Share the Darkness

When Batman v Superman came out in March, there were plenty of critics (and average people, I suppose too) who complained that it was too dark and gloomy, unlike Marvel movies.  Superhero movies should be light and fluffy!  From a pure profit motive that might have been a good idea for DC/WB.  I mean leading up to the film's release they were talking about how there could be an R-rated cut, which signaled pretty well that it wasn't family friendly.  That kind of limited how many kids parents would let go to see it.

About the same time, I got a two-star review on my pseudonym's book Transformed for Thanksgiving, which said:

Well written story. The characters I found to be very sad. The wife has 38 years to learn how selfish her husband is. Yet when changed she becomes as useless as he ever was. So nothing to enjoy reading . Most of us live with unhappiness, thus reading about it is no fun. 

[As a side note, the "reviewer" was apparently under the impression the main character got married the moment she was born.]

The story was one of those that originally I thought would be kind of funny.  At Thanksgiving a woman is tired of her husband just sitting around watching football and stuff.  She makes a wish on the wishbone and finds herself transported to an alternate universe or whatever where her husband is a shy hippie girl and she's the stronger, more dominant one.  It doesn't take long before her new power goes to her head.  In the course of one day she cheats on her husband and just about rapes him in bed.  So, yeah, it got a bit darker than I thought.  If you were looking for a lighthearted, heartwarming tale that wasn't really it.  But then why are you reading erotica in the first place?  If you want light and fluffy get one of those cozy cat mystery books.

Honestly I don't think just saying "this was sad" or "this was dark" is a valid criticism.  Shakespeare wrote comedies and tragedies because there's a time when you want Taming of the Shrew and there's a time when you want Romeo & Juliet.  It's like with music:  if I'm in a down mood I might listen to Everybody Hurts by REM or if I'm in a good mood I'll listen to Shiny Happy People, also by REM.  Even simpler, not many people can eat the same thing every single day.  You need variety or else it gets to be a drag.

So when you bitch that a story is dark or sad and that's your only criticism, you're denying something basic, which is that people need choices. So yeah all superhero movies don't have to be like The Avengers and all gender swap stories don't have to be light and fluffy either.

That being said, the criticism I hear the most among pretty much all my names is that so-and-so didn't like it not ending Happily Ever After.  Sometimes I just want to say, "What are you, six?"  If you're a grown up, you should be able to handle that not everything will end Happily Ever After all the time--just like real life!  And as the writer I don't really want to make every story end happy because then there's not much fun or surprise in it for me or the reader, which is especially true when you write as many stories as I have.

A to Z Challenge: Zathura

I'll admit I hadn't read the book or seen the movie of this one before this A to Z thing came along.  When I looked up Z movies that had been books, though, I remembered this movie had been on Netflix.  Fortunately it still was, so I could easily watch the movie for at least partial credit.

When this came out in 2005, it seemed pretty much like Jumanji in Space.  Not helping that is it's made by the same studio as Jumanji.  Though actually I haven't read or watched all of Jumanji either.  But this does seem like it has a very similar concept:  a boy finds an old game called Zathura and when he plays it with his brother, they find themselves in space, being attacked by robots, aliens, or whatever else is brought up when the game spits out a card.

Overall the movie is OK but a little on the long side.  Kristen Stewart of Twilight fame plays the big sister of the boys; the director and producers really sensed her acting range as most of the movie she's sleeping or frozen.  Another tidbit is it was directed by Jon Favreau, who went on to do the first two Iron Man movies.  So while it wasn't probably that successful a movie, it helped springboard a couple of careers.

I still haven't read the book, but maybe it answers just who the hell made the game and why.  Not that it's all that important; most Twilight Zone episodes work just fine without explaining too much of why things happen.

Though really, Disney probably should have paid attention to this movie's failure when they were green-lighting Tomorrowland, which similarly tries to invoke nostalgia for the bygone era of science-fiction from the 50s.  I don't think there are many people in the 21st Century actually  nostalgic for that, so maybe give up trying to make big-budget movies about it.

So there you go, there's the whole A to Z thing for the 2016.  Maybe you learned something.  Maybe not.  Monday we're back to...whatever.

A to Z Challenge: You Only Live Twice

This is a James Bond novel by Ian Fleming that was turned into a Sean Connery Bond movie in 1967.  I did read the book, along with all the other Fleming Bond ones.  I also watched the movie. The only similarities besides the title are the setting and at one point Bond gets painted up to disguise himself as a Japanese person.

In the book, Ernst Blofeld has taken refuge in a mansion and is growing a bunch of plants for some nefarious purpose.  Bond goes to a fishing village to learn more about the house, which is when he disguises himself as a Japanese person and hangs out with a local girl.  Of course later he's captured and has to save the day and so on and so forth.

In the movie, Blofeld works with a Japanese businessman to start WWIII by stealing space capsules of the US and USSR, making each side think the other is at fault.  Bond goes to Japan and sees lots of stereotypical Japanese stuff like sumo wrestling.  There's a great piece of misogyny where his host says, "In Japan, men are always first and women are second."  To which Bond says he'd like to retire there.  Eventually he goes to secret ninja school, gets dressed up to look Japanese (though I thought he looked more like Spock without the ears), and with some Japanese girl who replaced the Japanese girl who was killed by poison trickling down a rope while sleeping, they find Blofeld's lair in a volcano, where Blofeld has a pit of piranhas to feed victims to.

The movie is pretty silly, though I guess it's what people had come to expect from a James Bond movie.  I'd like to think the whole "turning Japanese" thing wouldn't work today, but then I think of Exodus: Gods & Kings, Gods of Egypt, and Johnny Depp in The Lone Ranger and I suppose things haven't changed all that much, which kind of sucks.

So really the movie and book are two completely different things.  The book, like all of Fleming's Bond novels (even Moonraker, which does not involve going into space) are pretty well grounded on Earth.  The gadgets and such are a lot less silly too.

Interestingly, there have been plenty of references to the movie.  The volcano lair has been parodied in Austin Powers, The Simpsons, and American Dad to name a few.  Actually Dr. Evil's whole look is a parody of Donald Pleasence's Blofeld.  Pleasence went on to play Dr. Loomis in six Halloween movies.  He only played the character once; the next time Blofeld appeared he was played by Telly Sevalas--and Bond was played by George Lazenby.  Blofeld had previously appeared in Thunderball and From Russia With Love though I don't think he was fully seen.  Interestingly in Diamonds are Forever, he was played by Charles Gray, who played a contact named Henderson in You Only Live Twice.  And later he was played by Max von Syndow in Never Say Never Again (an unofficial Bond movie) and of course last year by Christoph Waltz in Spectre.  So the character has changed faces about as many times as Bond himself.

There you go, lots of trivial trivia.

A to Z Challenge: X-Men Days of Future Past

I have to kind of fudge this entry because I can't find anything for X.  I checked Xanadu and a movie I liked, X (Night of Vengeance) but neither of those was based on a novel.  But Days of Future Past has sort of been published as a book, so that seems close enough.

The thing is, when the movie was coming out I bought the "book" from Amazon.  It was a ripoff because it's 184 pages but the actual Days of Future Past story is two comics that might be 50 pages.  So you have another 135 pages of filler.  Seriously, the other stuff didn't have much to do with it except taking place around the same period of time.  And they put those two issues in the middle of the book too so it's harder to just read those and put it down.

The movie is of course pretty different from those two comic books.  The biggest difference is Wolverine's involvement.  In the early 80s when the comics were written, Wolverine was not the god-like character he became by the first movie in 2000.  In the second issue he gets zapped by a Sentinel in the future and that's it for him.  Whereas by the time they were writing the movie version, Wolverine had all these powers and was most everyone's favorite character.  So while in the comics it's Kitty Pryde who travels in time, in the movie it has to be Wolverine.

The target of the assassination is different too.  In the comic book it's Senator Kelly, but he died in the first movie back in 2000 so I guess they thought that would be lame.  Instead they have to stop a delegation in Paris from being killed and then Nixon.  (Though if it was 1973 they would pretty much have been doing Nixon a favor by killing him.)  And since Jennifer Lawrence was playing Mystique, she gets a meatier role in the movie.

Anyway, as I said the comics were just two issues and that was it, though I guess the cover design of the one lingered on for a long time and has been parodied a bunch of times, even by a book Tony Laplume co-authored!  I'm not sure why they didn't use that for the movie poster, except that they were trying to minimize Kitty Pryde's involvement, especially in "the Rogue Cut" where I guess Rogue has to take her powers to finish the mission or whatever.

It should be obvious that the movie and comics are two completely different animals.  I can't really recommend buying the book unless you just get those two issues.  Otherwise it's a lot of padding.

A to Z Challenge: Wonder Boys

One of my favorite movies about writing and also a pretty good book.  Yes I've seen the movie (and own it) and also read the book--and own it too. 

Wonder Boys is about Grady, a writing professor at a Pittsburgh area college who is sleeping with a student and his dean, smokes weed, and is writing a novel that makes Infinite Jest seem like a pamphlet.  The title of the novel he's writing is the title of the book itself, but there's also a double-meaning as a long time ago Grady was a "wonder boy" (or boy wonder) with a really successful novel he has struggled to top.  He also has a talented novelist named James in his class; James is a future wonder boy Grady reluctantly tries to steer onto the right path.  To add some urgency to the setting, Grady's agent comes into town to try to get a look at the book Grady is writing.  Over a weekend Grady and James bond while getting attacked by a dog that James shoots, fleeing to Grady's in-laws for Passover, and facing their various demons.

They're both good but it's another where I'd say to watch the movie unless you really feel like spending the extra time on the book.  The movie strips out some of the bloat about the book, specifically the Passover seder that goes on much, much too long in the book.  The seder thing isn't really important to the overall story, so taking it out of the movie made sense.  Though this was a case of Hollywood whitewashing because in the book Grady's in-laws are Jewish and Asian.

I mentioned when I reviewed Ant-Man that everyone who stars in this movie has appeared in a superhero movie:  Michael Douglas in Ant-Man, Tobey Maguire in Spider-Man 1-3, Robert Downey Jr in all those Marvel movies, Frances McDormand in Darkman, and Katie Holmes in Batman Begins.  I don't know if there's anything significant about that or not.  But I do really like the movie.  The book is longer, and a little more depressing, but it's also worth a look.

A to Z Challenge: The Virgin Suicides

I read the book and watched the movie of this some time ago, back in the 2000s.  The book is from Michigan native Jeffrey Eugenides, who won the Pulitzer for his follow-up Middlesex, which to my knowledge doesn't have a movie yet.  The movie was from the late 1990s and is the debut feature of Sofia Coppola (daughter of Francis Ford) who was nominated for an Oscar for her follow-up Lost in Translation.  So everyone went on to better things.  Not to say this isn't bad.  It's actually quite good.

Both media revolve around a suburban Detroit neighborhood and a family of teenage girls everyone obsesses over.  Then bad things start happening to them.  There's one particularly rebellious one, who in the movie was played by Kirsten Dunst, who went on to better things in the Spider-Man movies.

The book features odd narration in that it's narrated by a group of boys who live in the neighborhood.  They're never identified; they're only given as "We."  So if you find that too weird it'd probably be better to watch the movie.

Here's my book review, which indicates I didn't like the book all that much; I gave it 3/5 stars.

This is the first time I've ever encountered the sort of narration used in "The Virgin Suicides." Instead of one central narrator, it is a collective of the local boys told through "we" instead of "I" or "he", which takes a little getting used to for this reader. At first I found this unique and interesting, but by the end I thought this device kept me from really experiencing the story on a personal level. Everything became so detached it was as if reading a newspaper account.

It didn't help that the Lisbon girls all seemed like clones except for Lux and Cecelia. The other three--Mary, Bonnie, and Therese--are so little-used it's hard to remember anything specific about them. Lux is certainly the best-drawn of the five girls, as her adventures on the rooftop and so forth are well-documented, but even she remains impersonal.

The boy narrators themselves are even more vague and impersonal. We know very little about any of them, except names and scant bits of information. I suppose it's ironic in a novel about how unknowable the Lisbons are that the reader knows even less about the boys telling the story, except that they loved the Lisbons.

By the end, like reading an obituary in a newspaper, I feel badly for the Lisbons, but it's that momentary, vague blip of sadness before flipping to the sports page.

I undertand that's the point of the novel. No one understands the Lisbons as much as they try. It makes for an interesting literary exercise; however, it doesn't really make for an entertaining book.

A to Z Challenge: Up in the Air

I had to really wrack my brain for a book/movie to use for U.  Fortunately when I checked on IMDB I saw the movie Up in the Air was based on a book, so there you go.  Problem solved.

Obviously I haven't read the book.  I mean, I didn't know it existed.  The movie from 2009 starred George Clooney as Ryan Bingham, a guy who goes around firing people for a living--as opposed to Ryan Bingham the alt-country musician.  Basically huge companies when they need to lay people off bring him in to try to smooth things over.  Unfortunately for me no Clooney showed up to lay me off.  Too bad.

Then he takes on a young assistant to show her the ropes.  She wants to modernize the business to use virtual chats and so forth, but he's resistant because he likes flying around the country.  He has racked up so many miles on American Airlines that he nearly has elite "platinum" status, which only like 6 other people had done.  Along the way he gets involved with a woman and falls in love, though it turns out she does not share that emotion.

It's a good movie, with a lot of complex stuff going on.  Not all that quick and snappy, but a good, involving movie.  The end is kind of a bummer, though.

BONUS:  I had a really hard time finding a K entry and then of course yesterday someone mentioned The Kite Runner and I realized that would have been the perfect K entry because I've read the book and seen the movie.  Both were really good.  I'd recommend the book because it's deeper, but if you don't want to invest the time, the movie gives you most of the gist.

A to Z Challenge: The Time Traveler's Wife

I read the book for this not too long after it came out.  Then thanks to Anjelina Jolie splitting up Brad Pitt and Jennifer Aniston I had to wait a few years longer to watch a movie version of it.  (See, Pitt and Aniston were going to star in it as a testament to their love but then they broke up and had to determine who got custody of the movie.  Or something like that.)  But I did eventually watch the movie starring Eric Bana and Rachel MacAdams.  They're both OK but not great.

My movie review pretty well sums it all up:

Being a single man, I don't watch a lot of love stories in the theater. But I had read the novel "The Time Traveler's Wife" twice and had been looking forward to the movie version, which had faced numerous setbacks thanks to Brad Pitt. At any rate, I wasn't disappointed. In fact, I was pleased because the movie eliminates a lot of the useless ballast that made the book nearly 600 pages to fit it into 108 minutes.

As the title suggests, the movie is about a time traveler and his wife. If you want to go chronologically, when Heny DeTamble was six, his mother died in a car accident and he finds out that he has a genetic disorder that causes him to randomly skip through time. A few years later, six-year-old Clare is playing in the meadow behind her family's mansion when she meets a naked man, who turns out to be an older version of Henry who has traveled back in time. She gives him a blanket and it starts a friendship with Henry as he appears at random intervals.

When Clare is in college, she meets Henry at the Chicago Public Library, where he works. For Henry it's the first time he's met Clare while for her it's not. (If you've watched "Star Trek" then you should be able to follow this.) As you should be able to figure out, they wind up getting married and from there experience marital difficulties that are unique to their situation, like Henry disappearing for sometimes weeks at a time and babies disappearing from Clare's womb.

If you've read the book and liked it then you should like the movie, as long as one of your favorite parts wasn't one that was eliminated. If you haven't read the book, then I'm not sure how much you'll enjoy it, though the old ladies next to me in the theater seemed to like it and I don't think they'd read the book.

As I mentioned at the beginning, the movie gets rid of a lot of the bloat from the novel. Most of Clare's younger years are eliminated, which isn't a huge loss. (This eliminated the most cringe-inducing scene of the book where 41-year-old Henry screwed 18-year-old Clare.) The stereotypical Korean babysitter and black cook are cut out and definitely no big loss. As well the brief subplot of Clare and Henry's friend Gomez hitting on Clare has been removed. The one thing I wish they had kept was the ending, but overall it was a worthy adaptation.

That is all.

A to Z Challenge: The Shipping News

This is another one where I read the book and watched the movie.  Actually I own the movie and at one point I owned the book, but a DVD is far less weight than a book so I got rid of the book.  Which should tell you which one is better.

Both book and movie deal with this guy named Bob Quoyle who moves with his kid(s) to Newfoundland and this old house that has to be tied down with ropes because there's no basement or anything.  Anyway, he starts working for a little newspaper writing "the shipping news" about boats that have come and gone.  And he starts making a life in the crummy little town and with a woman.

The book kind of annoyed me because it has this quirky style where sentences were written really short.  It got to be kind of annoying.  I never understood why the author wouldn't give the character's first name either.  It seemed kind of ridiculous.  There are two kids in the book and only one in the movie.  But since there's nothing really important for two kids to do, one does just as well.

The movie from about 2001 stars Kevin Spacey, Julianne Moore, and Judi Dench.  Since it doesn't have any weird quirks I think it's better to watch the movie than read the book.  It's also a very well-made movie.  Incidentally it's directed by Laase Hallstrom, who directed The Cider House Rules.  Those Scandinavians really know how to make literary movies.

A to Z Challenge: Rum Punch/Jackie Brown

I hadn't read or watched these before deciding upon this challenge, but I did have Rum Punch on my Kindle, so that helped me out when I couldn't really find another R.  I'm not sure why R was another hard letter, but it kind of was.

Anyway, the book was written by Elmore Leonard, who has had plenty of other books turned into movies like Get Shorty, Out of Sight, 3:10 to Yuma (twice I think), and some others.

The plot of book and movie is there's a stewardess named Jackie who works for a crappy shuttle airline and moonlights as a mule for a guy named Ordell.  One day she's bringing in some money when she's stopped by an ATF agent and his partner, who seem to know exactly what she's up to.  She goes to jail but won't give Ordell up and she's put in jail.  Ordell goes to Max Cherry, a bail bondsman to get her out.  Jackie and Max get something going and they decide to work out a deal with the ATF first for a "dry run" to smuggle some money in and then a much larger amount, during which they'll bust Ordell.  Except Jackie and Max work out how to sneak most of the money for themselves.

The movie was adapted by Quentin Tarantino and stars Pam Grier, Samuel L Jackson, Michael Keaton, and Robert de Niro in a largely useless role that could have been played by just about any dude for much cheaper I'm sure.  The movie is OK but the problem is it's 2 1/2 hours long!  There was no need whatsoever to turn a book that's only about 300 pages into a movie as long as your average summer blockbuster.  It's a fairly ordinary crime thriller that involves a stewardess who is caught between a gunrunner and the ATF.  The whole thing could easily have been streamlined to about 90 minutes.  That was actually the point where I got up to use the can, paused it, and saw there were still 54 minutes left!  Yipes.  The runtime is more tolerable on the second watching if only because I knew to expect it.  Still, a lot of the chitchat could have been cut out.  Unfortunately I think Tarantino, like Leonard, bought into the hype that he's really good with dialogue so he crammed the movie with lots of unnecessary talking to drag things out.

And yet what's funny after I read the book is it's 2 1/2 hours and yet it barely scratches the surface on a lot of things.  Somehow there's still a bunch of stuff that gets cut out.  A lot of that stuff would have actually made Robert de Niro's character interesting and worth the money they paid him.  In the book his character works for Max Cherry and is a henchman of Ordell, which is how they get brought together.  Whereas in the movie Ordell just shows up in Max's office.  Later the de Niro character steals some guns from Max's office to use to rob a liquor store.  Max also has a wife with an art gallery in a mall, which is where the "dry run" and other smuggling run happen.  In the movie he just shows up at the mall the first time to watch a movie.  Max and Jackie also fuck a few times, whereas I think they're more like "Just friends" in the movie.  So like I said despite being much, much too long the movie still can't be as deep as the novel.

Honestly I'd recommend the book since the movie takes practically just as long to get through. Here's a fun fact:  Rum Punch is actually a sequel to the much-earlier novel The Switch.  That book was made into the 2013 movie Life of Crime starring Jennifer Aniston and Tim Robbins.  So the movies were actually made in the reverse order of the books.

As far as it goes, I still think Get Shorty is the best Elmore Leonard book/movie combo, though I haven't read some of the other books that have become movies like Out of Sight.