Movie 4: Grey’s Anatomy (2005)

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This isn’t really a movie, but considering I managed to see the entire first season and the first five episodes of the second season in the course of five days, I think I might as well write about it.

The first five episodes really got me hooked – and assured me that I should never be a doctor or go to a hospital. I thoughts all of the characters were interesting. Meredith is the main character – the “average” one, Christina is the overachiever that on the surface seems cold-hearted, Izzie is the kind-hearted ex-model, George is the nice boy, and Alex is the smart-aleck. The only character I never really liked was Burke. I must be racist. (On a serious note, why the hell are there so many black people on this show? Is Seattle really that diverse that every other doctor you see just happens to be black? Someone please enlighten me on this matter.)

Yet as the show goes on, I find that the story doesn’t really go anywhere. The relationship between Meredith and Derek is kind of expected, but the on-and-offedness gets tiring after a while. One may even wonder why she is in love with him at all. The kind of things he says may be charming at first, but it is also obvious that he’s an asshole. What is more pathetic is the way Meredith keeps crawling back to him. Not once, not twice, but thrice (within fourteen episodes alone)! This disappointed me because I was under the impression that Meredith, in spite of her flaws, is supposed to be a strong character. Of course the first episode opens with her having sex with a random guy – which says something about her as a character – but I already chose to ignore that!

The relationship between Christina and Burke is also so wrong on so many levels. First, Burke does not look like the type of person who would remain a virgin until well in his thirties. Christina, maybe, but not Burke. The scene of their first time is highly unbelievable. I would think that if they’re both really virgins, then they wouldn’t seem so eager and . . . experienced. They don’t even know each other outside the hospital, for Christ’s sake.

In the last few episodes I watched, Izzie and Alex are also about to get it on. Now I do like both of them individually. Izzie is admirable. She’s pretty, seems to be the most mature, and cares a whole lot about her patients. Alex may be a jerk, but his sarcasm cracks me up since episode 1. But is pairing them up really necessary? I guess that was when I realized Grey’s Anatomy was going to be another pointless soap opera with a hospital as the setting. Come to think of it, the way each episode kind of has a theme is also annoying. This is too much like 7th Heaven, when Ruthie had to be addicted to bubble gums in the episode about addiction. Eugh.

So after dedicating several days watching this thing, I say to you, Grey’s Anatomy: Farewell.

Book 12: The Lightning Thief by Rick Riordan (2005)

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This is such a cute book. Percy is such a cute boy. I think it could’ve been better if the Greek Mythology weren’t directly involved. Centaurs and satyrs (and dragons) have been such accepted figures in a typical fantasy story that they could’ve existed in this book without any direct reference to the gods. Anyone, one shouldn’t write about characters like Zeus and Athena. They’re such known characters that if you mess around with them their fans are not going to like you very much.

Another thing is the copy I had (the paperback one with the green cover) had a good chunk of the book missing. So I returned that one and got another copy – only to later find out that it had the exact same miserable pages missing. So now I’m going to get a completely different version before I can complain even more about this book.

Edit: Hm, okay. So apparently there’s going to be Lightning Thief the movie. I’ve been getting a lot of hits from those keywords. I already got a new copy, by the way. I just haven’t had the time to finish it yet.

Edit#2: OMG, OMG, I finally finished this book on August 23, 2007!!1! Maybe if I didn’t pause midway I would’ve appreciated the story as much as I did when I first read it. It just becomes stupider and stupider towards the end, I don’t know. I maintain that a modern writer shouldn’t play around with archaic characters. I hope the movie will be able to pull it off. Thanks everyone who has googled the movie, come across this page, and enlightened me about its existence in the process.

Book 11: Are You Rapture Ready? by Todd Strandberg and Terry James (2004)

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I actually read the first two books in the Left Behind series (by Tim LaHaye, who wrote the foreword for this book) and liked them. At the time I hadn’t really been thinking about Christianity for the longest time and temporarily forgot that The End Is Near, so I found the whole thing intriguing. I had absolutely no idea what the Rapture is all about, though, and I swore to learn more about it “one of these days.”

Two years later, I finally picked up this book. I read bits here and there (it’s really hard to read this book without skipping to the more interesting sections) and remembered some of the scattered teachings of the non-Catholic Christian school I went to as a preteen.

I remember my violin teacher telling me the European countries uniting was a sign of something (which I now know the second awakening of the Roman Empire – or something). He also said one day we all would be forced to use microchips to function in this society, and if we refuse (because the body is the temple of God and we shouldn’t insert anything unnatural into it), we’d be brutally killed. I remember that really scared me and everyone in the orchestra – being twelve-year-olds and all. And Bill Gates was the Antichrist because “www” can be rewritten as “vi vi vi,” which translates into “666.”

That’s all this book does – reminding me of the good old days. I expected to learn about the Rapture a whole lot more from this book, but I didn’t. I just find it interesting that the authors seriously considers Barney the dinosaur as the Antichrist. I mean, my God. Most of us say it only as a joke. Seriously.

Book 10: Down the Rabbit Hole by Peter Abrahams (2005)

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I may not know anything about mystery, but I know terrible writing when I see one. Ingrid is one of the most one-dimensional characters I’ve ever encountered. She’s thirteen (or eleven – I may be confusing her with another character of a book I recently read), but she doesn’t sound like one at all. I find it really hard to relate to her the way I could easily relate to other female protagonists in a juvenile novel. I’m not even sure if this book qualified to be a juvenile novel (my library marks it as one). You can definitely tell that the narrative is written by an adult male who has no idea how it’s like to be a teenage girl. This book should probably be a book for adults about children, or something. I may appreciate it when I’m older, but not now.