Movies:

Rumor Has It

As I weighed my distaste for Kevin Costner against my adoration of Mark Ruffalo in deciding whether to get this movie from Netflix, I let my baser instincts take control and added it to my queue. It showed up June 27th and I haven’t been bored enough until last night to pop it into the DVD player. Caitlin had evaluated it as “horrible”, but I have to take her comments with a large cow-lick-sized block of salt because we’ve been known to have divergent opinions on some things. Heh.

Jennifer Aniston, who was remarkable in The Good Girl (although that could also have been the reflected glow of Jake Gyllenhaal), and certainly passable in Derailed, was all wide-eyed vacuousness in this piece of (fill in some word that is like “fluff” but with more air and no good humor). There was nothing amusing about the story or the predicament or even Shirley MacLaine’s portrayal of the allegedly real Mrs. Robinson. And – sigh – Mark Ruffalo was relegated to romantic comedy foil, in this case the cheap store-brand aluminum foil that is favored by those who make hats out of it to fend off the aliens/government. I finally turned it off after about an hour and had Caitlin give me the 30-second synopsis, which makes me glad I didn’t invest the additional time. Because any story in which a woman would pick Kevin Costner over Mark Ruffalo, even temporarily, is just too surreal for me.

Books:

Husband by Dean Koontz

Dear Mr. Koontz, In the future please stick to your tried-and-true formula of oddities, spookiness, and vague supernaturality. Do not feel the need to express your mid-life crisis in another treatise on the power of love to win out over all adversity. If I wanted that, I’d head to the Harlequin aisle or would switch on Oprah. Your prose does not need to venture past lavender into full-on-purple territory (come on – “ululation” and “susurration” in the same book?). You have a good thing going with the Odd Thomas books, are writing your Frankenstein books “with” other writers, and could easily find another strange disease like the no-going-out-in-the-sun one you used a few novels back. And by the way – having the parents behind the whole scheme would have made this a far more interesting read.
That is all. Thank you.
Harmonium