catching up: books etc

Forgotten from the previous list, Wonder, R. J. Palacio, which I should have co-reviewed with Fairest as both deal with questions of appearance and ugliness and it was interesting to read both at the same time. Of the two, I would recommend Wonder; I enjoyed the distinctive voices/perspectives of the multiple narrators, and I found it thought-provoking in a critical way, which, uh, I guess isn't exactly a glowing recommendation, but sometimes it is interesting to be engaged with the questionable aspects of a text?

( more about the particular issues behind this cut )

And then, relevant to the previous list, Thumped, the sequel to Bumped. Not really recommended, sadly. There isn't enough new material here to justify a second book, the whole thing could easily have been one volume, and a fair bit of it is given over to showing a positive and heartwarming successful adoption triad, which, okay, I can totally see the necessity of doing, after the skewering in the previous book, I'm sure the author didn't want to actually come across as prejudiced and hostile to first parents or families formed through adoption, but it's all rather pleasant and generic and forgettable, as opposed to the wicked biting satirical bits in the first one. Also minus points for major mishandling of the shipping - completely dropping the ambiguity in the pairing that *was* in doubt, and introducing a really forced and unnecessary love-triangle tension to the pairing that was nicely settled. Pthbbb.

catching up: films

Junie enjoyed Monsters University, as did I, well enough, although I'd rank it pretty low in my ranking of Pixar films. I was sort of hoping it would go further in questioning its own assumptions - sure, we know Mike and Sully go on to work in scaring, but maybe the other OK monsters really aren't that scary, maybe scaring isn't the best use of their particular talents, maybe they would actually be happier and live more fulfilling lives if they rejected the societal priorities that privilege scaring over other pursuits! But no, look, everyone has a scare card at the end, they're all conventionally successful after all, yay for them, boo for anyone who thought otherwise. Not that I was taking this personally or anything. Ahem.

I enjoyed The Great Gatsby although I wish we'd gone to the trouble of seeing it in 3D given the running imagery with cloud-of-drifting-thing effects, etc. Also it needed way more gay. (It's not that Tobey Maguire *can't* gay, I've seen Wonder Boys, Luhrmann clearly just didn't direct him to play it that way. Why not, one must ask.)