NOT THE BOSSA ME

The movie is never better than the book.

The Blindness movie adaptation is seeing a widespread release beginning today. Or perhaps it isn't seeing anything! HaaaaaaaaAAAAAAAAAA. The film was directed by Fernando Meirelles, a Brazilian director who is perhaps more famous in his native country than he is here, because I've never heard of him before now. Mark Ruffalo and Julianne Moore star as the Doctor and the Doctor's wife, the latter of which turns out to be the only person in the story who can see after a blindness epidemic spreads throughout a city. The first to go blind are quarantined off in an abandoned mental hospital and forced to fend for themselves, resulting in panic, unease and disease thanks to those affected being unable to properly take care of themselves, not being accustomed to their new sightlessness.

The original novel was written by José Saramago, and is one of my favorite books ever. Its prose is beautiful and sometimes disorienting - no speech is quoted, and sometimes it's unclear as to who is speaking and to whom. Characters are nameless and introduced at regular intervals until there is an overwhelming amount of patients to keep track of, and it's filled with more twists than a Twizzler, and I wish I had a better analogy than that, but whatever. It's filled with more twists than a ... 50's Rock 'N Roll dance party??? I don't know. Leave your better analogies in the comments.

Holding the book to such high standards, I am weary of the film. I won't settle for anything less than slightly above mediocre. It's times like these when I begin to wonder if there were any movies that most generally agree are better than the book. Apparently Blade Runner is better than Philip K. Dick's Do Android's Dream of Electric Sheep, the book on which the film is loosely based, although I've never read it. 2001 A Space Odyssey is apparently better than the book, although it was written after the movie.

The book I'm reading through now is called Perdido Street Station, written by China Miéville. It is considered to be one of the greatest science fiction books of the past 25 years, and I've been meaning to read it for some time now. While I find everything about it to be fascinating, I'm making my way through it at a fairly slow pace, just tonight breaching the 1/3 point after three weeks of reading (to be fair, it is over 600 pages long). It's about a man who is discovering all new types of fun scientific thingies and expanding rapidly on his life's work by helping out a trouble half-man half-bird thingy. It also follows the escapades of the man's secretive girlfriend, a highly artistic and muted insect with human-like features who is commissioned by a powerful druglord to create a life-sized sculpture of himself. The world they exist in is seedy, grimy and, dare I say, post-apocalyptic, which is the best kind of apocalyptic. The novel itself draws a lot from different sub-genres of science fiction such as cyberpunk, which is the best kind of -punk.



On an unrelated note, here's a pop song I discovered tonight called "3 Little Words" by FrankMusik. Apparently, a rearranged version of this song is going to appear on his major record label debut, which I can't seem to find much information on. He has a MySpace with a fun Radiohead remix on it, if there ever were a greater oxymoron than that.

Also in the vain of pop music I shouldn't be listening to is Girls Aloud's "Can't Speak French" single, which has been on repeat pretty much all day. YouTube embedding has been disabled by their soulless corporate parents, who probably control 90% of all pop acts coming out of the UK. Talk about cyberpunk. The video itself is absolutely horrible, and earlier today the Greatest Thing Since Cyberpunk correctly described them as a sluttier version of the Pussycat Dolls, which is an astonishing feat.

Also on my playlist is Sergio Mendes's first collaboration with Brazil 66, which includes the superior and non-shittified "Mas Que Nada", later totally destroyed by will.i.am and the rest of his crew of terminating producers. And, to further my bossa mood, I discovered sheet music for Chick Corea's "Spain" on my sister's piano, which made me happy. Here's an incredible performance of it with Hiromi Uehara to cap this post off with: