not go to the theater more often or have not yet read or seen the Da Vinci Code. I hope to get around to reading The Paradox of Choice sometime soon. But if I do not, that would also be okay. No regrets. See how that works?

Published in the American Book Center Newsletter 2006