Jarhead, Welcome to the Suck. A good film basically about nothing. I guess you can call this the Seinfield of War movies. Jake Gyllenhaal was amazing. I don't always see him as Donnie Darko now. Once you make such a cult movie like that its hard to be taken seriously again. He's the real deal as is Jamie Foxx and Peter Sarsgaard. A good cast for a good movie.
Is Jarhead the Academy Award powerhouse it was billed as? Nope. Its good but not that good.
Time Traveler's WifeI finished this finally. While reading this I also started the Historian, Fast Food Nation, The Rule of Four and a couple other books. The Time Traveler's Wife is a great book. It's worthy of me writing about it here which I rarely do about books. This is a science fiction love story. It is a hard core love story and a hard core science fiction story. What this book does is combine the two genres and I am hoping captures both audiences. The style of the story is very fast with sometimes one page chapters.
Why is this such a good novel? First off, the author actually writes a good time travel piece. It is soo hard to write a time travel story. The variables eventually become far too confusing and the sheer weight of what is happening, what happened and what will happen if the character does this as opposed to that normally lead the story to become too confusing or too dumbed down. It is normally too hard to do. I was worried at first as the first 20 pages make no sense until you read the next twenty pages. I have a tough time even writing this review as this story is very complex.
In short the protagonist travels in time with no control. He travels to important events in his past or future, normally past. He eventually meets his future wife when she is six years old and kind of watches and helps her grow up through the years. Eventually she finds him when she grows up but he has not gone back in time to see her yet at that age. You know what? I'm not even going to try to explain it. Lets just say its science fiction at its best. Unlike something like Doctor Who, when Henry travels back in time he can speak to himself. When older Henry travels back in time he is naked and has no clue where he is. I liked the scene where he is in the dark and he hears "Do you want a cookie Henry?" His 9 year old self is sitting there. Sometimes he hangs out with himself, his future wife and even his future daughter. The book brilliantly foreshadows Henry's death early on. His daughter cries when she sees him, he sees himself one night all bloody for a few moments then it goes away. The reason this works is that you know he is going to die but the book has 300 pages or so to build up the emotional impact of this. It really works. Why does his wife's father and brother see Henry and look like they have seen a ghost? There are many mysteries here. I can't believe the author made a coherent story out of this.
I like how at his wedding Henry looks out the window and sees himself giving him the thumbs up. Sometimes Henry helps himself out which is pretty funny. At one point Henry receives a startling call in the night from himself "help me!"
When Henry's mother dies in a car crash all that little Henry can see is himself at different ages, watching. He cannot stop time traveling to this moment. He is in the car next to them, on the bridge looking down, and basically everywhere. This scene eventually turns into a nightmare for poor Henry he can never escape.
I did find some huge errors by the author in the form of contradictions. I can't for the life of me remember what they were but they were pretty big.
