Acheron

Acheron by Sherrilyn Kenyon is the nth book in her Dark Hunter series. Ash has always been the leader of the Dark Hunters, who are vampire-like, but kill other vampires who are evil because they’re Apollo’s offspring instead of Artemis’s. Or something. It’s always been kind of vague and ridiculous to me and I ignored that part to concentrate on the individual Dark Hunter’s past/background.

This series, despite the vampire angle, is mostly romance-based. The point of the stories is to match the Dark Hunter up with his One True Mate who then has to kill him to redeem his soul. In later books, we see that the Dark Hunters’ souls are not freely given by Artemis, Asheron pays for them with his body and flesh and blood.

Acheron’s story is a tome. The hardcover version outweighs the most recent Erikson hardcover.  But it has thick paper and pleasantly sized type. 65% or so of the book is very ancient times, like 11,000 years ago. We see Ash as a child. We see him eternally living in the absolute worst torturous environment possible, with hope lasting just long enough to make the fall past rock-bottom even harsher. A lot of it was nauseating to read. If this was fanfiction, it would have carried a plastering of warning labels rivalling Indy cars. I loathe that published fiction has zero respect for readers and does not even bother to mention this level of violence and graphic torture. Normally I would not read anything with this much blood and gore and unfounded hatred because it makes me less of a person to immerse myself in other people’s pain like a sadistic voyeur.

What absolutely ruined the book for me was the modern story.

We see Ash going to an archaeology lecture and heckling the speaker. We see the speaker asking a colleague for help, the colleague is a Dark Hunter from a previous book (of course beholden to Ash) who says he can’t help her, but knows someone who can. The woman speaker throws a hammer at Ash and stomps off. (He deserved it, admittedly, but only if you hadn’t just read the previous half of the book.)

Ash decides she’s the woman for him and instantly falls in love with her, so despite ELEVEN THOUSAND YEARS OF EXPERIENCE, he trusts her and opens his heart to her. She falls for him because he’s freaking gorgeous (and this is actually described much better than the Kitty Does DC author’s “Brazilian”) and he can teach her to speak Atlantean (the language of Atlantis.)

It’s bizarre and completely unrealistic. There’s no reason these people should fall in love. And if there is, then Ash should have been able to fall in love before, because this woman is nothing special. Ash is thrilled that she seems to accept him, but lots of women accept men with shadowed pasts and don’t hold it against them. Ash is thrilled that she seems to have honor and loyalty and he’s never see that in another woman. I don’t know where he’s been looking, but I know a LOT of smart women who don’t lie and don’t cheat and who generously aid their friends even when it’s hard. The book is set in New Orleans, which is part of the South, where they claim to have Southern Hospitality and women are all kind and Christian, but most of them in my experience are vicious snakes in the grass out for any and all advantages they don’t deserve, as long as they can pull a kind face on it and say “Bless your heart!” afterward. So maybe Ash really does think all women around him are worthless whores, but I did not see ANYTHING special about this woman. There was no real rationale given either.

I had to read hundreds of pages of filth and torture scenes where a young boy is chained up and raped repeatedly and starved and beaten and raped and castrated and thrown out of his family home just for having been abused— and I get, Ash meets his perfect woman who is the only woman he’s ever met who doesn’t think badly of him for having been tortured. ? What? Really? That’s it?

No quibble with the very thin love story, not really. All the Dark Hunter books have been like that, where the big strong man just knows when he’s met the right woman.  Then they go through some conflict and plot and drama and in the end there’s a happy ending. I was really expecting that. This was absolutely not a happy book even though there is lip service to that. We spent pages and pages watching Acheron be raped and bled almost to death and gutted and having his eyes gouged out… but the only sex scene in the modern half of the book was less than 2 pages, most of which described the woman as wearing sexy lingerie instead of a pleasant instance between them.

I am angry that there was 10 times as much effort to convey the pain and fear and gut-wrenching aspects of Ash’s early life and no effort what-so-ever to convey why he would fall in love with this particular woman. She didn’t seem special. That would have been fine if it had stood alone. With all the gore though, I feel like I am OWED hundreds of pages of “this is what it’s like to be in love with the right woman and be immortal.”

I would like the other 400 pages of happy ending. Or for someone to have warned me to start 2/3 of the way in the book. Even just typing this out, my stomach is trying to escape through the back of my neck and my skin is crawling fit to move to Canada without me.

There is no question that this was supposed to be a “romance” story, that’s who the whole series has been marketed toward. But at the same time, there is no question where this book belongs. It was full-on horror in my opinion.

-1089123 in meeting my expectations.

Heartily non-recommended due to causing of repeated vomiting.

If you’re one of those sadistic people who likes scary stories and violence and characters hurting beyond the point of human frailty, well, this book is definitely for you. It was well researched and catchy enough that I read it all. But it still gives me nightmares.

0/10 because it made me want to throw up just thinking about it to write about it here. ANGRY ANGRY ANGRY at the author for the zero warning.

Dragon Tiger Gate

It was filed under superhero movies. I claim that the renting of Dragon Tiger Gate was completely not my fault. I love superhero movies. My DH loves kung fu movies. Clearly this would be an amazing together-activity, right?  Not so much. We did watch it together and we did bond over it. But that moment of shared experience was thinking “What were they thinking?”

The movie jumps around a lot in the timeline. It’s based on Manga, so you just know there are whole issues that are flashback. But there is no cohesion to the flashbacks, so they go from current to recent-past to long past to possible future to current in some random order at intermittent times.

The plot is that two brothers are separated in early childhood. There was a conflict between the spoken English and the subtitle English, but it seems to have been that Dragon and Tiger are half-brothers and their father Two Wrong FuHu  (or something like that) cheated on Dragon’s mother, so they were thrown out of their home and replaced by the new and improved family while Dragon’s mother went to live in the ghetto slums. Tiger tries to keep his brotherly bond, but Dragon is having nothing of it. Then Dragon’s mother dies and Dragon is adopted by a complete stranger instead of returning to his father.

But the premise of the plot is that Dragon owes fealty to his father and must return to “The Gate”. Dragon feels he cannot because he has dishonored his kung fu.

But even now after watching the whole thing, I have no clue who the bad guys were. At first it seemed like this gang. Then it was a traitor within the gang who was Dragon’s bit of fluff. Then it was this escapee from the Power Rangers.

Oh, and a huge part of the plot is that no one seems to believe Dragon and Tiger are related because they don’t look alike. Maybe if I were Chinese I would be able to tell, but to me it looked like that ancient Parent Trap movie with Halley Mills and Halley Mills.

All the fight scenes are completely ludicrous. They look a bit like the car-fight scenes in Speed Racer where jump-jacks can shoot the car straight up and into a barrel roll. By the time we get to that part though, we’re on our fourth evil mastermind and this one looks like a cartoon reject, so I just assumed this was supposed to be hilarious and a parody. (I wonder if I might have liked Coughing Tiger, Hidden Moron if someone had told me it was all tongue-in-cheek?)

The story is all over the place with technology. Cell phones, but no one has a powered vehicle.

Some parts of the story were interesting. Love interest. Foreign Family Values. Etc. But it really was written by the three faces of Eve or something. Just completely incoherent.

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.

Rocket Science

Rocket Science
a movie
IMDb | Netflix | Amazon
Overall Rating: 4/10
Meets Expectations: -2
Apparent Rating: 2/10

This was supposed to be “outcast boy makes good in intellectual competition”. It was “loser boy, from loser parents who shouldn’t have bred, screws up his life more with help from an evil bitch-girl, intellect be damned”.

The acting is terrible. The situation is badly written, so the “trick” of switching who the good guy is seems like an obvious technique that was telegraphed from the beginning. The supporting roles are horrible horrible characters, so bad that they must be caricatures or someone should have called Child Welfare.

There is an element of what debate is supposed to be about, but when the story starts with the end of the previous year’s debate, we see a student fail. Then we hear he dropped out of high school and now works at a dry cleaners because of it. That’s almost a mockery of “people taking things seriously”. So it manages to look like debate is an activity for snooty people and everyone else should just stay home. Maybe it really is like that and it’s not about ability. Certainly joining a high school sports team requires more than athletic ability.

I didn’t like how intellect was not honored in this story. It really might have been a movie about loser boy getting conned into joining the track team instead since it was a movie about how outcasts are kept out.

We’re told to feel sorry for the main character, because he stutters and it keeps him from doing anything fun in life. We see him struggling to make progress when the school’s idea of “help” is a guy who studied pallative treatments for ADD and has no idea what to do in terms of speech therapy. But I can find 10 ideas on how to deal with stuttering, just online. Most of them are free— free advice and the advice doesn’t cost anything to implement. So it’s a case where he doesn’t even try to do anything to help himself.

There was a lot to really loathe in this movie and the resolution was not particularly pleasant.

It’s not uplifting, it’s not well told, it’s not about real people trying their best, it’s a movie showing that horrible people keep doing horrible things and they seem to like it that way.

Garden State

Garden State
Netflix | Amazon
Overall Rating: 4/10
Meets Expectations: -1
Apparent Rating: 3/10

The summary for Garden State says it is a “whimsical comedy”. What? Nothing in this was funny. Oh, sure, people tell you that a movie about someone going home for their mother’s funeral and seeing what their old friends have gotten up to is bound to be hilarious. But the mother killed herself after being stuck in a wheelchair for 20 years because the son broke her neck when he was 9. The old friends are grave diggers, but only for Jewish funerals. Everyone uses hardcore drugs at the post funeral party. The main character has been medicated by his doctor-father for decades in a way that is tantamount to child abuse.

While “back home” the main character meets a woman at the neurologist’s office. She’s a chronic liar and wears a The Thing helmet and kills her pets.

The whole thing is like this 90 minute stoner meltdown and I really have absolutely no idea why anyone thought this was a good story. Perhaps if one is desperately aching for more fiction from Stalinist Russia and the Gulag era, then this might be worth watching. But in my opinion, all these characters are so crushed, hopeless, and miserable that death would be a kindness.

Total downer of a movie. Zero comedic value. If you have to watch it, put the subtitles on and fast-forward so less time is wasted. This was bad.

Reign Over Me

Reign Over Me
Netflix | Amazon
Overall Rating: 6/10 
Meets Expectations: -1
Apparent Rating: 5/10

There is a gap between what this movie could have been, what it should have been, and what we ended up with. The story could have been a very powerful exploration of friendship, tragedy, mental illness, pain, family, dealing with loss. Instead what the movie was is an almost tongue-in-cheek approach to agony.

Sometimes, in the midst of tragedy, the perspective or language or even just a nugget of what’s written into the script will be intellectually amusing. Shakespeare was a master of this. The people responsible for Reign Over Me are not.

It was very hard for me to believe Don Cheadle and Adam Sandler were dentists. There was no hope of me thinking Liv Tyler was a psychologist. I won’t say that these actors were playing themselves or that they did not give really acting a good try, but it wasn’t enough. It was clearly Adam Sandler in the role of the crazy dude. It was clearly Liv Tyler playing Arwen playing a therapist. I don’t know that I’ve seen anything else with Don Cheadle, but he doesn’t look like a dentist in this movie.

The premise of the movie is that a NYC man loses his wife and three daughters during the plane crashes on that fateful day in 2001. The movie is about how his college roommate sees him at random on the street a few years later and tries to pull him out of the morass he’s in without being pulled under himself.

This could really have been a powerful movie if it had been played straight up as a drama that happened to have humorous moments. It never pulled that off.

I am unfamiliar with the song used for the title of the movie, so I cannot say whether it stayed true to the theme, but if external knowledge is required for a movie to work for the audience, then I think it needs to be part of the common culture.

This movie was about a heart-rending tragedy and it made fun of that throughout, until the very end when we’re supposed to believe that the main character does all these things to drive out the constant reminders of his old life. It wasn’t a big enough problem to justify the vehicle they used and I was offended. Aside from that, it was vaguely okay as a movie.