things that i currently hate, part eleventy-four

here are some things that fucking SUCK!!!

umm...so i read the road today, finally. the mccarthy one, and not the kerouac one. i like the kerouac one.

granted, i expected a lot out of this book, as it won the pulitzer and everyone i know told me it was basically the best book ever. i'm glad i read it...but i didn't like it. i really liked mccarthy's descriptive language, and he's obviously a hell of a writer. i'm going to try to read something else of his and see how i feel about it. but the road just seemed sort of pointless to me. i love post-apocalyptic stories, love them, but this wasn't so much a story as it was a poem, really. the only thing that ever seemed to changed or become interesting in varied ways was the language itself. there were never any real plot threads, or character development, etc...just the engaging/mysterious setting and the shockingly dire and depressing circumstances...but the newness and emotion of those two things wore off after about 50 pages. i just wasn't that interested, and i don't understand why mccarthy won the pulitzer for this book, honestly. i hear he's written some other, better things. maybe that's why. but this book specifically just bored me. he did some cool stylistic things, but nothing that i haven't already seen other, less well-known writers do.

i like diet coke!!! FUUUUUUCK!!!

another thing i do not like, though, is the movie valkyrie. i watched it the other night, at daniel's awesome popsicle party. or at least, i mostly watched it, while also inhaling lots of popsicles and talking to peeps. and it was pretty lame. as most people will tell you, it is really difficult for me to dislike a film. however, i disliked valkyrie. tom cruise actually gave a pretty decent performance. however, i felt like the film sort of circled itself rather than having any kind of involved plot...hey! the movie opens with an attempt to assassinate hitler! and it fails! and then there's another, more complicated attempt involving tom cruise! and it fails! then they try the exact same thing again! and it fails again! then everyone is slowly executed during a drawn-out overly dramatic closing scene! and then the movie ends. that's it. the entire movie screamed "artsy!" so loud that i wanted earplugs. at one point, during a bombing raid (which is completely gratuitous and serves no purpose within the greater narrative of the story), tom cruise realizes his children left his record player on upstairs while they're all huddling together in the bomb shelter. and on the record player? "flight of the valkyries" by wagner. seriously. and not only do they spend entirely too much time playing the song, then they zoom in tight on the record itself just in case you don't know the title and make the connection on your own. i realize that part of the point here is that this inspires tom cruise's character to come up with the plan to take advantage of project valkyrie, but there are a shitload of these heavy-handed moments throughout the film that simultaneously scream "look! TRICKY!" and "well, our audience is obviously completely idiotic, so let's make sure they understand that this Means Something!" it was a little insulting.

there was something else i hated, too. but i can't remember what it was. i'll be back if i remember.

HATE!!!