Wrist Cutters: A Love Story

Wristcutters: A Love Story
a comedic movie
IMDb | Netflix | Amazon
Overall Rating: 6/10
Meets Expectations: +2 (because my expectations were artificially lowered)
Apparent Rating: 6/10

Sometimes a movie I was not sure I wanted to see works its way up in the queue. This was one of those, because really, who wants to watch a movie about suicidal teens? But it was kind of cute, kind of funny, and kind of epic (on a small scale). I liked the resolution to the story. I even liked the cinematography, despite the atmospheric washout. The subtitles did not suck hugely. Pretty much there wasn’t anything wrong with this movie.

It was well done, it was what it promises to be (a love story about suicidal teenagers).

And I still cannot believe I watched it.

Given a choice, I prefer this a lot more than I did Juno, but they’re kind of the same premise where someone young and powerless screws up hugely and attempts to deal with it. Wristcutters is better than Juno in a few ways, there aren’t logistical faults like wondering how someone without a job can afford a case of tictacs. There are some bizarre logistical faults in this, but they’re intentional, plot-relevant, and funny— for example, the car they take their road trip through the world of the “offed” has a bermuda triangle kind of thing under the passenger seat, so things are lost forever if the passenger drops them. The main character in this has a job, he works at Kamikaze Pizza. I thought that was hilarious.

The story in Wristcutters was tight. The writing was solid. That’s why I found some parts of it funny. If something is slapped together, I am never sure if it was supposed to be funny.

If I were younger, I think I might have enjoyed this more than I did.

Speed Racer

Speed Racer
a fantasy-action movie
IMDb | Netflix | Amazon
Overall Rating: 6/10
Meets Expectations: +1/-1
Apparent Rating: 6/10

Overall, this movie was good. Considering the dearth of non-fluffy source material and the quality of the underpinnings, the movie was excellent.

There are a lot of things in this movie that were impressive and very few failures if you have accepted the general premise. The general premise is ludicrous, of course, and the beginning of the movie does nothing to submerge a skeptical adult’s psyche in the fantasy world.

That lack of solid beginning would be my main complaint. It took me probably 25-30 minutes to overcome the first scene. The movie is about fanasty car racing, the kind of racing where cars can jump into the air and do loop-the-loops and jumps and dives on tracks that rival modern-day roller coasters. So why did they start with a lumpy looking kid filling out a multiple choice test form? It did nothing for setting the stage and convinced me that the kid was some sort of defective jerk whose sole purpose on the Earth is to keep other children from learning and succeeding in life. I was shocked that was the same character from the cartoon, where Speed is presented as some sort of brilliant prodigy and an upstanding man.

This school stuff continued a lot longer than it should have too, because we had to know that Trixie (who flew a helicopter in the cartoons and acted as Speed’s spotter for rally races) had been with Speed from almost the beginning. Mostly it seemed like an egregious pandering, “If there are kids in the movie, kids will love it!”

Then the movie starts and the whole thing is a ride as wild as the track.

The main actor, Emile Hirsch also starred in Into the Wild and he definitely has a real career ahead of him. I’m not sure I would have noticed his performance as a performance if I hadn’t seen Into the Wild before Speed Racer, but he brought real acting chops to the part. A lot of the movie was CGI, so they must have shot it in a soundstage against a green-screen, but even knowing that intellectually, I thought it looked as real as it could have. Speed really looks like he’s driving and Hirsch brings it home.

John Goodman does an excellent job as Pops Racer, though too many points he went over-the-top to the cartoony style of the original. In a very strange way, Pops Racer looked like Fred Flintstone, with that sense of “I’m an actor playing a ridiculous role and you shouldn’t take me seriously.” If it had been played straight, there should have been more focus on Pops, with the constant tongue-in-cheek attitude, I’m glad they minimized it. Spritle and Chim Chim were ridiculous sops to the original cartoon and really could have been omitted in my opinion. The girl playing adult-Trixie was not good (her counterpart during the childhood/schoolyard scenes was better.) Whoever she is, she’s a lousy actress. Her part had real solid meat in it and she couldn’t sell it. It’s the inverse of Natalie Portman in Star Wars where Portman was a decent actress and had nothing to demonstrate that with. Trixie was a real role played by someone who is good at standing around looking pretty but nothing more. Susan Sarandon was good at the acting but she didn’t jive with the rest of the look— she looked ancient. The main villain, Royston was good but way too obvious. It looked like he’d been told to camp it up.

The other racers managed to make themselves caricatures. Rex and Racer X did not get much screen time and were played by different actors. No opinion. Taejo was not as bad, there was a lot more to his part and he managed it, but he was still a cartoon.

The car modellers and costumers and CGI people were brilliant in this. I wish the movie had been edited so there were whole scenes of racing without flashbacks or cutaways and I’m not one for watching competitions.

Someone saved this movie from being campy, someone said, “Let’s play this straight and let the audience find the humor themselves.” And that made it a really fine piece of entertainment whenever that shone through. I wish it had been done that way throughout with intent. Whenever there was campy humor and “We know you’re not taking us seriously!” it was disasterous.

It could have been better if they’d been making the movie for real throughout. They had the actors and the script and the CGI and the models and the special effects. But a lot of people brought that “This is humor, I don’t have to be professional.” attitude to the movie. It is, at its heart, a fantasy. For all the action, for all the mechanics, the story is one about a magician who goes on an epic quest to save his family. And you cannot have a successful fantasy without convincing the audience to suspend disbelief. But humor requires bringing external knowledge to the experience and is contrary to suspending disbelief. Humor pulls people out of the immersive experience. And Speed Racer, despite succeeding on many levels, failed at providing an immersion for me.

It could have been an 8 or even 9 out of 10 for me, with the story they had and the material/resources. I liked it, 6/10 or so, but I resent that quarter/third of a movie experience I didn’t get. Obviously most people don’t see turning in merely good work as a failure. I see this movie as taking a great idea and wasting half of it on this product. If they had taken the great idea and really rolled with it, this could have been a phenomenal experience. +1 for some great acting, -1 for wasting an idea.

National Treasure: Book of Secrets

National Treasure: Book of Secrets
a movie
IMDb | Netflix
Overall Rating: 6/10
Meets Expectations: -2
Apparent Rating: 4/10

If you go into National Treasure or the sequel National Treasure: Book of Secrets with the understanding that it is an action movie and the plot was never intended to make sense, you are likely to be averagely pleased with the experience. You’d never go into a toilet-level comedy expecting great dramatic acting or intelligent reactions from the characters— the idea is that the people in those movies are as butt-stupid as people can be while still standing upright. The National Treasure movies purport to be about really smart people who have treasure hunting adventures, but for the most part, they make bizarre leaps of logic and there is zero rationale for their behavior. The characters are smart because the writers said they were smart, not because we can see it.

I watched the sequel telling myself that it was going to be dumbed down for the average pre-teen to enjoy. There couldn’t be any real science in it. There couldn’t be any real philosophy. There couldn’t be real relationships. So there would be action and violence and mediocre efforts from actors who know that any good work will spoil the mood.

Even with that understanding, this was worse than I expected. The plot is ludicrous. It didn’t make sense and it makes smart people look like they have no loyalty or sense of fair play. The acting is actually worse than in the original. The conspiracy theory crud this is centered around is much weaker than the first movie. But the worst part is how the plot moves forward— there is a scene where an inscription is translated from French by random policemen on the street in Paris. They go from “the determined twins” to “resolute twins”. Because that exact word was chosen, the main character makes this leap to the HMS Resolute, from which desks for the Queen of England and the President of the United States were made. But I cannot name a single person who would have chosen “resolute” as a synonym for determined. I’m pretty sure if I asked a dozen people on the street, 11 of them couldn’t tell you what “resolute” means. It’s not common enough that a policeman’s translation would ever have come up with it.

I was also really disturbed by the movie showing a break-in and theft at Buckingham Palace being something that they’re not at all bothered to be doing, but breaking into the Oval Office is horrifying. The room the desk was in in Buckingham Palace was also an oval, but no one drew any sort of connection between them. It’s like they didn’t think England was a real sovereign country where that kind of behavior wouldn’t cause an international incident if they’d been caught. It was completely shocking, but not in an entertaining way.

There was one part of the movie I found really interesting, it’s when the main character talks about why he admires Abraham Lincoln, he said that before Lincoln, people said, “The United States are….” and after Lincoln they said, “The United States is….” He credits Lincoln with making us a single nation in everyone’s eyes. I really think that was an interesting discussion topic. Personally I think Lincoln was kind of horrible— he suspended the rights of all Americans because we were “at war”. He undermined Congress and the Supreme Court because they didn’t agree with him. His insistence on sudden emancipation destroyed the economies of a dozen states and the war reparations severely undermined the infrastructure and economic investment for those states. On one hand, we have an on-going atrocity that no one involved has any interest in stopping. On the other hand, war wasn’t the right answer. And certainly stripping everyone else of their rights in order to fight the war was hugely immoral. But the way we forgot to treat the losing states as part of our country after they lost did not help. It took another hundred years before we started enforcing legislation saying people who looked like former slaves were actually fully human. So it’s not like the Civil War really improved anything. If we’d skipped the war and spent the next 100 years fixing the Southern economies and changing how things worked, it would have been more effective and cheaper. So in my mind Lincoln was a fool and stirred up a ruckus for no real reason except he needed to be remembered.

I think I disliked this movie somewhat because it glorifies a President whose ego was already the size of Mount Rushmore.

I did not particularly like this movie, though it was somewhat amusing in parts. It can’t be any worse than a Will Farrell movie.

27 Dresses

27 Dresses
a romantic comedy movie
IMDb | Netflix | Amazon
Overall Rating: 6/10
Meets Expectations: +1
Apparent Rating: 7/10

27 Dresses was one of the better romantic comedies I have seen in a while. (For overall romance, I preferred P.S. I Love You, but since it was about a widow, it lost something in the comedy arena.) What I liked best about the 27 Dresses is that it was not about the dresses or about the way this woman kept bending over backward to help everyone else. The movie was about how she kept going on the way things were until there was a breaking point.

The breaking point was very reasonable to me and her reactions, though excessive to anyone who hadn’t seen the whole list of woes lined up, were reasonable and non-vicious. But I really enjoyed how everyone around her looked at her reactions to events as if she were completely insane.

My favorite part is how one potential love interest was eliminated from the running. I have seen it several times in recent movies, and it is a popular mechanism— the trial kiss. I have no idea why I like that element as much as I do, but there you go.

Overall, this was exactly what I was expecting it to be, with a few bits and pieces that made it speak to me personally. I think it was an average-ish movie with a happy ending and I liked it disproportionately much. The movie is set in New York, but aside from people taking lots of cabs, it didn’t have to be. It could have been set anywhere. I believe, through my own prejudices, that if it had been set in Chicago or Des Moines or Denver or San Francisco or San Diego or Miami or Atlanta or Houston that it would have been a better movie with the same story. I probably would have marked it +2 without the New York.

Breakfast At Tiffany’s — Truman Capote

Breakfast At Tiffany’s
a book by Truman Capote
Wiki | Amazon
Overall Rating: 6/10
Meets Expectations: +2 and -2
Apparent Rating: 6/10

Many times in the course of my life, glaring omissions in my knowledge of the world appear, realizing recently that there was a book (novella) version of the famous movie Breakfast At Tiffany’s was one of those things. I have had the movie in my Netflix queue for ages, but just about anything sounds better and it doesn’t move up. Truman Capote arises on Jeopardy! fairly frequently. He’s supposed to be really famous for being a great writer too. My knowledge of Truman Capote was, “Isn’t he some dead writer dude?” So I was completely shocked that he’d written something I’d heard of.

Now, let us get into the book itself. I was very very interested by the beginning, where the narrator of the book sounds a lot like I imagine Capote himself would have sounded. It was that kind of book, where enough facts coincide and it looks like the author’s fantasy life spilled onto a public page. But the narrator starts out saying that it never occurred to him to tell the story of this everyday experience/life he had even though it’s clearly what he really knows. Modern advice-for-writers pounds that idea so heavily that creativity can have its edge blunted. Some other modern advice is to “show, not tell”, but this is very terse narration with bits of really dramatic scenes. Pretty much all the advice I have ever seen for authors is tossed out the window with Breakfast At Tiffany’s. And yet, the writing in this is stunning. I found myself wanting to go back and read portions again.

The quality of writing and the degree of control in this book and by this author is enormous. The flashbacks aren’t tightly reined, but I followed along without error. The characters live in my imagination despite my not knowing anyone like any of those people. The world described is something I can see in my mind’s eye. You see? It’s brilliant. Hands down, utterly brilliant.

And it’s all fucking wasted on the most loser story in the history of the planet.

Flighty useless woman lives in New York City, has a flighty useless life, gets lots of men panting after her, continues being flighty and useless, book ends.

In a recent post about Arabian Nights, I said, “To my mind, there should be a penalty for doing a mediocre job with a great idea, thus wasting the idea.” I wish we could have combined some of the really amazing story ideas out there with the writing efforts of Truman Capote.

I will be pulling the movie from my queue. I can’t imagine a way that the movie would be anything less than disappointing since the only thing I liked from the book was Capote’s work.

I read one of the following short stories and again found the writing very elegant (sparse alternating with glorious detail to keep the reader’s attention focused) but again the story was so horrible (not gory or sad necessarily, or even badly written, just why would you ever want to read that?) that I felt physically ill.

Truman Capote was really extraordinarily talented and wasted it writing depressing stories wrapped in frivolity about nothing. If he could have taken that ability to capture the essence of a scene and used it to document history, I think generations of schoolchildren would stop thinking history was for the dead. If Capote could have actually used his imagination and gone for the kinds of world-building we see in Tolkien, Peter Jackson would have been too busy to do Lord of the Rings.

So the writing in Breakfast At Tiffany’s is about as close to godlike as I have seen, but the story was flat-out nauseatingly bad.

Agnes And The Hitman — Crusie and Mayer (fiction)

Agnes And The Hitman
a romantic fiction book by Jennifer Crusie and Bob Mayer
Authors’ site | Amazon
Overall Rating: 6/10
Meets Expectations: +2
Apparent Rating: 8/10

Agnes And the Hitman took a long time to review since I thoroughly enjoyed it. Immediately upon finishing it, I mentioned it as a “you should buy this” book to a specific friend. (This is NOT a general endorsement, the friend has really enjoyed similar books previously.) Yet, I don’t see a lot of objective difference between this book and the previous Crusie+Mayer collaboration that I panned (before this blog.)

In the previous book, Don’t Look Down, (they’re not a series at all) we had a film director who was dealing with a mystery and violence on the job while trying to help her sister and niece. I didn’t like it. In Agnes, we have a woman who cooks a lot and has bought her dream home from childhood. In both books the hero is a guy who knows his way around violence, but is a good guy, rock solid, hero-with-issues kind of man. In both books, the hero falls for the heroine for no Earthly reason (Agnes was a little better in that regard; there was some hand waving toward that explanation, though it didn’t jive for me.)

One of the few things that bothered me about Agnes was that she didn’t appear to have much of a career. She writes a newspaper column. I don’t know much about syndication, but it doesn’t seem likely columns pay more than comic strips and Scott Adams who draws Dilbert worked his day job for years after getting major syndication. So it would not likely pay well enough to sustain a mortgage of $3000/month, even split with someone else (which had been the plan). Agnes also writes cookbooks. Even bestselling cookbooks are still non-fiction and sales of 10,000 copies is a large run. There just doesn’t seem to be a way for Agnes to afford even half of what she was expecting to pay on the house plus her handyman plus the repairs for the upcoming wedding that was the central focus of the story.

Agnes herself was quite interesting. She has real anger issues. Not like she shouts at people, like she kills a man in the first chapter and is worried that she’ll be in bigger trouble because she’s walloped men with frying pans before and been arrested for it. It makes Agnes’s interest in the hero much more explanatory, he’s actually strong enough to calm her down and deal with it. All the other men in Agnes’s life quail in the face of her anger.

I did not like the setting for the book. It’s in that part of the South where women are universally evil bitches sent by the devil to plague man- and womankind. If someone lies to you and cheats you and is a general scumwad, you tell everyone you know so no one ever talks to them again. You post about it on your blog. You call your lawyer. You don’t smile pretty and be a doormat. Being nice to people who are devoutly evil is wrong, but Southern women make a career out of it. It disgusts me. It appalls me.

I really liked the hero in this book. I liked how he stepped in and helped her in practical ways. I liked how Agnes feeds people and they become her family. I liked how family-like it really was. I even liked the kid they adopted. The flamingos were hilarious. There was a lot of humor in the book without the humor interfering with the story. None of us would like to star in a comedy, but all of us have humorous things which happen around us. This was that kind of funny.

I enjoyed the story, but the plot was ridiculously complicated for the book and the level of writing. The mystery plot and hidden characters and bizarre soap opera plot twists were authorial masturbation at its finest. One of the things I complained about in the previous collaboration between these authors is that they don’t appear to match up in terms of audience level. Romance readers tend to be lowest-common denominator— to unfairly stereotype: (but the genre sells with the kind of books that indicate it) romance readers want small words and easy answers to easily resolved (or imaginary) conflict. Suspense (+mystery or +adventure) books have more of the underlying motivations and the details. I have read books where the mystery was good and the “hook-up” was good, but those are not very common. Usually a book goes to one side or the other. This book had the plot of a suspense novel and the writing and attention to detail of a romance. So there is definitely a disconnect and the end of the book was extremely confusing and had several “Wait. What?” moments.

I think the writing could have been better. I liked the story and the characters better than I feel like the book deserved, but it was a book I really enjoyed reading. I might read it again before it goes back to the library. But if I had paid $17 for it, I would be mad.

From Dead To Worse — Charlaine Harris (paranormal fantasy)

From Dead To Worse
a paranormal fantasy book by Charlaine Harris
Author’s site | Amazon
Overall Rating: 6/10
Meets Expectations: +1
Apparent Rating: 7/10

This is the eighth book in the Southern Vampire series. They have been variable. Generally if the book is set anywhere aside from Bon Temps, Louisiana, it was mediocre. Although I find the mechanics of vampire travel very interesting, Sookie herself is so discombobulated whenever she’s out of the boonies that all of her internal monologues are about crap I couldn’t care less about. When Sookie is at home, most of what happens that I find eye-blinkingly Southern is glossed over and disregarded as normal. It makes the books less alien that way because we’re all pretending fictional rural Louisiana shares a common culture with anywhere else in America.

Sookie started out her adventures in paranormal life (her interactions with vampires and were creatures and other weirdnesses) largely due to her own weirdness of being a telepath in a small town. She was more than a little insane from not being able to block that out, but in the first book, she meets a vampire and his mind is silent. There’s a lot of lust, rather graphic, and we see a gory mystery solved. It was satisfying but a bit formulaic until I realized that the first vampire was a very low-level peon vampire. That made it different from Laurell K. Hamilton’s books where her central character only meets the kings and gods of the paranormal enclaves.

I really enjoyed the first book in the series. I enjoyed some of the stories in the other books too. But this was the first book that came close to approaching my enjoyment from the first book. Most of the reason for this is that Sookie didn’t spend a lot of time interacting with neighbors and humans or working. Sookie didn’t spend a lot of time with the were creatures— who really are less vivid than Ms. Harris’s vampires. Sookie’s boyfriend issues took a back seat, which is a relief because she hasn’t really seemed attached to any of them since that first vampire who dumped her viciously and violently for his old girlfriend. It’s hard to think of a book as a romantic adventure when it seems like meaningless sex.

This eighth book brought back a lot of favorite characters and used residual Katrina mess to kill off some really lame characters. If someone had gone through and done an audience screening, I don’t think they could have done a better job gleaning the wheat.

The whole Southern vibe this series has rubs me the wrong way a lot of the time. In this book, Sookie comes to a dead stop when a man says he wants to check her house over for intruders and she insists she’s fine, so he says he wants a Coke and her upbringing won’t let her not jump on that immediately. I would be all like “There’s the ‘fridge, yo.” Well, not really, because I’m an educated woman who doesn’t mock the uneducated urban culture. In a previous book Alcide shows up first thing in the morning and is offered coffee, he says he wants breakfast. When he’s offered eggs, he asks for sausage too. What I didn’t understand is why did Sookie date him then? A man who acts like that isn’t looking for a partner in life, he’s looking for a slave he can have sex with. But Sookie doesn’t think anything of it. Sookie goes to a high school football game in one book, she dresses up for this with hair ribbons that match the team colors…. first no one goes to high school ball games unless they know one of the players— if unchilded adults went to high school football games here someone would think they’re likely pedophiles. Second, how old is she that she wants matching hair ribbons? There’s a lot of just plain weird stuff that the author describes Sookie as doing or thinking or accepting as normal that is completely anathema to me.

I would really like to see stories written in this universe that aren’t set in hell and starring someone who acts as blonde as she looks. The vampire mythology, the magic system in use, the were creatures, the intra- and inter-relationships of the paranormal groups are all very interesting, but the whole thing really suffers from being set in a part of the country where they still burn crosses on people’s lawns.

What I like about the characters who are my favorites is that they’re from a city in Louisiana and they cynically market their own vampirism to tourists. They come across as normal kinds of people. I’d like to read books which just have those kinds of characters and leave the bumpkins alone.

If you are considering other books by this author, be warned that the Grave series contains graphic consenting incest in its third book. The author has some very Southern ideas about what family means and I brought that squick with me to her other series.

None of this explains why I liked it, and I did. I like vampire stories. I like stories where the heroine doesn’t start out at the top because the author is lazy. But mostly I like non-horror vampire stories.

Roman Holiday

Roman Holiday
Netflix | Amazon
Overall Rating: 6/10
Meets Expectations: +0
Apparent Rating: 6/10

There are frequently lowered expectations when seeing a movie or reading a book which is a classic that has been used as an archetype for others of the sub-genre, simply because exposure makes what was novel seem trite. I have seen a re-make of Roman Holiday, Chasing Liberty, without knowing whence it came. I remember thinking when watching Chasing Liberty that some of the things they did seemed unexpected, without conscious rationale— today I realize they were consciously emulating Roman Holiday and everyone was expected to have the reference.

From a coherency perspective, Roman Holiday is superior because it stands alone. From a story perspective, assuming one has seen Roman Holiday, Chasing Liberty is better because of the ending and because modern emotional reactions are much more approachable to me than someone from my great grandmother’s time. There was this big to-do about a woman wearing pyjamas and I have no understanding of what the problem is. The princess offers just the top half as an option. I suppose it might be uncouth for a woman to wear trousers in public, but in bed? There were a number of things like that where “common culture” meant they didn’t need to explain and I don’t have any clue why that’s a big deal. The princess seems honestly horrified when she wakes up in a strange man’s rooms but because she’s wearing pyjama pants. Doesn’t it seem like she’d be more upset to not be wearing anything on her lower half?

The ending… No one says Roman Holiday has such a downer ending. Gregory Peck was amazing in it, because he manages to typify the expected stoicism from men but is nearly in tears when the woman leaves him. That’s what makes stoicism so powerful, when we really believe it but are let inside the curtain anyway. It gives leading men an emotional depth because of expectations. I think male actors of modern times have a lot more room for demonstrable emotion, but the stoic thing works for me especially in old movies.

Roman Holiday is in black and white. They go through a lot of effort to tell the viewer that the movie is shot entirely in Rome. They want to indicate that the scenery is for real. But then they filmed it in black and white! Since it’s after The Wizard of Oz, we know color film technology existed. Thus it is sheer laziness and cheapness that they did not bother. I give them zero points for showing “the real Rome” since they didn’t bother to do it right and in color, like actual reality. I somehow doubt that a visitor to Italy would have found Rome to be colorless in 1955 as if color had been invented in California and just hadn’t spread all the way to Europe yet. Thus they did not show Rome and might as well have filmed it in Hollywood. I don’t mind that they didn’t do it in 3-D or smell-o-vision (even if it’s invented soon) because that technology was not readily available when Roman Holiday was made. Movies had been made in color for more than 15 years when this came out.

On the whole, I considered this movie spoiled by the ending. The acting was good. The writing was good. The story made sense. The camera work was good (unlike the hamster-on-crack kind of camera work modern movies use to make things seem frenetic.) I really liked how the movie actually seemed romantic. I liked the comedic parts (which did not have a laugh-track and did not need them.) But a totally unhappy ending made this movie depressing. I’m not surprised it won awards since only downer movies win major awards.

Oh and this is one of those movies with costumes by the famous bitch Edith Head who won a slew of Oscars by stealing other people’s work. That meant whenever I saw someone wearing a new outfit, I wanted to hiss and spit. Knowing she won the award for this movie made me really angry for the people who did the work for no recognition. I think the Academy should have stripped her of her Oscars or at least given retroactive acknowledgement to the actual winners.

I don’t know who told Audrey Hepburn to cut her hair, but I thought the shorter style was much less attractive on her.

I think I enjoyed Roman Holiday, I am sure I would have liked it more if I wasn’t bringing all the baggage along. If I had seen this when it was new and no one had done something like this before, it would have been phenomenal.

Herbie: Fully Loaded

Herbie: Fully Loaded
Netflix | Amazon
Overall Rating: 6/10
Meets Expectations: +0
Apparent Rating: 6/10

Shockingly, this movie did not suck. All I knew about Lindsay Lohan is that she has no modesty and the news likes to show her scantily clad and misbehaving. I recorded the movie on TV, I would never have rented it because “skanky ho” is not to my taste. But I was home sick, there were no Netflix movies needing watching, so I watched this. Lindsay Lohan looks like the pretty version of the girl next door. If they had put Amanda Bynes in this (if you don’t know who she is, she’s the current iconic image of that in almost every teen movie I’ve seen this year), I would not have been surprised. There were some big names in this too, actors I’ve seen in bigger movies. The pleasant shock did not translate into the movie being better than I expected of the movie. It was definitely better than I expected from Ms. Lohan though.

There weren’t any really major flaws beyond the obvious– and you really have to suspend disbelief on this or you’re not going to watch the movie– sentient car bit.

The plot is trite in every single aspect: Father wants to protect daughter and squashes her dreams because girls can’t be race car drivers. Girl went away to college and learned how to lie and backstab her friends. Spoiled guy who is the current record-holder who feels like he deserves everything because people who are on top don’t deserve it unless we’ve seen the movie about them making it from nothing. I understand the need to have the underdog coming from behind, so we can all see how they deserve to win and how making the current king-of-the-hill deserve losing lessens the internal conflict for the audience. But sometimes I really want the plot of a feel-good story to actually have conflict— what if the person on top of the world came from nothing and earned their place and is beloved by fans for more than just the image of humility? Not everyone who wins is a bully who loathes hangers-on—— that’s the whole point of having the girl next door win, right? She’s not going to be the bully who doesn’t deserve the honor like the current jerk. But why won’t the power go to her head and everything float her up to the top until she thinks she deserves it all and becomes the same jerk?

Some things could have been improved, like the scene where the current driver of the family race car, the brother, was getting checked out by the doctor and fakes a vision problem. If that had been signaled by a wink or gesture, that would have helped. Also, 85% of the way through the movie, the mechanic who loves the girl discovers that he has no more credit to buy parts—- you’d think he might have noticed before then eh? Or at least mentioned money before this.

This movie was sheer cotton-candy fluff, designed for times when you can shut off your brain and just watch a feel-good movie without thinking too much.

Kitty Takes a Holiday — Carrie Vaughn (fantasy)

Kitty Takes a Holiday
a fantasy book by Carrie Vaughn
Wiki | Publisher’s Site | Amazon
Overall Rating: 6/10
Meets Expectations: +1
Apparent Rating: 7/10

I loathed the second book in this series, Kitty Does DC Goes To Washington, with the author’s description of a gorgeous man as merely “Brazilian” as if all Brazilian men are the kinds who are featured on pin-up calendars of soccer players… as if “Brazilian” isn’t a type of pubic wax job. So I figured the guy was old, wrinkly, and midget-size…. I’m thinking Tattoo from Fantasy Island twenty-five years later and the author was thinking “dark-haired Fabio”. We were told that Kitty has self-respect, but she takes her Brazilian to bed right away because she can’t resist him since he’s a lycanthrope too— but he’s a were-jaguar and you wouldn’t think wolves and jaguars would mate in the wild, right? So why was her attraction uncontrollable? I really lost all respect for the author. I swore off any other books she might write. I didn’t even consider buying the third book.

The library had the book. It taunted me.

So I took it home and read it. Kitty only f**ks one guy in this book and it costs her a long-time friend. But mostly what made this so much better than the previous book is that it actually is all about her when she thinks it is. And even when the problems are about her, she’s thinking about someone besides herself. So when the author tells us that Kitty is a great person who cares about her friends and her fans, it’s somewhat believable, for once. When we’re told that Kitty has suffered, we’re actually shown some of her suffering, for once. We don’t see Kitty get viciously raped then get up and walk away but get told that she’s broken up about it.

Maybe I liked this book because it was largely about how vicious and horribly intolerant Christians are while claiming they’re nice people (they accidentally summoned a demon while trying to force a well-mannered lycanthrope from her home). That usually improves my opinion of a book.

Overall, it was a pleasant read. If the first two books had started like this one, I might not have such a horrible impression. I still doubt I will ever buy any more of Ms. Vaughn’s books since we don’t share a common vocabulary (“Brazilian!” “You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.”) And we don’t seem to share an understanding of what normal people consider normal behavior. So when Kitty behaves bizarrely or immorally, I’m expecting an explanation in the text from the author and it’s never there. I guess maybe the author is much younger than I am and thinks women act like they act on the television– like sluts and whores— so no explanation is needed because it’s not werewolf behavior, it’s ordinary.

I liked it surprisingly well. I think other people would consider it an average book for the genre.