The Road

People tend to make too big a deal about whether or not the book was better than the movie. To me, there's really no comparing the two. Just because they tell the same story doesn't mean they can be looked at in the same light. A movie is asked to do a lot of things a book never has to think about. A book can drone on and on, get lost, go off on tangents, and as long as the writing is crisp enough, all the filler is perfectly fine. In fact, some people even find it commendable. There's something to be said about cranking out a 1000+ page novel. Movies get far less leeway. Like truly good fiction, everything in them has to have a purpose. There's simply no time to include anything that doesn't shove the story along. And of course, these restrictions also tend to leave the most memorable scenes in a book on the cutting room floor when the final draft of the movie is made.

But for the sake of doing this assignment, I'll make a decision. I thought the movie was much better. As a story, I didn't find either particularly strong in the first place, but in the book, much of the scenes seemed almost cosmetic. Yes, each one helped shape our opinion of the man and the boy, helped us connect with them, and humanized them. But what needs to be remembered here is that it is a narrative. There needs to be action. The story has to be building towards something. It has to go somewhere. Don't ask me how a story about two people following a road fell short of that, but it did.

Surviving in a world like the one described in the book is as monotonous as it is difficult. The scenes in the book start to blend together for me as more time is put between me and the day I polished off the last page. Heck, maybe the familiarity from scene to scene was even intentional. McCarthy could have been trying to beat us down so that we were more able to sympathize with his characters. Intentional or not, I found it quite unpleasant.

This is where the movie outshines the book. By its very nature, the movie sets out to cut all the fat. Yes, we're made to be dragged along the road with the man and boy, but it's not quite so repetitive. There's much more variation in the scenery. There's even more conflicts and characters. While a lot of people will harp on the fact that these things were not true to the original vision of the story, I'm just grateful that my second journey down the road wasn't completely the same as the first.

Like a lot of adaptations, this movie wasn't able to avoid the need for a voice over. Some ideas just take way too much time to be conveyed with traditional movie methods. Not everything can be shown to us. That's the great part about books, the author can tell us exactly what he/she wants us to know. I'm not disappointed at all that they had to resort to voice over for a lot of the thoughts that they ripped out of the book. I prefer it that way. Voice overs may seem like cheating to some movie buffs, but I'm actually a sucker for them.

Overall, I think the movie did an awesome job of staying true to the book. I'm not sure if I think that's a good thing, but I'm sure it's what they wanted when they set out to make it, so in that way, it's a smashing success. Really, it's hard to even contrast the two. The few changes that were made to the story were so trivial that they hardly even mattered.

So again, if I had to pick one over the other, I'd pick the movie simply because it was more compact, but in reality, the two were remarkably similar in their mediocrity. There's no real story here, just a setting. The characters don't influence their surroundings; they merely try to survive them. This is not the type of novel I'd set out to read on my own, but it was a good experience anyway. I hope next year's book/movie has more substance.

Television

For the majority of my life, I've only had broadcast television to watch. My childhood is filled with memories of wrestling with bunny ears, trying to balance myself against tiny televisions. Now, I know it's only T.V., but when you start mucking about with all of the cable channels, it starts to feel a lot more like work than leisure. There's something to be said about the simplicity of only having a handful of channels to choose from; I just can't think of it because I'm too busy watching Adult Swim at 4 AM in the morning.

The upside to only having broadcast is that you become an expert. You know what's on at all times. You know exactly what it is you want to watch. There's very little channel flipping and if there's some kind of interference with the regularly scheduled programs, you know about it because you've been there for all of the commercials since they announced it two months ago.

You also get the pleasure of being able to get a little taste of every new show. Everything gets a shot because nothing is particularly unmissable. At a young age, I became a critic before I even knew what a critic was. When I tried out a new cartoon and liked it, I made it my new choice for that time slot. If I thought it was garbage, I never watched it again. I might not have been able to articulate why exactly I made these decisions, but I was sampling pretty much everything and I was forming opinions on all of it.

Then my mother got a decent job and I convinced her we were the only people in the world who still didn't have cable. I almost regret that day. I feel completely different about my T.V. watching now. It isn't about what I have to see anymore; it's about what I happen to land on when I have enough down time to watch T.V. I'm no longer an expert. There's no way I could be. No more could I say I was an expert on books than I could say I was an expert on television programs. There's just far too much content.

Of course, with all of the extra shows, when I finally do find something I like, it's much more personal. I feel like an explorer, discovering new worlds in the triple digit channels. And when I do find something special, it's almost always better than what I find on broadcast T.V. It's not just some generic show made to suck up every demographic imaginable for that time slot. It's made with a specific audience in mind and with that focus, it's better able to serve that audience.

So yes, these days, I find myself watching more cable than broadcast. I'm a big fan of Sons of Anarchy and much of the other original content on FX. I also spend a lot of time watching the Discovery Channel. And of course, my standby, the channel that comes on when I power on my box and the channel that usually stays on all day and all night, is ESPN. Really, the only time I ever venture over to the broadcast world anymore is for local news or football games.

I'm no longer an expert; I can no longer say I know I'm not missing out on anything better when I settle on a program, but I think I have a much more enjoyable T.V. watching experience all the same.

Magazines

The only times I’ve subscribed to magazines were when it came for free with some other kind of purchase. When I paid for the content on International Gaming News’ website (IGN.com), I started getting Wired and Computer Shopper as well and as the months passed, I stopped using IGN’s website entirely.

The main benefit became Wired, a magazine I knew nothing about when I originally subscribed. Admittedly, I barely glanced at Computer Shopper, but without Wired, my purchase would have been completely wasted.

These days, I hardly ever read magazines. I feel like I can get anything usually found in a magazine somewhere on the internet instead. Why subscribe to ESPN The Magazine when half the content is available on their own website and the rest of it is covered ad nauseum on hundreds of similar sites with varying quality?

Basically, the only purpose of paying for the printed version is having something to read when I’m on the toilet. And I don’t know about you, but the backs of shampoo bottles are just as thought provoking as Time when you’re in the bathroom doing your business.

Now that I don’t get any magazines delivered to my house, I’m forced into opportunist mode. I’m that guy who won’t pay for cigarettes because they cost too much, but then asks to bum a smoke off you every 30 minutes.

I even steal magazines from hair cutteries and doctor’s offices when I’m interrupted in the middle of an article. I have no problem asking for a friend’s magazine when I’m forced to leave their house abruptly. And in the off chance they say no, it’s not a big deal.

Being that I’m an opportunist, I don’t usually get much choice in what I read. When there is a bit of a selection, I go for the sports magazines first despite the fact that virtually all sporting news is time based and irrelevant by the time I read the issue that’s been sitting around in a waiting room for three months.

I still pick it up ahead of more time neutral magazines like People. Of course, if there’s nothing sports related present, there’s no low I won’t stoop to. I’ve read Cosmopolitan, Oprah, even Glamour. So really, I only read magazines when they're my only option and when they're your only option, anything will do.