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Christopher Farr...'s Profile
Customer Reviews: 63
New Reviewer Rank: 16,882
Classic Reviewer Rank: 5,604
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Reviews Written by
Christopher Farrell (Cupertino, CA USA)
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2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
Possibly the most under-appreciated movie ever, March 6, 2009
I find it kind of weird to be writing a review of Star Wars: Episode II so long after the fact. But for what is and has always been a series of popcorn movies, it took me a surprisingly long time and large number of viewings to really appreciate the subtlety of what Attack of the Clones was doing and how well the prequel trilogy as a whole succeeded.
In a nutshell, George Lucas set himself a gargantuan task in doing the three prequels. He had to take the character of Anakin Skywalker, make him a likable and sympathetic character that viewers would enjoy watching for most of three movies, and then turn him into Darth Vader at the end in a way that was both fundamentally believable and effective, and allow the us to feel the tragedy. In short, he had to do something almost completely unlike the heroic arc he did in the original trilogy.
And you know what, for me anyway, he succeeded, and once again the middle chapter is the key one. This is where Lucas had to develop Anakin as a real, likable character, and yet give us just enough of his darker side to set up his final fall without yet making us actually dislike him. I think Anakin's romance with Padme was the linchpin and very well-done, even though many fans have criticized it for lousy dialog. You know, I had badly-written dialog when I was that age too. We've had a lot of hip teenagers in popular culture these days, like the character from Buffy: the Vampire Slayer, who talk more like what their 30-something writers would have liked to have talked like when they were that age. Anakin is an awkward, conflicted, serious yet emotional teenager who is deeply in love with Padme and doesn't know how to talk to her. And that's what he sounds like, and for me, it worked, allowing Anakin to develop both sides of his character (Padme's side of the relationship is a little sketchier; her role isn't as well drawn in my opinion, and additionally Natalie Portman, a talented actress, may have been mailing this one in).
Needless to say, the action and chase scenes are brilliant, and George Lucas is the master when it comes to framing and setting these things up. Whether it's the skillfully managed tension of the bar scene, the cleverly-shot lightsaber duel between Dooku, Anakin, and/or Obi-Wan, or fisticuffs in the rain, Lucas makes all the action scenes compelling. Crucially, they are an extension of the plot and character development and not just spectacular set pieces as they are in so many movies of this genre.
I'm not going to say the movie is perfect, or as compelling as The Empire Strikes Back; it's got its awkward moments, not all of them there for a good reason. The first time I saw Episode II, I wasn't that impressed. But what Lucas set out to do was much more ambitious than it appears on the surface, far more ambitious than most Sci-Fi action flicks, and for me he's succeeded in delivering a trilogy of both exciting action and emotional depth. It took a little while for them to grow on me, and for me to appreciate and understand what he was doing, but now that I'm there I like the second three as much as the first three.
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0 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
Best Cleveland Orchestra recording of Beethoven's 9th, March 5, 2009
I must admit to being a little surprised at the predominantly lukewarm to negative reviews of this recording here. I'm a Clevelander originally, my clarinet teacher when I was younger was a Cleveland Orchestra alternate, and my high school orchestra had several children of orchestra members in it at the time. So I was a little disappointed to hear it had been going downhill.
Fortunately, I discover that the rumors of the Cleveland Orchestra's demise appear to be greatly exaggerated. Out of curiosity, I went back and listened to the three recordings the Cleveland Orchestra has made of this piece, under Szell, Dohnanyi, and Welser-Möst. And, just for good measure, the Karajan/Berlin Philharmonic version many consider definitive.
What I love about the Welser-Möst version is how unique it is amongst the other recordings. Part of this is, of course, that it's recorded live in Severance Hall and so the sound has a slightly less rich, but crisper and more authentic feel to it. But the thing I like the most, perhaps because of my background as a clarinet player, is how well all the interior lines of the symphony are brought forward in turn and how well you can hear all the things going on in the different orchestra sections at the same time. Also, I feel like the wind and different string sections are given a little more prominence here which I like; when the brass kicks in it doesn't seem to overwhelm everyone else. The balance between and choreography amongst the different parts is very distinctive and to me very interesting and pleasing to listen to. It also shows off the exceptional skill of the musicians, as the precision of their playing is on greater display here than in other recordings I feel.
Of course, when you plunk down your cash for a recording of Beethoven's 9th, you're paying as much for the vocal performance as for the orchestra. My general feeling on the vocal bits is that they are often performed too operatically. Schiller's Ode to Joy is a poem, not an opera. When the bass breaks in with "O Freunde, Nicht Diese Töne!" it is an invocation, a clarion call, and therefore the lyrics should, in my opinion, be comprehensible. This is one reason why the Szell recording is actually my least favorite of the four I listened to, because I honestly can't make out a word the bass is singing, and I even have passable German. And I've listened to various versions of this symphony a fair bit. The solosts in the this new edition are very good, their voices and the lyrics are quite clear, and they sing well and in good balance as an ensemble. My only complaint is the soprano, which is always a difficult, risky, and exposed performance, and I feel she is a little overwhelming at times here (I am spoiled by the Karajan/Berlin Philharmonic recording which has an absolutely stunning soprano performance).
At any rate, I thoroughly enjoyed this recording and am happy to call it my favorite Cleveland Orchestra recording of Beethoven's 9th, and put it on the shelf next to the Berlin Philharmonic and the Cleveland Orchestra performance under Dohnanyi. After years of figuring I basically knew what the 9th sounded like, this provided a wonderful new perspective, brilliantly performed.
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As a brief addenda, I think it really pays to listen to this recording with good speakers or good headphones. I listened to it again recently on some lower-quality headphones, and you know what, it didn't sound very good; sort of mushy almost, and I was almost worried I needed to re-write my review (the other performances sounded OK even under suboptimal conditions). But on my higher-quality iPod headset it sounded much crisper and clearer. You may also need to make sure you haven't got any equalizer presets enabled so you can get the full range properly.
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Great characters, entertaining read, June 18, 2008
I really enjoyed this book, full of entertaining, believable, sympathetic characters and the alchemy of happiness and melancholy that Amy Tan does so well. The pace of the book seems a little slow in the first half, but once I had found its rhythm and gotten settled in it was quite enjoyable.
I think the intro on the dust jacket, which focusses on the main characters' captivity in Burma/Myanmar, does the book something of a disservice. This element of the plot starts comparatively late in the book, and is more of a culmination really than the main focus. Saving Fish From Drowning follows the 12 main characters (admittedly probably about two too many, but hey, they're all good) through their adventures, misadventures, personality issues, and whatnot, with the kidnapping then being the final crucible in which the characters are tested and develop. So it's more of the climax of the book than the story of the book.
I did feel like some of the plot was a bit predictable, and with such a proliferation of characters it's inevitable that some are better-drawn than others. But as a whole, the characters were real and involving, and the emotions they evoke in the reader are complex. An enjoyable and highly recommended read.
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11 of 20 people found the following review helpful:
Umm ... just not that funny, June 18, 2008
I thoroughly enjoy Lewis Black. I love his Daily Show bits, and whenever he hasn't been on for a while I wonder when we'll get to see him again. The interviews and bits he's been doing to promote this book have been entertaining and funny. I think of him as sort of an American version of John Cleese - get him wound up about something and watch him go.
Except for a couple genuinely funny bits about air travel, tops, and Islam ("I'm not going to say anything about Islam..."), this book just isn't the sarcastic, biting, rapid-fire Lewis Black that I've come to enjoy. He gets into rant mode occasionally but only for a couple sentences at a time and he rarely really gets on a roll. Heck, the book is almost sentimental. Which is nice of him, but not that funny, and, I'm afraid, not that interesting a read. I'm hoping that the skit that ends the book was funnier in person in the early 80s than it is to read in the late 00s.
I couldn't help but think of Julia Sweeny's wonderful Letting Go of God, her version of the spiritual journey, while reading this book. While her style of comedy is obviously totally different from Lewis Black's, the stories have similar elements but hers is so much funnier, more affecting, and truer than Me of Little Faith, which is sadly tepid and which I can't really recommend.
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Judas Unchained
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by Peter F. Hamilton
Edition: Mass Market Paperback |
| Price: $8.99 |
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| Availability: In Stock |
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2 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
Big improvement over Pandora's Star, October 4, 2007
After being dragged kicking and screaming through Pandora's Star, Judas Unchained was a reasonably pleasant surprise. The long, brain-numbing descriptive passages that started off each section in the previous book have been truncated to a more reasonable length, allowing the actual plot to get momentum. We no longer have the painful perspective switches where the interesting plotlines would abrubtly be put on hold while we went off to visit some unspeakably boring characters for 20 pages - events are now tied together better and focus remains on the interesting bits long enough to generate energy. Ozzie's "journy of personal exploration" or whatever the heck it was supposed to be is given a thankfully brief page-count after the mind-numbing pointlessness in the first book. Ideas that clearly weren't working seem to have been jettisoned.
There are still some fairly significant issues - too much gratuitous sex for my tastes, the characters are thinly drawn and only a few of them are much more than cardboard cut-outs or stereotypes, the book is still needlessly bloated, and the writing style is still a bit repetitive - but the book now makes for reasonably entertaining pot-boiler sci-fi, on the level with Star Wars fiction, for example. Not great, not particularly notable nor does it have any individual elements that stand out or are particularly interesting, but it's a decent light read with good plotting and a reasonable pace. Now that I'm done with the pair, if I went back in time and was given the option of reading them again, I absolutely would not do it (mainly because the first book is so awful), but if you've staggered through Pandora's Star and are interested in finding out how things work out but are having a hard time facing down Judas Unchained, while it's definitely not a *great* book, it's good enough to be engaging.
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1 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
Sometimes, you just can't go home again, August 30, 2007
As we were watching the first story of these Lost Tales, and Tracy Scoggins was reading us page after page of exposition about what's going on, I was struck by something: the old Babylon 5 would never have done this. We would have seen the plot unfold, not be told about it. That would have been interesting. Listening to the story being told in what could very easily have been a radio play was not taking best advantage of the medium.
I can only assume that the problem here was budgetary constraints. The casting is so sparse, with each episode having only a small handful of characters (each episode basically has one primary character from the old cast, a bit part for another old cast-member, one or two "guest stars", and that's about it) and a similarly small number of sets. The sparse production I suspect just really limited what they could do - limited things too much, I think, and so we end up with episodes that have a ton of exposition and not enough action or interaction.
As a fan, I still enjoyed them as a diversion. They seem truer to the B5 mythos than Legend of the Rangers was, but the first story (featuring Scoggins) is a little heavy-handed, while the second one (featuring Boxleitner) is better. But both are just shadows of the past, sadly. Their relative averageness just serves to remind me how truly great a series Babylon 5 was. Maybe it's time to just go back and watch that again.
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189 of 336 people found the following review helpful:
Intruiging but horribly overwritten, August 30, 2007
It's hard to be too critical of The Name of the Wind, because there is a lot in there that is interesting. One thing that stood out for me was the slight obsession with currency. Finances are something that are routinely omitted from fantasy novels, but as Kvothe works his way up the income and prestige ladder it's kinda cool to have a real understanding of his financial situation, which adds an edge to the parts of his story where he is broke. I thought the imagining of magic in his world, the concept of Sympathy, was rather clever.
But at the end of the day, I didn't care for The Name of the Wind, and I think the problem is that Mr Rothfuss greatly overplays his hand. He sets up a world and a character in the first few chapters of the book, a world which is currently in crisis with all sorts of unexplained things happening. We are then introduced to this retired adventurer running a bar, and the idea is clearly to bring Kvothe out of retirement to help deal with the world's ills. To do that, for some reason we need to hear the entire story of Kvothe's life to this point. In excruciating detail.
So what we then get is 900 pages of back-story on the first, oh, 20 years of his life or so. Parts of the story are interesting, many are not. Some of the characters are interesting and very well-drawn, many are not. He goes through a flavorful and occasionally challenging existence and then has a short and marginally exciting adventure at the end. It's all a little ... well, boring. No risk, no drama, no confrontation of difficult choices, no struggle to succeed, little real character growth ... all the ingredients of a basically uninteresting story. One of the reasons I liked the money element of the book is because it's used so efficiently - a little bit about how much he earned or spent or what things cost is slipped in easily from time to time and it cheaply adds depth, interest, and realism to the story. Sadly, virtually nothing else in the story is so clean, and the book never attains momentum or has much tension. The real killer is that the character of Kvothe is simply uninteresting. He wanders around, does a bunch of stuff, excels at virtually all of it, but he never engages on a personal level, is never interesting enough to like, hate, or feel much of anything for.
What makes it irritating is all the foreshadowing. We know there is a huge amount of story left to tell. We have to make it through another couple volumes of this length to tell Kvothe's entire back story, and then we can start working on the here and now that was set up way back in the beginning of book 1. So we're staring down the barrel of maybe 5000 pages to tell the story Mr Rothfuss has envisioned. Which is, quite frankly, grossly excessive. None of the characters in here are interesting enough to sustain that kind of page count. If we're generous, there is barely - barely - enough plot to sustain just this one book, which is carried mostly by good writing and to a lesser degree by some modestly interesting characters. But I have no enthusiasm to follow them through another thousand or so pages, never mind multiple thousand-page volumes. They are modestly interesting. Not compelling. I doubt that anything that is drawn out to this degree could ever be that compelling.
What we needed here was an editor. Give me the best stuff of this entire envisioned world or series in three books of 300-400 pages each, and maybe we have something really good. Even better might be a collection of short stories with a novel in the middle or at the end. But The Name of the Wind creaks badly at 900 pages and does not give us enough to get emotionally or intellectually engaged in for this one book alone, never mind where Mr Rothfuss is apparently trying to take us.
Look, War and Peace was only about 1400 pages. Tolkien told the entire tale of the Lord of the Rings in less space than it takes Mr Rothfuss to tell this quarter-finished tale. People always joke about Charles Dickens being paid by the word, but The Tale of Two Cities is only 300 pages or so. Why do modern fantasy and sci-fi authors feel compelled to put so many word on the page? Are they so arrogant that they can't admit that not all of their ideas are worthy of printing? This is ridiculous. Mr Rothfuss clearly has writing talent, too bad his editor and/or agent couldn't force him to tell one interesting story and finish it before his readers lose interest.
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1 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
Please ignore the man with the pencil, February 25, 2007
This movie was about as good as one could reasonably expect, given the fantastic ILM-supplied special effects and good performances turned in by Jonathan Pryce, Jack Davenport, and Keira Knightley, and given that the script was apparently written by trained monkeys.
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20 of 84 people found the following review helpful:
This is not reason, it is ideology, June 6, 2006
The underlying premise of this book (democracy = good, tyranny and slavery = bad) is obviously sympathetic. You can't go wrong with that these days, on a fundamental level.
What Hanson has done with this, though, is utterly inexcusable. He's taken every fact and twisted and tortured it until it fits so that each of the people surveyed can be painted in pure black and white, as unambiguous heroes and titans among men. It doesn't matter that Patton took over an army already on the verge of breaking a badly-battered German army, or that the reason Sherman was able to burn his away across the South was because Grant was going toe-to-toe with the only dangerous Confederate army in Virginia. No, in each case, Hanson's favorite guy was entirely responsible for victory, and he manages to twist the contributions of others into proof of their incompetance. It's like, you know, Grant was completely stalled out by Lee! He couldn't get anything done at all! Meanwhile Sherman was doing all the real damage! That Grant guy was a total loser. Or ... before Patton showed up, all the British and Americans were doing was uselessly battering themselves against the Germans! It took Patton's genius to achieve the breakout where those losers were just getting people killed and wasting time!
This stuff is beyond the pale, really. It's intellectually dishonest. It's not history. It's history twisted and tortured to support an ideological bias.
The shame of it is that this is a really interesting topic. Sherman and Patton anyway were real people, ambiguous and conflicted. Patton in fact was probably a nut (and even many of his fans would probably not disagree on this point), but he was a nut who could motivate troops. And I personally always do feel conflicted about what we've done and what has happened in fighting some nasty wars: the fireboming of Dresden, the nuclear bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Sherman's march to the sea, the genocide of the Native Americans, My Lai, and Abu Grahib. What I want is someone to really look into these things and tell my why free and democratic nations which claim to have strong principles do these things. I don't need someone telling me "it's OK, our society is great, it was all in rightous anger, it had to be done, and anyway, they were all bad guys."
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15 of 19 people found the following review helpful:
Boring!, June 5, 2006
Durability: Fun: Educational:
I have to say, I was surprised at just how boring this game was. Normally I like games from this publisher (Days of Wonder) as nice, family-friendly games with a touch of good strategy. But Shadows over Camelot not only took a long time to play and was complicated to learn, it also offered me little in terms of entertainment. Most of your choices are pretty obvious - if you're on the Grail quest, you just draw a random event card, and then play a grail card if you've got one, then wait a few minutes for your next turn and do it all over again. The traitor really can't do that much to overtly sabotage the good guys, so there just isn't enough to the game to make it worthwile, especially in light of how complex it is.
Reiner Knizia and Fantasy Flight Games have made a very similar game, based on the Lord of the Rings book, called the Lord of the Rings Board Game, which Amazon also carries (be careful, Fantasy Flight Games also makes a game called War of the Ring, which is totally different and unrelated, but also pretty good). Anyway, the Lord of the Rings game is far superior to Shadows over Camelot in almost every way - more fun, more action, more evocative of the books, more interesting decisions, more sense of the players being able to control their own destinies, and more interesting discussions as the players plan out options and contingencies and discuss the trade-offs. Honestly, the two games are extremely similar and I can't think of any way in which I would recommend Shadows over Camelot over Lord of the Rings.
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(Cupertino, CA USA)
