Just finished reading the Form 4 textbook novel for BM next year. A very dpressing and slow-paced story of war and the ugliness of human nature in desperate times. It's not sad (for me), it's just very heavy and disturbing to read. A. Samad Said (a Malaysian version of Dumbledore- no, I'm serious!) totally knows how to play with the emotions and drama. When I wrote the synopsis, it mostly consisted of describing lengths and lengths of conversation between the characters. It is definitely not a book of hope as it shows the characters being so helpless and just accept their fate. You can kind of imagine what it's like during wartime when watching Steven Spielberg's War Of The Worlds, except without the human-vapourizing alien robot things. Just so you know, the movie nearly made its place in my heart, if not for its oh-so-unexplosive ending. Spoilt everything! Anyway, back to the textbook reviews. (I'm so damn bored that I wrote reviews on textbooks! bah!)The anthology was nice and typical. I really liked the play Serunai Malam, very cheeky. Khadijah Hashim's Budi Yang Tak Terbeli was also very nice, liked her works. The Pantuns and The Sajaks, on the other hand, seems very tough. Never really liked it as well as the traditional prose, don't really get it. For English, we get a collection of short stories and poems. The poems are a bit advanced in language and does require a lot more effort in internalizing it compared to the Form One poems. (yes, I was able to understand Macbeth because I think that he's a historical EMo figure. see, EMO was way cool back then even before there was an EMo music scene). The short stories are okay and different compared to the Form One short stories. some tend to convey a hidden message I have yet to unearth like the Drover's Wife and The Sound Machine. The wide range of genre differs from those childish short stories learnt in Form One. I liked the tale of The Necklace by Guy de Maupasant (I think I spelt it wrong..). It depicts a woman's studipidity in an obsession of materialistic things. (totally agree with that!). But I'd like it better if we had a dose of those 'em sci-fi stuff by writers like Isaac Newton and the lot..which actually brings us back to H.G. Wells who...
Firstly, I should make my biases clear, but I'm pretty sure it's obvious. I've seen the Sam Raimi trilogy and of course, I will be comparing it to the reboot. After all, the reboot came a little bit too soon after the trilogy. Most of what follows will probably just be my personal preferences and gripes. Warning, spoilers abound. 1. Peter Parker I liked the doe-eyed Tobey Maguire more as the day-to-day Peter Parker. He's the nerdy, unsure of himself, normal guy. Andrew Garfield's cheeky boyish look doesn't make me buy the Peter Parker-ness. Andrew Garfield looks like he belongs to some teen series. 2. Mary Jane versus Gwen Stacy I hated Kirsten Dunst's Mary Jane. She's completely helpless like the traditional damsel in distress and sometimes her whining about her relationship with Peter Parker, seems, idk, petty, and sometimes she seems to not understand his predicament of being Spider-man and not being able to be there for her all th
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