Yay for oily foreheads and pimple breakouts.
And yay for money.
I had a difficult time trying to find the right job; so many places wanted full time employees (like The Body Shop or some food places) and even KFC was advertising for part-time but I was able to ask for just 15 hours a week so yay.
I start in March and it's at Towers so come visit whenever you can =]
Also I started reading Pride and Prejudice a few weeks ago. It's quite a long novel, about 900 pages long so I'm slowly crawling through it. It's quite interesting, I thought it'd be really dull but since the ebook came with my Nook and since it's Number 2 on the Dymocks' Favourite 101 (as well as top 5 at least for a lot of book lists), I decided to read it. There's 3 volumes, each with about 20 chapters so it's quite heavy, but I'll let you know more about it when I finish.
I also finally saw Cloud Atlas!
66% on Rotten Tomatoes
There's no way I can properly review this without giving you a run-down of the book it's based on. It's really difficult to tell you what this story is about because it actually comprises of six stories:
1. The Pacific Journal of Adam Ewing
Set in the 1850s, this story is a diary with entries written by an American lawyer crossing the Pacific ocean.
2.Letters from Zedelghem
Set in the 1930s, this part is comprised of letters from an English musician to his gay lover who works for a reclusive composer as a means to one day become a famous composer himself.
3. Half Lives: The First Luisa Rey Mystery
The third story is a mystery/thriller novel about a young journalist putting her life on the line as she investigates reports of a nuclear power plant.
4. The Ghastly Ordeal of Timothy Cavendish
Then we turn to the only comical story in the novel about a senior man's unjust residency in a nursing home because of a prank his brother plays on him, and his plot to escape from it.
5.An Orison of Sonmi-451
The fifth, and personal favourite, story is a dystopian one set in futuristic Seoul, where the main character is a fabricant humanoid who was manufactured to work at a fast food outlet called Papa Song's, and how underground rebels help to free her from her slavery.
6. Sloosha's Crossin' an' Ev'rythin' After
This last story was one of my favourites too, and it's set way into the post-apocalyptic future where, after 'The Fall', the people of Hawaii had to start living like barbarians again among leftover futuristic remnants of technology.
The most interesting thing about this book is how it's structured. Stories 1-5 are split into two parts, and the novel is set out as: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 5, 4, 3, 2, 1.
It is revealed that each main character from each story is reading or watching the story from the most recent time period (i.e. person in story 3 reads story 2, whose person reads story 1). So the crazy thing that made this novel really stand out is the fact that everything and everyone was sort of connected.
Now for the movie.
I think the movie did quite a good job at doing this. The stories were all over the place though, it didn't follow the structure of the novel, but it more or less just kept cutting from scenes of one story to scenes of the next story so that at the beginning of the film we were at the beginning of each story, and at the end of the film, we were at the end of each story.
The film is structured, according to novelist David Mitchell, "as a sort of pointillist mosaic."
-From Wikipedia
At first it was really confusing because the scenes from each story were extremely short, so you didn't really understand what was going on, even an hour into the film (and the film was a whopping 172 minutes long). However as the film progresses, the stories start becoming longer and longer and you get to see how similar the stories are and how the characters start resembling different themes and stuff.
The main thing about this movie was the idea of reincarnation and past and future lives affecting the outcomes of each other. It also deals with elements of evil, injustice, redemption and self-awareness.
I really like this quote that the author of the books said about the film:
"The reincarnation motif in the book is just a hinted-at linking device, but the script gives it centre stage to link the six worlds with characters, causes and effects." The film will also feature all the principal actors playing multiple roles of different ages, sexes and races. "A novel can't do multi-role acting: a film can," says Mitchell. "The directors are playing to the strengths of their medium, just like I try to."
For a better depiction of what all this means, I found a really cool character map here (they're not really spoilers but maybe don't look at it too in-depth just in case):
Unfortunately, because of make-up, prosthetics and unclear voices, you don't really get to fully appreciate the reincarnation motif. A huge negative is the fact that there is no way you could enjoy this movie without subtitles. During the beginning, they actually talk about past lives and all that quite a lot, but you don't really understand it because for the first hour the movie gives you nothing to understand.
I still hold on to my belief that this movie is for the people that read the book, but it's a really good adaptation and in the end it did help me understand the book a bit better because it gave us a clearer image of who was reincarnated to whom, and who always had similar roles in the battle between good and evil.
Bonus: One of the best quotes (it was in the book too but it was amazingly delivered here):
Haskell Moore: No matter what you do it will never amount to anything more than a single drop in a limitless ocean.
Adam Ewing: What is an ocean but a multitude of drops?
Well that was a rather lengthy movie review and since I'm too tired to keep blogging, I'll talk about the other movies I watched in a new blog.
Until next time.
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