And I consume media...

William Gibson has written my favorite opening line to any book with Neuromancer and more than a couple of my favorite novels can be attributed to him.

I am a fan boy.

I finished Zero History on Thursday morning and I have been...thinking...or processing this novel.

For those of you who need some catching up, many of the characters that were introduced in Spook Country reappear, all connected with Bigend in some way, and they seem to be the same characters, with some other differences, but...

Yeah, that's the problem with this novel. There is no there there. While I did care about Hollis Henry (nearly as much as I cared for Cayce Pollard, who you do find out about what happened to her after the end of Pattern Recognition), there wasn't the same urgency that existed in the first two books. There is the same search for something unique yet commodifiable but again, different. Maybe it is the subject of this quest...while I am interested in locative art and odd web videos and interesting cryptographical challenges, I could give a damn about the combination of streetwear and military gear.

Bigend is taking on Bondian villian proportions with his machinations and his hardware (the aerofoil done up in Hermes, really?) and it was almost laughable but not.

It isn't as if this is a bad novel. It isn't at all. If I can refer to another piece of media that I love, remember the cookie dough speech from the series finale of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, where Buffy Sommers confesses to not being quite done yet.

Well...

This novel is like Buffy's cookie dough. Brilliant but...not quite done yet.

It is better than The Switch though.


My first question is when did someone decide that Jennifer Aniston was a movie star? Like the above novel, it isn't that she's awful...she isn't...it is just that she is Rachel Greene and she will always be Rachel. This movie is Rachel having (another) baby, with Patrick Wilson as the presumed donor of genetic materials.

I am assuming that you have seen the commercial for this film but...check it out on YouTube and you get the entire film in two minutes.

The saving graces of this film are Jason Bateman and Jeff Goldblum who play off each other so well, and Goldblum is wonderfully smarmy in every scene he is in, chewing on the lines and sucking every last bit of comedy like some sweet marrow.

And then we get to Jason Bateman.

JMFJT observed that he is the definition of "cute" and he handles it well here. So cute that when standing next to Patrick Wilson, you forget for a moment that Wilson is a good looking man.

But cute can only carry you so far, and when the script is this bad and the premise of the film so...icky...the film becomes a Rom-Com of the most banal variety.