self-indulgent crap.

caveat = I know the irony of tossing an epithet like "self-indulgent" around in a place like this.


the omnivore's dilemma started off pretty good. There was something to learn in the first however many chapters of it. About corn, and fast food, about the impact of some of our dietary choices, about "organic" food, about the polyface farm, and some of the possibilities for sustainable agriculture. Imagine my surprise when, immediately after leaving the farm, Pollan turns the whole thing into a stream of conscious blab fest. Any attempt at informing or even gratifying the reader is cast aside while he coughs out his hunting stories in some righteously smelly prose. He puts himself in the center of a world of people much more interesting than him, and unsurprisingly, insists on casting himself as the star. We're left with the wonderful conclusion that he had fun making this book. F you mister pollan.

an even steamier pile of self-indulgence is "fear and trembling", a film product of (quelle suprise) canal plus. If you think you'd enjoy watching an effectively racist portrayal of life inside a japanese company by a lady with a grudge, this movie will help you rethink that. The lady is a self-obsessed fudge-up. At the beginning of the film, she does something super, and gets in trouble, and she spends the rest of the film failing and failing and failing, and blaming it on her environment. She's so worthless by the end of the film that I feel like the good deed at the beginning was a out-of-charactrer flourish to convince us that she is lovable in some way. The author tries and tries to use this editorial authority to make her case, but the ridiculous japanese caricatures that she puts to celluloid are such 2-dimensional stereotypes that it reflects much worse on her. Also she's belgian.