The Good Life

Good Neighbors - The Complete Series 1-3
$49.98
My partner and I have loved this show for years and it is great to be able to sit and watch it from beginning to end. My only issue with this is the packaging...it seems that every British comedy set we order comes in flimsy packaging...brittle plastic casing. But that doesn't stop us from laughing at the show:-)

Good Life [Explicit]
$0.99
song reminds me of "through the wire" for some reason. a nice feel-good track.

The Good Life
$14.98
I am very upset about the voice-over narration at the beginning and end of this film. It's otherwise nearly perfect--a movie for movie lovers--it has everything. If there's a class of movies that includes films such as Cinema Paradiso, this one should be included. And that's what upsets me so much about the voice over. Whoever thought it was a good idea should be sentenced to watch nothing but CSPAN for a month. And not the really entertaining CSPAN1, but one of its subsidiaries.

I just can't believe that a film so attuned to film (a movie theater plays a large role in this film, for example) doesn't seem to take its own advice. I don't want you watching the movie with me and getting all chatty. Stay in the film.

Ruining this film would take quite some doing, though, and luckily that's only thing it attempts and fails at.

The Good Life
$14.95
Since his debut with "Bright Lights, Big City", Jay McInerney chronics the Me-generation of the 1980's and 1990's. His books follow the ageing (and what comes with it) of these people. As time passes, they lose their dreams, change their goals, make and lose money and so on. McInerney's "The Good Life" is still about these people but with the 9/11backdrop.

But the tragedy is only something to bring change to the characters' lives. McInerney exploits how New Yorkers (mostly the rich and shallow) changed. While he has an interesting subject, it is poorly executed. The characters like empathy - it is not that readers must love all characters for a novel work, but we do need to care about them somehow, and people here are so silly and self-centered (despite the charity) that we hardly care about them.

Sometimes "The Good Life" reads as a bad TV soap opera, with characters and plot poorly developed. McInerney's writing used to be good - at least relevant, and his story used to have something to say about the world we live in and the people that inhabit it.