The Liar

I need to get to bed as it's late and I have work to do tomorrow (more on this later). I just wanted to get a quick note down about my immediate impressions having just finished The Liar by Stephen Fry.

I've taken multiple literature classes and had discussions about unreliable narrators. The book is called The Liar, and it is (not surprisingly) about a chronic Liar. Still, finding out towards the end that you've been lied to is a surprise and a bit of a knife twist in the gut. Because it was all so engaging, so good, you want it all to have been true. And of course if some of it is a lie, then all of it might be a lie, and that would be so depressing. It would make our interesting, witty hero into someone boring. I would rather have the lie.

I haven't finished a book and felt the desire to immediately go back and reread it for a long time. But with this novel I feel like I need to go back at once and scrutinize because there are multiple unreliable narrators in this story and I want to rifle through the layers and see if I can determine what is credible and what is not. How much of this story was a lie?

Of course it's fiction. So all of it was a lie. Having read Stephen Fry's autobiography Moab is My Washpot, I know that bits of it are taken from his life, but not much of it. The international espionage was not autobiographical.

I just don't know. I am baffled. I'm not even sure if I find the ending satisfactory or not. I can't tell if it was really clever, or just confusingly muddled. It's a first novel, so perhaps it's a little of both. It was good though. I do know that I like it.

Up in 3D

Not having a job is really stressful. And it gets increasingly stressful the longer it goes on. 

So last Thursday I took a de-stress day with some birthday money I got from my grandparents. Got a haircut, saw a movie. 

The film was Up, Pixar's latest offering. It was quirky and charming and sweet, and blah blah blah. 

I love Pixar and everything they do, don't get me wrong, but I didn't love this film. I mean, I really enjoyed it, and I'd watch it again. But every other Pixar film has wowed me somehow, even Cars. I always come out of the theater blown away by what they've managed to achieve. And this time, I guess it was just stuff that I already knew they were capable of. I do love the storybook world of the film, where absurdities are just taken for granted but even that wasn't really breaking new ground. 

The thing I enjoyed most was the 3D. I love stuff in 3D because I'm a dork like that. But until recently, this film in fact, I have never seen it used in a way that ad

ded anything to the movie. It's always three effects that shoot stuff towards your face in a way that is more distracting than anything, and nothing else because you wouldn't want all the people watching in 2D to miss out on anything. But the 3D in Up wasn't distracting, it was used elegantly (the way Pixar does everything) to enhance the world of the film. 

I'm especially excited because there were previews for a Disney movie in 3D (and a couple others) as well. In the previews before the previews we saw a 'making of" featurette about the movie (about Guinea pig spies) and it looked pretty lame (at least to anyone outside its target demographic). But when we got to the actual previews and saw the thing in 3D it actually looked pretty cool.

I've always ranted that 3D could be a great tool if people would just start using it, instead of making it into a gimmick. And now it looks like they're starting to, which makes me kind of excited.