Action fun and fast cars

Okay so my sister dragged me out to see Baby Driver because I don't go to the movies as much as I should because, again, I'm really fuckin busy, but I enjoyed the shit out of the movie even though it has some odd problems (women being written sort of badly/strangely, not enough black folks in Atlanta, that sort of thing).

But it was a joy to watch, the car chase scenes are some of the best I've ever seen and I'm super glad I got so many of them. The music was fuckin' fantastic, it was really amazing to see people signing in a film, everything looked cool as hell, and the one dance-walk scene is maybe the best thing I've seen on a screen in like five years.

I'm happy I saw the movie, I love Edgar Wright, I want Edgar Wright to make more movies, I want Kevin Spacey to make more movies, I want Jamie Foxx to get more roles he can have fun with. This was fun to go see even if it was a little popcorny, but I still think there's a deeper thing there about how hard it is to get yourself out of a situation where you've built momentum - no matter how good your motivations are for getting into a rut or how good your motivation is for getting out of a rut sometimes you're just stuck in a rut and it sucks and it feels like everything is falling to pieces around you.

I like that the film studied that kind of inertia so subtly that it took me a month to realize that's what it was doing, because it was so well hidden under a catchy (maybe gimmicky) soundtrack and big bold bright fun visuals.

Cheers,
     - Alli

Whining and dying

Ohhhhhmygod this fucking year.

Okay. So I basically didn't read any books in June, I started reading Our American King but then got distracted and very, very fucking busy and that's kind of where I still am only I've finished reading a couple books but now I'm super behind on blogging about them and I haven't made a video rundown since fuggin APRIL.

Like the good news is I've started a Patreon and an Etsy store and have purchased a domain for my webcomic and have been working on submitting to anthologies and such.

The bad news is that I don't get as much time to read and I don't get as much time to write about what I've been reading so that's where I'm at with this blog.

I mean, it's not going to *stop* me or anything, I've just gotten really good at constantly functioning with some low-grade, background panic going on.

Anyway, David Lozell Martin's Our American King is depressing as fuck and I really have to stop accidentally stumbling into reading dystopias because in other years I love that shit but right now I just cannot hang with a story about a military takeover of the US after some unnamed catastrophe. TOO UPSETTING.

The book was generally fine, there were a couple things that were genuinely compelling and made me want to know more but like I'm just not super in the mood for rape and starvation and might=right at the moment. The latter half of the book has some things that it wants to say about the petit bourgeoisie and resource hoarding but I don't know that it said it all that well, or at least it doesn't seem all that well said when the US seems pretty amped to eat the rich at the moment.

(Like, they're talking about rich people in Arizona walling themselves away from the poor and sneering down at their suffering - I read this the same week that John McCain flew away from his hospital bed to vote to overturn the ACA. MAYBE SAVAGE MURDER OF EVERYONE INVOLVED DOESN'T SEEM THAT BAD TO ME BECAUSE OF MY PREEXISTING CONDITIONS BUT FUCK IDUNNO)

Anyway, if nothing else it's super weird to look at the grim perspective of only 9 years ago and say "welp, it didn't go that way but maybe it went worse."

Because it's hard to read a book about an exhausted population looking to a charasmatic liar to lead them away from democracy from the perspective of someone living in the time of 45.

Fuck.

David Lozell Martin's Our American King was written in 2008 and can be found wherever.