As I sit to write this, I'm absolutely amazed (gobsmacked!) that it's been so long. It really doesn't feel like seven months since I last did any reviews, but my blog tells me it is. Maybe I lost some posts that I don't even remember writing -... yeah, that's it....it's the other guys fault.
Candidly, it wasn't all that productive on my dual missions to consume and review both the works of Philip K Dick as well as all of the best picture Oscar movies through time. As is often the case, life gets in the way, and distractions abound in our world. So here's the whirlwind tour of the last seven months in these pursuits:
In the last seven months, I managed to read 4 different PKD books. - one sci-fi and three realisms. The Broken Bubble was a view into the lives of a professional couple, who for reasons explained, wind up involved with another couple, in multiple senses. In the end, they wind up switching partners with this other couple, which you could see coming from a mile away. I don't get much out of his realism books, other than a glimpse into how people lived differently back in the 50s and 60s, and how much different California seems than what it represents today.
And that observation continues with Puttering About in a Small Land and In Milton Lumkey Territory The first is about the owner of a TV repair shop, and his relationships with his wife, son, and eventually mistress and her husband. It taps into the idea that our early relationships shape our future ones, but it doesn't quite hit home directly. Here again, it's sometimes hard to figure out what drives PKDs characters, and why they make some of the choices they make; maybe not enough in their backgrounds to explain that.
Which happens in Lumkey too a bit, but here, we do actually get background that helps explain some things about the main character - why he has the type of relationships he does, maybe a bit of an Oedipal theme. But the character that resonated with me (for once!) was the woman at the heart of the story. A woman from the main character's past (his teacher) who sits in his memory as two-dimensional, but during the story, her character deepens, and many of her choices in life seem totally logical (unlike the main character's and many of PKD's female characters). Of all of his non-sci-fi novels, I thought this one of the more interesting ones, full of views of the far West, and a number of risky actions, some of which don't turn out well.
But the book I liked the most of this session was Time out of Joint, which again fits into the Twilight Zone arena of his writings. Set mainly in the recent past, it follows the story of a puzzler who keeps stumbling across elements that just don't seem so right to him, but he can't really understand why. To say more would be too revealing, but this book was just satisfying in getting back into what PKD does well - establishing a universe that we can often relate to, but is just off-center enough to generate an interesting 'what if' and make one think about possibilities.
On the Oscar movie front - you probably don't need me to recap these, 'cause they're mostly famous. I finally watched 12 Years a Slave (good, but hard to see), The Sting (revolutionary in those days, maybe, but today, predictable), The French Connection , and In the Heat of the Night (surprisingly enjoyable as a movie; not surprising in its depiction of rampant racism). Outside of the Oscar chase, I also watched A Clockwork Orange (which lost the Oscar to French Connection - I get that, the world was not ready for that movie - maybe it still isn't!), Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (why is "Raindrops keep falling on my head" in this movie ?!?!? - pretty fun otherwise), and that's about it for classics.
Naturally, it's another Oscar year, and I'm 5/10 in terms of the current nominees. We've seen The Banshees of Inisherin, Tar, Everything Everywhere all at Once, Top Gun, and Triangle of Sadness. While I see some acting Oscar potential in a few of these, I'm hoping Everything gets the Oscar, if only to mainstream Sci-Fi again. Of the 5 I haven't seen, candidly, I don't know that I'll see any of them except All quiet on the western front, but in a few weeks, I might need to, right?
Oh, and I watched Wakanda Forever and Ant-Man: Quantumania. Not Best Pictures.
