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Showing posts from July, 2024

Good Inside by Becky Kennedy

You think you're reading a really lovely and helpful book about child rearing, and you're feeling quite equipped and inspired to be a great parent, when suddenly it hits you that in order to have patience and grace with your offspring, you must first find patience and grace for your inner child, at which point you realize that Dr. Kennedy has therapized you quite successfully and you feel even better.

The Italian Job (2003)

You can have a lot of fun in a world with superhero thieves, and even more if your movie doesn’t bother with any slow or boring exposition for more than 20 seconds at a time, so altho this has sort of little to do with the 60s original by the same name, it’s a very entertaining light-hearted action movie romp. 

Imperial Twilight by Stephen Platt

For a book ostensibly about a war, this slow burning buildup of geopolitical diplomacy, drama, and intrigue detailing British-Chinese relations in the early 1800s doesn’t actually find its climax in battles, but rather in the very dryly funny political maneuverings that led to the war, which I found to be entertaining and ultimately quite worthwhile, altho it was a dense read along the way at some points, and I wish it had detailed more of the Chinese history alongside the British. 

land of bad (2024)

It’s important to watch contemporary mass market schlock action movies to keep abreast of current trends in spectacle-making, and after watching this particular schlocky action movie the trend is: the decaying american empire is no closer to understanding itself, but it’s very good at suspenseful gore-fests with homoerotic undertones.