What was Watched in 2019, part 2

Here are the rest of the movies* I watched last year:
*I also watched a lot of TV, including 7 seasons of The Office, 4 or 5 seasons of the Great British Bake Off, and the latest Fresh off the Boat season.

The book was better
Blade Runner – I enjoyed Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? more. I was not a huge fan of the film noir-ness of the movie.

A Wrinkle in Time – Not a great adaptation. It looked great, but felt like there wasn’t enough substance to either the characters or the plot.

Unspoiled
Fight Club – I had never seen the movie or heard the ending until 2019. I can’t talk about it.

Not a fan
You may have noticed I’m not super picky about movies. I enjoy most of the ones that I watch. But not all of them.

The Shape of Water – The cinematography, score, characters, cast, and setting were all great. The plot was not. Midway through, there was one thing I knew the writers were going to put in, and I’m still asking – why?

Phantom Thread – Slow in the beginning, picked up in the middle, but then took that sharp left turn into why? territory. I’m usually fairly forgiving of characters doing dumb things (see Finn interrupting Rey in the middle of a lightsaber battle with “hey Rey, it’s me. I’m here! Also I can’t really do anything to help you right now.” in the latest Star Wars movie) but this crossed some sort of line for me.

Gravity – I couldn’t get over the incorrect orbital mechanics, and I don’t know orbital mechanics.

Epic finales, or Fanservice

Take your pick.

Avengers: Infinity War and Avengers: Endgame – To prepare, I watched every Marvel movie up to this point. I do think a lot of these two movies was explosions, people fighting each other, people chasing each other, questionable plot points, and “act now, think later” moments, but in the end, I’m happy (and impressed) with how they concluded their twenty-three-movie superhero saga.

Star Wars: Episode IX – The Rise of Skywalker – A big complaint about the whole trilogy was that the writers and producers had no creativity and were basically telling the same story they did the first two times we had Star Wars trilogies. I agree somewhat with that, but it’s also intentional in a non-money-grubbing sort of way. Each trilogy follows the development of a character who discovers they have the force and the fight between rebels and an evil empire. Same story, different characters, variations on plot points and settings. The critics can complain, but I liked the movie. [If you have a lot of interest and time, you can also read a theory about how the first six movies are connected through ring composition.]

Everything else
Solo: A Star Wars Story – Han Solo and Chewie go on an adventure. Probably not as good as Rouge One, but it’s still a fun movie that tells the story of how Han, Chewie, and the Millennium Falcon came together.

Crazy Rich Asians – Some of the nuances of the book are lost because of the number of characters involved. Similarly, some plot points were either simplified or eliminated, but it was a pretty good adaptation, all things considered. Overall, it’s a spectacle, one that I enjoyed watching.

Dunkirk – The movie depicts the evacuation of Dunkirk during WWII, shown from land, sea, and air. Recognized for being fairly historically accurate and unsensationalized.

Mr. Holland’s Opus – It’s a two-and-half-hour-long movie about a high school band teacher. Does anything much happen? No. Do I care? Also no.

The rest: O Brother Where Art Thou?, American Pie, Ant-Man and the Wasp, Die Hard, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, The Graduate, To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before, Napoleon Dynamite, Julie and Julia, Lady Bird, Scott Pilgrim vs. the World, Moonlight, Legally Blonde, Call Me By Your Name, Eighth Grade, Love Simon, Ocean’s 8, A Simple Favor, Let it Snow, Drumline, The Devil Wears Prada, Ocean’s Thirteen, The Irishman

Disney: Pocahontas, Hercules, Mulan, Tarzan, Lilo & Stitch, The Emperor’s New Groove, The Princess and the Frog, Bolt

Rewatches: The Prestige, The King’s Speech, Stardust, Meet the Robinsons, Chicken Little, Men in Black, Good Will Hunting, Indiana Jones and the Raiders of the Lost Ark, The Adventures of Tintin, Star Wars: Episode VIII – The Last Jedi

At the Library

Now that I have this thing called free time I've been frequenting the library to borrow books to read for fun. The Cornell library has a massive selection of books, but unless I want to end up with La Chasse des canards or Harvest of grief: grasshopper plagues and public assistance in Minnesota, it’s really hard to browse. Even with the Library of Congress Classification System categories, looking at call numbers starting with PR – a fraction of a floor of one library – only narrows things down to the entirety of English literature.

So I've been going with the call numbers for random book recommendations in hand and this summer I've read a mix of science fiction, young adult fiction, and more “classic” novels.

I first read Arthur C. Clarke when I picked up Rendezvous With Rama at a library book sale a couple years ago. Over spring break, I finished the Rama series and this summer I've started on the Odyssey books. Thusfar I've read 2001: A Space Odyssey and 2010: Odyssey Two. There are definite similarities in the two series – space travel and alien life being a couple of the themes that have made an appearance in all of Clarke’s books I've read so far. One kind of cool thing is that Clarke wrote about using Jupiter’s gravity to accelerate a spaceship deeper into space in a kind of slingshot maneuver, which is exactly what the Voyager probes did, before Voyager 1 or 2 launched. [I read a book about the Voyager probes last summer, and while it wasn't terrible, I was hoping for more about how the probe was designed and run and things that happened on its journey and the author focused more on exploration in general.]

My first library trip this summer, I went in looking for 2001 and was wandering the shelves in the English literature section when I found Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s works. I decided not to pick up any Sherlock Holmes at the moment and instead went with The Lost World, in which a newspaper reporter, an academic, an adventurer-type, and an overbearing professor explore a remote mesa in South America, where, the professor claims, there are dinosaurs. I found part of the ending a bit anticlimactic but overall the story was interesting, with plenty of action in the second half of the book.

Moving on from dinosaurs to pirates, I borrowed a young adult book titled Pirate Cinema by Cody Doctorow as a quick read. The pirates in this book do not sail the seven seas, but instead illegally download things from the internet and stay in abandoned buildings. It was a less dense read than some of the other books I've been going through, and the storyline is rather relevant to today’s technology-filled world. The general feel of the book reminded me of The Thief Lord with laptops.

Finally, to round out my selection of two dystopian novels, two novels based in England, and . . . aliens, I read Brave New World by Aldous Huxley. This book considers a world where people are raised from birth to have a particular intelligence, social class, and job. They cannot imagine being happy doing anything other than what they have been conditioned to do and if they ever start becoming unhappy, there’s a pill that can fix that. Brave New World is one of those books that’s on lists of “100 books everyone should read” and that comes up periodically on Jeopardy! and trivia quizzes, so I figured I should actually read it. I enjoyed it, but I wouldn't want to live in the world Brave New World describes. So far I've liked everything I've borrowed from the Cornell library system and haven’t had to suffer through dutifully enjoy titles such as Feed and The Life Before Us that have been past summer reading assignments. I’m currently working on Donna Tartt’s The Secret History with the first two of Terry Pratchett’s Discworld novels still to come. If anyone has any book recommendations, feel free to leave them in the comments.

Art

First off, I am back at Cornell in the midst of summer college, tour groups, and no less than four major construction projects around the main part of campus. I have thus far survived mostly on cereal, peanut butter and jam sandwiches, pasta, frozen vegetables, eggs, and a variety of fruits.

Second, there is currently a giant root outside of the Johnson Art Museum.

I can’t find a picture of it right now, but I just wanted to let people know that I happen to have a smaller version at home. It’s an original work, produced by spade and manual hedge trimmers, and I would be willing to let it go for the right price.

Third, I became the owner of a tablet about a week before returning to Ithaca. It’s one of those that graphic artists and photographers use to make art, but since my art skills peaked in elementary school, the most useful thing it’s done for me so far is turn about six pages of handwritten equations into computer text. I honestly don’t think it was much faster than typing everything up, but it was less painful due to the preponderance of Greek letters, superscripts, and fractions. If you've ever had to type up equations in Microsoft Word, you know what I’m talking about. If you haven’t, be glad.

Since, of course, my photography is usually only slightly blurry and slanted nearly professional, I was semi-interested thrilled to also be able to download a version of Photoshop that came with the tablet. It only took my sale-price high-end laptop three hours to download. Once I got to try Photoshop, I had no idea what I was doing instantly became a Photoshop master and produced such quality photos as these:

It was a dark and stormy night.

When the Statue of Liberty came alive.

And then we went to Mars.

The Aliens are Here

I don’t know why the sky is that color, but it’s unnatural, so it must be the aliens.