Sneha Jaiswal's Blog, page 273

Underwater Welder – A Poignant Graphic Novel

Finished reading book number 12 for the year – A poignant graphic novel called ‘Underwater Welder’ by Jeff Lemire. Lemire has both written and illustrated this haunting book that deals with loss and a man’s reluctance to part with his deceased father’s memories.

Like the title suggests, the protagonist Jack is an underwater welder, who lives in a sleepy port town with a pregnant wife. Jack was just 10 when his was lost to the sea when and some parts of him hopelessly continue to look for their childhood hero during their deep dives into the bottom of the sea. Lemire captures the mundane life in the town with his grim inks, which feel very personal and raw, like detailed drafts from a personal graphic diary.

I like how the graphic novel explores the ties between fathers and sons, of how boys tend to hero-worship their dads, oblivious to how flawed their idols are. Lemire shows us in a grim yet dreamlike manner how boys metamorphose into their fathers as they grow older. Will Jack too turn into a drunk selfish man his mother claims his father was? Why did his father not keep his last promise to the ten-year-old Jack, a promise that plagues him even at 33. I didn’t know what to expect when I started reading ‘Underwater Welder’, but it surpasses whatever little images I had in my head.

It’s a 4/5 from me.

The Long View – Grisly & Gripping

I finished reading book number 11 for the year. ‘The Long View’ by Mark Hurst is great horror material – spooky, gory, grisly, discomforting & gripping. Had this novel been a little shorter, I might have binge-read it in a day.

The plot follows Sophie, an asocial teenager that can see the dead and even talk to them, just like her mom. The author weaves an interesting tale of what happens between the living & the dead, with a serial killer thrown in the mix. What serves as perfect background is the fact that Sophie’s father runs a funeral service, complete with a mortuary at their home.

I said the book was discomforting because there’s some brutal bullying that isn’t very comfortable to read. There is also some graphic violence that kind of comes with horror territory, so is absolutely justified. I felt knots in my stomach as I read some of the horrible stuff the protagonist has to endure. All I am trying to say is that “The Long View’ is not for the faint-hearted. But if you are a horror enthusiast, you will probably love the book.

I have read the author’s previous work “The Nasties”, and “The Long View” is way more intense, with detailed descriptions that give you a clear vision of the author’s imagination. The descriptions are so vivid that the story plays like a movie in your head. The book will probably spook you a bit if you read it alone at night post one am.

I felt like the climax was slightly long drawn, but it wraps up quite neatly, with a witty little twist at the end. It’s a 5/5 from me. The book is available on Kindle Unlimited, so if you are looking for something creepy, grab a copy.

All My Friends Are Dead – 2020 Film Review

The 2020 Polish film “All My Friends Are Dead” directed by Jan Belcl has to be the wackiest film I’ve seen in a over a year. It’s like “American Pie” on cocaine, so things get way out of hand and there’s a lot of blood and ridiculous violence.

The movie starts with two detectives inspecting the crime scene, a huge house with lots of dead youngsters after a New Party gone awfully wrong. “This is called epic fail” the senior detective explains his junior, in the 21st century teen lingo. Things then go on rewind to show us what really happened at the party, which starts off a normal enough gathering, with kids drinking the night away to music.

It’s just a party montage following one weird person after another – there’s a girl who thinks she can read people, two sisters who have an insane libido, a photographer who is just out of rehab, two ‘loser’ friends who would do anything to get laid, so on and so forth. How they all end up dead is just one idiotic mishap after another.

The movie is shot in a house that’s huge and exudes ‘privilege’. Amidst all the rich kids partying, there was a small sub-plot, about a pizza delivery guy working on New Year’s Eve, who ends up at the soon to be ‘house of the dead’. It was a moving juxtapositions, to show the viewer a ‘rich vs the poor’.

As the plot unfolds, half the time you would be exclaiming ‘wtf?!’, rest of it you’d either be watching amused or be like “okay, this is way too silly”. But all in all – “All My Friends Are Dead” is a fun film to watch with friends after a few drinks. It’s an 18+ film, with lots of drugs, nudity and wack-ass jokes.

What hit me as interesting was the fact that both men & women were equally sexualised/objectified in the film. Such ‘party gone wrong’ films tend to over-objectify just the women, not this one. The makers parody a lot of party tropes and despite making a funny film, they manage to send a pretty strong message against gun ownership. Never leave a house with kids and loaded guns alone. Or people can end up dead.

It’s a 6/10 from me.

Finding Ohana Review – FamJam Time

The animated film ‘Lilo and Stitch’ introduced the world to the Hawaiian word ‘Ohana’ in 2002. There’s a beautiful quote from the film that explains its meaning – “Ohana means family and family means nobody gets left behind or forgotten”. While there are no extra-terrestrial beings in the 2021 Netflix film “Finding Ohana”, there are some supernatural elements and familial bond is a dominant theme.

Directed by Jude Weng, “Finding Ohana” follows the story of two siblings Pili & Ioane, who have been raised in New York, but find themselves spending the summer in Hawaii with their grandfather. Pili finds a journal that talks of a hidden treasure & the girl is convinced of its existence. What follows is an adventure which is very reminiscent of the classic film ‘The Goonies’, but with some Hawaiian cultural twists.

The cinematography is done well and some of the beach scenes are breathtaking, it makes the viewer want to pack their bags and fly away to Hawaii. The writers weave in a lot of cultural elements native to Hawaii, along with some interesting myths, that make this typical adventure tale more interesting than it otherwise would’ve been. Actor Branscombe Richmond who plays the grandfather looked like he was straight out of Moana, the popular disney movie.

Actor Kea Peahu is adorable as the fiesty Pili who loves adventures. The sibling rivalry between Pili and Ioane makes for some fun comic scenes. Even though it’s quite predictable, I thoroughly enjoyed watching the film and think it makes for a great pick to watch with the entire family on a nice lazy Sunday evening. I could try spend more time thinking about it to analyse the film and pick out some critical points, but I prefer my reviews to be about my immediate movie-watching experience. So yeah, it’s a fun film and worth a one-time-watch. It’s a 7/10 from me.

P.S – AbstractAf also has a podcast channel on YouTube now, be sure to check us out & subscribe

Crazy About Her – First Look

Netflix just dropped the trailer to its new French film ‘Crazy About Her’ (Loco por ella – original title) starring Álvaro Cervantes, Luis Zahera, Susana Abaitua. The trailer starts off typical romantic comedy style – where two strangers hook up and tell each they don’t need to remember anything about the night.

The two strangers tell each other just their firs names, the guy is Adri and the lady is Carla. While Carla vanishes into thin air the next day, Adri develops a crush he cannot shrug off. So he frantically begins to look for Carna and finally finds her in a mental health facility.

“This is a madhouse”? he asked bewildered, when he finds the place. Undeterred, he manages to admit himself at the facility so that he can court Carla, who claims she is a manic-depressive. We then are shown a few montage like scenes from the ‘madhouse’ & I guess the rest of the story is about whether these two individuals will end up together in the most unlikely of places.

There weren’t any fun moments in the trailer, although it briefly did remind me of ‘The Eternal Sunshine of The Spotless Mind’, which was a magical movie by the way. The plot definitely seems interesting, but one is made to hope that this film doesn’t romanticize mental health problems.

The lead actor Álvaro Cervantes looks like a mash between Liam Hemsworth and Prince Harry. I can’t possibly be the only one who thinks that, take a look for yourselves –

The film is directed by Danny De La Ordan, who has made a few romantic comedies in the past, although ‘Crazy About Her’ seems a little different. Will have to find out if its worth a watch on release date! Leaving you with the trailer.

January Book Wrap

I am on track to read my target of 100 books this year. In-fact, your friend here is ahead of schedule, because she managed to read 10 books just in January, that’s apart from the 50+ manga comics that she devoured on the sidelines. Okay, referring to me in the third person is getting creepy now.

Anyway, while I have been putting up every book review on the site here, there’s also a new podcast episode up on YouTube where I review all 10 of them under 10 minutes for those who may have missed the older reviews or just don’t have the patience to read 10 different long-ish posts.

If you like the podcast, please do subscribe to the channel and show support.

Digital Weddings & Some Memories

Ever since the Covid19 pandemic pushed us into our homes, I have attended three weddings via zoom. Pretty sure there are people who have attended at least 50 zoom weddings by now. I am just not that social.

But this time it was different, it was a pre-wedding ceremony of a school friend, who I have known since we were just eleven. That feels like a different century now. He changed schools two years later and we lost contact. But half a decade later, he managed to get my number from somewhere & staying in touch became a little easier – thanks to Facebook.

We’ve met only a few times since then, in different cities, when by some luck, we would be in the same place. When I was watching the ceremony via a Zoom link today, it made me nostalgic and made me wonder how the pandemic might have distanced us from people physically, but in some ways, it’s also brought a lot of us closer. Had there been no pandemic, I am not sure if I would’ve been invited & even if I were… I don’t know if I would’ve been able to attend it. But now that everybody is broadcasting their special events online due to present circumstances, a lot more people are able to be part of memories they would have otherwise missed.

Hopefully, this trend will continue, pandemic or not. Because we had a very small wedding (way before the pandemic) and our grandparents weren’t able to attend, due to health & various other reasons. Now that I think of it, we could’ve set up a camera and just streamed it for them, even back then. It just never struck us. But now, nobody needs to feel left out of anything, at least as long as they have a good internet connection.

P.S – AbstractAf also has a podcast channel on YouTube now, be sure to check us out & subscribe.

The Dig Movie Review – Not Enough Shoveling

Just saw the 2021 Netflix film ‘The Dig’ directed by Simon Stone, starring Ralph Fiennes and Carey Mulligan in the lead roles. You can choose to either listen to the podcast version, or continue reading the review.

The film is a historical drama based on a real life story of how landowner Edith Pretty hires an amateur archaeologist Basil Brown to dig what resembles burial mounds on her property. What Brown goes on to discover becomes one of the most important archaeological finds in British History.

If you are not a history buff, this movie might not be something you would want to pick for the weekend, but if find crumbling palaces and ancient corpses intriguing, you will dig ‘the dig’. The cinematography is stunning for most parts because the makers capture the rural beauty Suffolk England, be it during rain or sunshine. While Ralph Fiennes plays the self-taught excavator Basil Brown, the much younger Mulligan plays Edith Pretty.

Moving on to the plot, the story is pretty straightforward – how an unknown archaeologist discovers an ancient ship, at a time when the country is at war, what follows is a credit battle & debates on which museum gets to keep it all. There’s a subtle class warfare at play in the film, we are shown how at first the local museum authorities weren’t keen on lending Basil Brown for a private excavation that they assumed would lead to nothing. But as soon as Brown digs up a significant find to indicate there might be something stunning underneath the mounds, the museum authorities become keen to sideline the poorly educated Brown and take over the excavation.

The film is a little slow and overtly emotional, the broody gloomy music does little to uplift the mood. There is barely any humour or comic relief and the tone is somber. Towards the second-half a few new characters come in and there are new sub-plots. Neither the characters, nor the actual dig gets enough script for the viewer to begin caring, the focus is split, but not well, so you get a little bit of a muddle in the end. A reduction of at least 15 minutes in the runtime would’ve made it a lot more gripping.

To the credit of the makers, the scene when the archaeology makes their first discovery to indicate that the site dates back to not just the Viking, but even further back to the Anglo-Saxon age, their triumph is shot beautifully. The viewer would rejoice at their victory too. Unless you are not a history buff.

The cast is pretty convincing in their parts, Actor Lily James was adorable as the nerdy historian Peggy Preston and the kid who plays Robert, Edith’s son, was a joy to see on screen. The climax was quite satisfying. I would give this film a solid seven.

Brazen Book Review – Buy It!

Finished reading book number 10 in January – Brazen by Penelope Bagieu. I LOVE LOVE LOVE this book! It’s like a graphic novel, with the cutest artwork, but badass stories about ‘rebel ladies who rocked the world’.

I almost teared up at the first story about Clementine Delait, a French woman who used to rock a full-blown beard and ran a Cafe called ‘The Bearded Lady’s Cafe’. She lived a rich & rather successful life. It’s a story about embracing yourself with all your oddities and displays perfectly how the world would celebrate your ‘quirks’, if you do it first. Since the book only has cartoon panels, I looked up Delait online and here’s what she looked like –

Picture source – https://wellcomeimages.org

‘Brazen’ is filled with such stories of women, some of who aren’t celebrated enough, who we might have never heard of before, but who really changed the world for women around them. Their lives are given a dash of magic in the colorful and playful panels drawn & narrated by Penelope Bagieu. She has chosen a very eclectic mix of women, you have political activists, rulers, rappers, athletes, artists, journalists, volacanologists… the list goes on.

Which brings me to one story that gave me the chills – that of Katia Krafft, America’s first woman volcanologist, who died while filming a volcanic eruption. Katia & her husband had been researching eruptions for over two decades, always being inches away from death, but Katia an interview had said “I’ve seen so many eruptions in 23 years, that if I die tomorrow, I don’t care”. That’s the kind of spirit only somebody who is living life on their own terms can have.

Pictured above is Katia and Maurice Krafft. Source – Website of the USGS

Even though ‘Brazen’ is a book about women, the stories have universal themes of courage, hard-work and the human spirit. It’s a book that I absolutely adore and will treasure. If you are looking to gift somebody a book, buy this! The diversity on display will blow your mind and the stories of their wit & grit will make you emotional. It will make you want to go back in time and give these woman a bear hug… and tell them they are ‘AWESOME’.

It’s a 5/5 for me. If I could give it a 10 on 5, I would.

Abstract AF Is A Podcast Too!

You read that right. Abstract AF is a podcast on YouTube now, so if you feel to tired to read us, you can just hear us!

For the first episode I discuss small things or habits that can help you read more books in a year.

Please show your support & subscribe. We’ll subscribe all of you right back.

Link to the first episode – How To Read Over 100 Books In A Year