Puttering in the Study

Movie Night: Percy Jackson Sea of Monsters / Pacific Rim

We have been working recently to have movie nights more often, where we drive the boys up to the movie room and watch something together.  Until recently we could only watch discs up there, but after eight years we finally fixed the Ethernet to the room and it now has a Blu-Ray player that can get online so we can watch Netflix and Amazon video demand.  

The first one recently was Percy Jackson Sea of Monsters.  Grayson has read the books (at least some of them) and the Greek mythology angle is something they have some experience with from their Mediterranean trip.  We enjoyed the movie together - a good story, and fun to wacth.  Looking forward to the next installment.

The second recently was Pacific Rim.  We enjoyed it as a spectacle (it out-Godzilla's Godzilla) but it was a pretty poor movie otherwise.  And I saw the ending in The Avengers.  Still, a good family movie.

Man of Steel

Watched this the other night in the movie room, and really enjoyed it.  It's deliberately highbrow, with Russell Crowe and Kevin Costner lending gravitas to the role of Cal-El's fathers.  And grungy - it reminds you more than a little of the Batman reboot by Chritopher Nolan.  Oh wait - he's an executive producer - that's why.

Halfway through I realized I was taking this movie seriously, and not treating it as a comic book movie.  I am looking forward to the next installment, when we don't have to wade through the origin story.

The Storm of War - Andrew Roberts

Another recent overall history of the war I tore through so fast I now don't remember anything about it.  Don't recall that I didn't like it, though.  

Roosevelt's Centurions - Joseph E. Persico

I realized the other day I forgot to post on this book.  I now can't remember a thing about the book, as compred to the other recent WW II histories I have read, but I would remember oif I didn't like it, and I don't.

The Accursed - Joyce Carol Oates

This book was a disappointment.  It had an intriguing premise of some sort of curse (presumed to be vampiric) on the upper crust of Princeton, New Jersey in 1905-1906.  And the bouncing around several different stories by a ditzy "historian" narrator promised to be a good way of presenting a horror story, in much the same way that the epistolary narrative in Dracula did.  

But instead of presenting a coherent story, the book presented fragments of the horror story (albeit well-done fragments), loaded down with two completely unrelated stories - one of the academic struggles of Princeton university president Woodrow Wilson and another with the socialist advocacy of Upton Sinclair, who was living in Princeton at the time.  I kept waiting for the stories to intertwine, but they never really did.