Sunday, August 2, 2015

Going to camp, reading a book

I am inching closer to the True Blood recaps, I promise.  In the meantime, I just couldn't help myself and have fully embraced Wet Hot American Summer.  (I know I should be catching up with Hannibal but WHAS is so much funner.)  When I thought about it, I couldn't recall actually watching the whole of the original movie so I started with that.  Which I loved.  So much fun to see all these now-familiar people, many of whom were just getting going in 2001 when the movie came out:  Amy Poehler, Bradley Cooper, Michael Ian Black, Janeane Garofalo, David Hyde Pierce, Paul Rudd, Christopher Meloni, Molly Shannon, Ken Marino, Elizabeth Banks, Judah Friedlander.  And then to see the new Netflix series, Wet Hot American Summer: First Day of Camp!  For those not in on the joke, the 2001 movie was set in 1981 about the last day of a Waterville, Maine, summer camp.  The new series, just now out in 2015, set in 1981 about the first day of that summer camp.  Same cast, fourteen years older, playing the same characters.  It was funny when they were all in their early thirties and playing teenagers ... now that they're in their mid-40s?  Awesome.  I do think that Paul Rudd may have sold his soul, however: he does not seem to have aged a day (from 32 in 2001 to 46 now).  I've only just seen the first episode but I so approve.

In media I have to read as opposed to watch, I recently finished David Mitchell's The Bone Clocks.  Mitchell is the same guy who wrote Cloud Atlas, which I haven't read but which is apparently similarly constructed to TBC which all these disparate characters and storylines that are somehow connected.  In a nutshell:  a teenage runaway is connected to psychic phenonmena that follow her throughout her lifetime, drawing in many peripheral people in her life and involving her in a supernatural conspiracy that spans generations across the globe.  I really do prefer linear plots and when I got to the fourth section of TBC I was starting to get annoyed - just when each story got going, it ended and another one started.  Thankfully, Mitchell does tie it all together at the end but I did find the novel frustrating.  I wanted to finish out the characters' stories rather than cutting short and skipping way ahead to the end.  I did like the very last section quite a lot, however, as it was a sobering look at a possible future for our planet as we humans continue to devour resources without thought for the consequences.  The Bone Clocks was ultimately, for me, a frustrating but intriguing read.

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