Speed Reading and Speed Watching
Over time I have got into the state where there are several books/movies that I would like to see but don't have the patience to 'sit through' completely. Either because the book/movie is stupid/boring or parts of it cover stuff that I am not interested in,like 'fighting scenes', or because since I have read or watched so much already, the current movie or book does not feel original or fresh. Recently I read two books "The Zahir" and "Veronika Decides to Die" by Paulo Coelho, in this mode. I'm not a big fan of Paulo Coelho. It does not strike a deep chord with me.
Nevertheless, its interesting enough and there are enough rave reviews about his books that I feel like checking the books out. So I read through these books very quickly. Its quite easy to speedread these books because there's lots of stuff not directly relevant to the main plot so you can skip through all of that and still follow (of course the danger with speed reading is that you might miss the essence for going so fast).
Priya recently got from a friend, a interesting pirated DVD. It proclaimed itself as a 3-in-1 and contained Predator, Predator-2 and Mission Impossible-3 all on the same DVD. Quite a nice idea :-) and one which would give the genuine copyright owners some significant heartache. I speed watched Predator and Mission Impossible-3 with very satisfactory results.
Predator is one of those brain-dead movies whose plot can be summarized in 1 or 2 lines. This makes it very easy to speed watch as there are no subtleties to miss whatsoever. The only mildly interesting part of the movie was the way the Predator creature was 'designed' ie. stuff like semi-invisibility etc. The other thing that came to mind was how come Schwarznegger with his thick accent managed to make it big in Hollywood movies and politics. MI-3 was somewhat more interesting, but still highly speed-worthy. Not much to report there.
And last night I got Ocean's Eleven and started watching it. However due to some technical glitch that happens sometimes with VCDs on my player, the entire first disc wouldn't play. So I just watched the second half of the movie without the first half (and without speedviewing). The results again I am happy to say were excellent. I got most of the story with a few hanging threads which if anything served to improve the experience as one could chew over these after watching.
I think I'm onto something here.
Nevertheless, its interesting enough and there are enough rave reviews about his books that I feel like checking the books out. So I read through these books very quickly. Its quite easy to speedread these books because there's lots of stuff not directly relevant to the main plot so you can skip through all of that and still follow (of course the danger with speed reading is that you might miss the essence for going so fast).
Priya recently got from a friend, a interesting pirated DVD. It proclaimed itself as a 3-in-1 and contained Predator, Predator-2 and Mission Impossible-3 all on the same DVD. Quite a nice idea :-) and one which would give the genuine copyright owners some significant heartache. I speed watched Predator and Mission Impossible-3 with very satisfactory results.
Predator is one of those brain-dead movies whose plot can be summarized in 1 or 2 lines. This makes it very easy to speed watch as there are no subtleties to miss whatsoever. The only mildly interesting part of the movie was the way the Predator creature was 'designed' ie. stuff like semi-invisibility etc. The other thing that came to mind was how come Schwarznegger with his thick accent managed to make it big in Hollywood movies and politics. MI-3 was somewhat more interesting, but still highly speed-worthy. Not much to report there.
And last night I got Ocean's Eleven and started watching it. However due to some technical glitch that happens sometimes with VCDs on my player, the entire first disc wouldn't play. So I just watched the second half of the movie without the first half (and without speedviewing). The results again I am happy to say were excellent. I got most of the story with a few hanging threads which if anything served to improve the experience as one could chew over these after watching.
I think I'm onto something here.
posted by VK at 11:49 PM
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