Cloud Atlas.
I didn’t managed to finish watching this DVD and don’t mind at all. This was the film version of a novel called Cloud Atlas which weaves together six stories across time. It sounds jolly clever, but also like some piece of authorial showiness which has publishers saying, “Very good, but now write us something readable.”
It’s also clearly one of those books which is unfilmable in that a film can be made from it, but it’ll never be a successful piece of cinematography. The film was apparently trying to be faithful to the book, but in the end it was merely six vaguely related stories spliced together and using the same cast to save the studio money.
I had a mail message from Amazon this evening. They were inviting me to buy a book called The Name of the Wind by Patrick Rothfuss. I’ve never heard of it or the author. The reviews were overwhelmingly positive. I ended up at Good Reads (which is blocked from here because the imperial government just hates people having their own opinions about anything; 14.11.13. Seems to have been a temporary blip; I was back on the site without a VPN) where the reviews were so positive that if they were a programming language, it’d be called C++++++++.
Instead, I started having a look at the one- and two-star reviews on Good Reads (because the reviewers are likely to be bluntly honest), and from what I’d read about the author, I’d say the protagonist of the book is the author himself. Again, like the author of Cloud Atlas, Rothfuss is clearly talented, but he’s puked up an overindulgent, George-Martin-sized tome.
Green Bamboo 