A movie review from The Movie Snob

Wild Safari 3D: A South African Adventure (B). The parents were in town for the holiday weekend, and getting them to the movie theater can be a challenge. But they were pretty easily talked into checking out this new 3D movie at the local IMAX theater. The movie takes you on a tour of various wildlife preserves in South Africa in search of the so-called "big five": elephants, rhinoceroses, cape buffaloes, leopards, and lions. Some of the movie is filmed from the back seat of an all-terrain vehicle driven by our cute and spunky tour guide Liesl, and other parts seem to be filmed from other vantage points very close to the animals. These animals are filmed in pretty much normal conditions—hanging out, drinking at water holes, eating what’s left of a kill—so they don’t really do a whole lot. Also, the narration was not all that informative, although I did learn that when leopards come together to mate, they do so up to 100 times over the course of three days. Good, but not great.

A book review from The Movie Snob

Morris Dickstein, A Mirror in the Roadway: Literature and the Real World (Princeton University Press 2005). This is a collection of essays, mostly literary criticism about twentieth-century novels that I have not read. However, I read a very favorable review of the book in National Review, so I thought I would give it a try. It was quite good, and it pointed me to several books and authors that I will definitely try to read to improve my acquaintance with twentieth-century literature. (I should add also that the author brings no conservative agenda to the table, and in fact throws in the occasional anti-Reagan or anti-Gingrich remark, many of the essays having been written several years ago.) Interesting essays cover the work of Willa Cather, Upton Sinclair, F. Scott Fitzgerald, George Orwell, Philip Roth, Saul Bellow, and others.