Kelson Reviews Stuff - Page 29

After finishing my epic re-read of Les Misérables, I’ve been watching the various movie adaptations and finding other versions of the story, including a classic radio play, some comics, and even a children’s book.

Movies

• 1935 Les Misérables Movie directed by Richard Boleslawski, starring Frederic March and Charles Laughton.
• 1952 Les Misérables Movie directed by Lewis Milestone, starring Michael Rennie and Robert Newton.
• 1978 Les Misérables Movie directed by Glenn Jordan, starring Anthony Perkins and Richard Jordan.
• 1998 Les Misérables Movie directed by Bille August, starring Liam Neeson and Geoffrey Rush.
• 2000 Les Misérables TV Miniseries (3-hour version) directed by Josée Dayan, starring Gerard Depardieu and John Malkovich.
• 2012 Les Misérables Movie musical directed by Tom Hooper, starring Hugh Jackman and Russell Crowe.
• Followup: The 2012 movie after re-reading the book

Spoofs and Parodies

• Les Miseranimals (Animaniacs’ spoof)
• Thénardier’s Inn (a cabaret-style parody)
• Three Les Misérables parodies

Stage, Audio and Books

• Les Misérables 25th Anniversary Stage Production
• Orson Welles Radio Drama (1937)
• Classics Illustrated original comic book (1943)
• Classics Illustrated revised comic book (1961)
• Cozy Classics: Les Misérables
• Manga Classics: Les Misérables

All of these reviews are at Re-Reading Les Mis, along with commentary on two full reads through the book.

TODO: Quick note about what iNaturalist is.

The app streamlines the basic use case of posting an observation from your phone,
and the AI is usually good at identifying (or at least narrowing down)
the plant or animal you’re looking at, even before other people have a
chance to review it.

iNaturalist app is available for Android from the Google Play Store and for iOS from the App Store.

The intergalactic community is ready to welcome Earth into its fold…but only if we prove to be sufficiently civilized…by placing in an interstellar version of Eurovision. If we lose…well, “elimination” is the right word in more ways than one.

Absurdity, social satire, lots of music references, and a fast read that still feels like a wall of words at times. In the same vein as Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy and Year Zero (though in this case humans are the worst musicians in the galaxy). Fun, though it’s got some dark moments. The world isn’t totally awesome or totally awful, it’s both: Everything is messy, and you can find the sublime in chaos.

The book’s subtitle is “How to Fake Your Way into Getting Rich on Instagram,” and it’s a fascinating exposé of a side of the network (Follow me on Instagram! Actually, don’t. I’m mostly on Pixelfed these days.) that I’ve mostly ignored.

I’ve known the high-rolling “influencer” side of Instagram is out there, but for the most part, I’ve tuned it out by following only friends and people whose photos I find interesting (including the author, which was how I found out about this book), rather than following personalities.

The book covers three main topics:

• How and why people game the system on attention-based social networks, using Instagram as a case study.
• How attention-based social media games your brain.
• Ways to keep yourself in control of your social media experience.

I’ve read a lot about the second and third topics, so that part was mostly familiar to me, though I expect it will be more interesting (and helpful) to other readers.

The first topic - which is basically the hook to get people looking at the rest of it - proved to be very eye-opening as it describes the sheer amount of product placement and sponsorship going on, the lengths people will go to in order to make it look like they have a bigger audience than they do so they can get the deals, and the various techniques used to get around fraud detection.

Available through the author’s site at Stuck in Customs.

The art is great, and the scope is ambitious, but the story feels really familiar. The Dark Multiverse and World Forge concepts are interesting, but the story follows the same beats as Final Crisis: a dark god takes over Earth and begins dragging it downward into an unending hell while a handful of heroes mounts a desperate resistance in a conquered world where they have to fight twisted versions of their allies.

And by the end of the book, I feel like it was less about the story itself than about the pieces it set up for the next round of new comics launches.