Reading of The Plague isn't going so well. It's somewhat dull and my focus wanders. Camus was a dude who I was interested in reading more work by after The Stranger, but even that isn't the most interesting of books, and doesn't really suggest a great body of work. Still, I threw it on my independent contract reading list. I have to read Melville's Billy Budd for my Saturday class this week, and once I'm done with all that, I'm moving on to Heller's Something Happened, which I look forward to. This is all in addition to the fact that I should be tearing shit up with the writing.

I saw A Very Long Engagement. The criticism that most of the people are throwing against it is similar to the complaint people had about The Life Aquatic, in that it's bullshit complaints that people who are fans of the directors expect. This is not to say I liked A Very Long Engagement as much as The Life Aquatic... My mind wandered, there's a lot of plot and I didn't understand it all except in broad strokes. Frequently there were characters on-screen that I didn't know what their connection was to the other characters. Every shot in the film is beautiful. It's not as good as Delicatessen. There might be some problems that stem from the fact that the film's an adaptation of a book. Bad Education is playing at the Capital Theater later this month, and my hopes are high.

American Dad, the new cartoon from the creator of Family Guy, is fucking horrible. Take all the ham-fistedness and stupidity and attempted offensiveness of Family Guy, only apply it to politics instead of pop culture. Then drop the density of pacing and the occasional long go-nowhere anti-humor bits. I've said in the past that Family Guy was pretty funny, but the people who were really into it are bad people. I wonder what they think of this. It's really stupid, but it's also obviously terrible, and the politics are those of the left. (Family Guy seemed to attract a lot of right-wing fans. It just had a generally poorly-informed fanbase, and while this show doesn't seem particularly nuanced or informed- it's people who've come to similar conclusions as I but don't necessarily know all that I know- it does have viewpoints that the majority of America, and by my reckoning, the majority of Family Guy fans, don't share.) I can't imagine people liking it unless they are retarded. And if they're conservative, they'll be turned off, retardation or no.