Author Archives: joonassilmu

Going Postal

Going Postal is a novel written by Terry Pratchett, who died recently at age of 66. The novel was 33th of Pratchett’s Discworld series. Discworld is a fantasyworld that is a disc on top of four elephants which in turn are on top of a giant turtle. The story focuses on Moist von Lipwig. A man who has lots of fake names. He lived his life by cheating and fooling people by using his talking skills to make them to think that they are making a good bargain.The story begins from gallows. Moist, currently called as Alfred Spangler, is being hanged. He dies, but wakes up. Lord Vetinari has given him a new chance by offering a job of postmaster at the Post Office of Ankh-Morpork. He is being followed by an ancient golem so he won’t attempt to escape. Golems are used as workers with minimum payment for all kinds of jobs. At the old and run-down Post Office Moist finds two men. Junior postman Tolliver Groat, who is really old and worked in the Post Office when it was still fully functoning, and Stanley, a young lad who is into pins. He knows everything about them and is a collector. The Post Office os full of unsent letters, some of them are many decades old, and moist is expected to deliver them and raise the Office back to it’s feet. The work is even harder with the Grand Trunk around. It’s a company that sends messages as data code between cities via clacks towers that recieve and pass messages. Moist is determined to bring down the company head Reacher Gilt, a businessman who only thinks money and his own profit. The theme is about business and financial world. I found it interesting to see how the underdog Moist von Lipwig takes out a big corporation. The book had a lot of connectons about our businessworld. I really enjoyed the story and all that was about the genre. Also the main character’s psychological skills were interesting and he felt like a man who knows about behaviour.

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Year One

I’m doing a review about the movie ”Year one”. It’s a rather old one already as it was made in 2009. It was director Harold Ramis’ last movie he made before his death in 2014. He was also one of the writers and played the role of Adam, the first human according to the bible. The movie is a comedy which is my favourite genre. But if a movie relies only on being funny it’s not very good anymore. The plot is a mix of history and the bible and it’s making a lot of fun at their cost. I feel like they didn’t use all of the potential the idea has. The story focuses on two cavemen Zed(Jack Black) and Oh(Michael Cera) who are lazy and thus not very liked among their tribe. One day Zed finds and eats from the tree of knowledge of good and evil and starts to get ideas and solutions. Once he gets found out he’s immediately banished from the tribe. When he leaves he manages to accidentally burn the place and Oh then decides to come with him since there is nothing left for him back at home except a girl he likes but he is too shy to tell her that. On their journey they encounter a lot of scenes familiar from both history and the old testament. The plot is basically jumping from place to place and always expressing it’s dirty humour. Without that the plot would be even more poor and constant change of scenery makes it look confusing but because it’s a comedy it doesn’t even have to make sense all the time. The characters have very common personalities that are shown very strongly in them for an example a strong guy who is easily recognized to have a nature of a bully and a ruthless authoritative who despises everyone. There are some characters from the bible such as Abraham and Isaac. The casting has a lot of names I don’t recognize but there is some. Not very big ones though. Hank Azaria (playing the role of Abraham) is the most known for being a voice actor for ”The Simpsons”, the longest and most successful animated series from the USA. Jack Black(starring) is one very often seen name in comedies and was the main character’s voice actor in Kung Fu Panda movies. All in all the movie is not that good but not a total flop either. It is enjoyable if you are a fan of it’s type of humour. I would rate it 3/5.

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Filed under Films / theatre