Arrival (on DVD)

Arrival
[DVD Arrival] 

Louise Banks is a linguistics professor (played by Amy Adams). One morning most of her students were missing from class and the ones that showed up asked her to turn on the news. Alien spacecrafts had mysteriously appeared in 12 different places across the globe. Banks is visited by a colonel in the military (played by Forest Whitaker) who recruits her to come to Montana where a ship has arrived in the US. There she works with physicist Ian Donnelly (played by Jeremy Renner) to try to communicate with the aliens to see if they are here as friends or foe. They communicate using a markerboard with the two aliens they have dubbed Abbott and Costello. The situation becomes a race against the clock when the Chinese government decide to pursue military action against the ship located on their land instead of working with the aliens. Banks and Donnelly must find a way to understand the alien language and communicate with them before war could break out.

I really enjoyed this movie. We saw it in the theater and I checked it out just to see it again. I highly recommend it. There is a definite twist in the end.

[If you enjoy this, you may also wish to try Passengers, Interstellar or Edge of Tomorrow] [Based on the novella “The Story of Your Life” by Ted Chiang, which is available in traditional print format.]

[ Internet Movie Database entry for this film ] | [ official Arrival web site ]

Recommended by Carrie K.
Bennett Martin Public Library

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Dear Luke, We Need to Talk: and Other Pop-Culture Correspondences

Dear Luke, We Need to Talk: and Other Pop-Culture Correspondences
by John Moe [817 Moe]

This is a sometimes-hilarious, sometimes-annoying collection of fake correspondences between pop-culture icons. From the handwritten notes of Darth Vader to his newly-discovered son Luke Skywalker, trying to explain his status as an absentee father, to bitingly satirical inteviews with various Disney animated personnel discussing the conundrum about Goofy and Pluto both being dogs, humorist John Moe skewers dozens of different pop culture standards. And the formats of correspondence that he mocks are equally entertaining -- letters, e-mails, journal entries, Don Draper's cocktail recipe notecards, poetry, extended Fight Club rules lists, the formats go on and on. I found myself smiling and giggling at about 65% of the content of this breezy collection. Unfortunately, the other 35% was either un-funny or somewhat insulting or insensitive. Or, unfortunately, boring and repetitive, which applies to a long, drawn-out series of Super Bowl Half-Time proposals, which became tiresome very quickly. None-the-less, the portions of this humor collection that "clicked" more than make up for the portions which fell flat, and I do recommend it to anyone with their finger on the pulse of pop-culture! -- recommended by Scott C. - Bennett Martin Public Library [ see Scott's Reviewer Profile and more of his reviews ]

[If you enjoy this, you may also wish to try the Lazlo letters books by Don "Father Guido Sarducci" Novello, Idiot Letters by Paul Nosa, and the satirical news collections by the editor of The Onion.]

[ official Dear Luke... web page on the official Wits Radio web site - hosted by John Moe ]

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When Parents Text by Lauren Kaelin and Sophia Fraioli

When Parents Text: So Much Said...So Little Understood!
by Lauren Kaelin and Sophia Fraioli [eBook]

Mildly amusing book, tied in the the website set up by Kaelin and Fraioli, where they share dozens (no hundreds) of texts sent by cellphone by parents of today's tech-savvy generation. Some parents may be hip to the use of today's tecnology, and the established lingo of the texting generation. But not the one featured on this site or in this book. These short, punchy messages are organized in helpful categories, and are good for a few chuckles here and there. But I found reading an entire book of them in one or two sittings to be more than I could really take -- a little of this type of humor goes a long way, and a lot of this type of humor ends up being too much. -- recommended by Scott C. - Bennett Martin Public Library [ see Scott's Reviewer Profile ]

[ official When Parents Text web site ]

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Snark

Snark: A Polemic in Seven Fits: [It's Mean, It's Personal, and It's Ruining Our Conversations]

by David Denby [809 Den]

I found Snark to be a very interesting read, but ultimately somewhat lacking. Denby tackles a topic that is incredibly huge -- the increasing use of uncivil, unpleasant, "attack"-oriented dialog, which has become the main modus operandi of columnists, political hacks, and discussion forum trolls. Throughout the course of his book-length essay, Denby offers an intriguing look at historical precedents to modern Snarkiness, all the way back to the early writer Juvenal. However, by the end of the book, although I had been disconcertedly entertained by some of his observations, I didn't really feel that Denby had succeeded in clearly enough identifying what distinguishes Snark (or snarkiness) from typical irony and/or vituperation or foaming-at-the-mouth ranting. If you're interested in the rapid degradation of common civility in public discourse, you'll probably appreciate Denby's examples and asides. If you're looking for a true academic exploration of the topic, Snark will probably fall a bit short of the mark for you. I'll definitely give Denby marks for being an entertaining writer, though -- he's a film critic for New Yorker magazine. -- recommended by Scott C. - Bennett Martin Public Library

[ David Denby on Wikipedia ]

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Ten (or more) new reviews appear every month on the Staff Recommendations page of the BookGuide web site. You can visit that page to see them all, or watch them appear here in the BookGuide blog over the course of the entire month.