May 2012 Month in Review

And so we come to the close of the fifth month of the year.  We’re finally starting to get some nicer weather up here in Ohio, which means I actually spent some time in the past couple of days reading outdoors.  I know, it’s insanity.

Anyway, I was actually a little surprised with how much reading I was able to get done this month.  I was out of town 5/12-5/15 because I was in Baton Rouge Louisiana for the USBC Open (national bowling tournament).  I brought a couple of books with me, but I only had time to read a couple of chapters while I was down there.  Last Thursday (5/25) was also a wash for me as I spent the day up at Cedar Point in Sandusky Ohio.  Despite having about a week where I wasn’t reading at all, I managed to finish 9 books this month which clocked in at 3165 pages.  So we’re 152 days into the year and I’m up to 17,897 pages for the year, which puts me at an average of just over 117 pages a day, not too bad.

And now we get to the books that I finished this past month:

All told it was a good month of reading.  Although any time that you go through 4 Christopher Moore books in a month it’s going to be good.  I also got back into a little bit of non-fiction this month with the books by Foer and Larson.

And now for the fun part.  In the next couple of weeks I should get my check for cashing in the Ohio State Bowling Tournament.  Ryan and I cashed 10th in doubles, and I should also cash for team, singles, and all events.  All this means I should be getting a pretty nice check for bowling, which means I get to buy books!  I’ve also been slowly working my way through my TBR pile, which means it’s down to about 15 or so books and I’d love some suggestions for more books to look into in the upcoming months.

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by Adam on June 1, 2012  •  Permalink
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Posted by Adam on June 1, 2012

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The Lovely Bones

Ah, the start of yet another post where I try to recall where I first heard of a book.  In this case, I think I actually remember correctly.  My second year back in college after my time off, a friend of mine from one of my Psychology classes mentioned it.  Time wise, it was probably just at the beginning of the time when I started reading all day long, towards the end of the huge movie watching phase of my life.  I watched the movie a couple of years ago, and some time later when walking through Barnes & Noble they had a copy of this book in the bargain rack, the listed price is $16.99, it was on sale for $4.98, so I bought it, and I just got around to reading it, on with the review.

Also, a quick bit of blog news.  The last day of the month is generally when I do my Month in Review posts, however, I had the third post in my sociopath series posted this morning, and now I’m posting this review today.  I don’t want to have three posts in one day, so I’ll schedule May’s month in review to go up early tomorrow.

I’m going to have some spoilers for the end of the book, but even knowing what happens it’s a very well written book and well worth reading.

Book Stats

328 pages

Drama

Characters

The book revolves around Susie Salmon, a young girl who lives with her family in a small town in Pennsylvania.  You find out in the second sentence of the book that she’s been murdered.  She spends most of the book in a sort of middle ground between Heaven and Earth watching her family, friends, and her killer.  Because Susie is dead watching them, the book is written in a kind of pseudo omniscient point of view.  She can be in different places very quickly and is also able to see what the people she watches are thinking.  It’s a unique way of telling a story and all of the characters that you see behave very realistically throughout the course of the book.

Setting

A small town in Pennsylvania in 1973.

Plot

The plot to this book is very simple, yet very effective.  From the first page of the book we know that Susie is dead, and the book shows how her family deals with her death.

Enjoyment

There is a lot to this book.  It’s difficult to imagine an author writing about what is probably the most difficult situation any person could ever run into, the death of their child at a young age.  But Sebold handles everything in the story very well, and every emotion that the family experiences feels real.

There are several very touching moments in the book, one of the earliest comes as Susie’s father is trying to explain to her four year old brother Buckley that his sister is dead and won’t be coming back.  It’s interesting to watch how he uses Monopoly pieces to explain what’s going on to his son, and I don’t know if you could come up with a better way to explain death to a child that young.  Another wonderful scene was the impromptu memorial for Susie’s death on the one year anniversary.

(The next couple of paragraphs contain spoilers for the later sections of the book.)

That said, I do have a couple of small issues with the book.  One of the biggest issues that I had was directly related to my recent series of posts about sociopathy.  About halfway through the book we’re shown a couple of scenes from George Harvey’s childhood.  During these quick scenes, we’re shown that his parents had a troubled relationship, and that his mother encouraged him to shoplift from stores.  Along with this, his mother encouraged him to steal objects that were left at roadside monuments left for people who had died there.  His mother says to him: “You have to be able to look past the dead, sometimes there are good trinkets to take away from them.”  This is the exact kind of justification in fiction and life that we use to make ourselves feel safe and different from people who are “obviously disturbed.”  I hated seeing this part of the book and I think it weakened the book.  It doesn’t matter why Harvey killed Susie, the story isn’t about Harvey, and for that matter, the story isn’t really about Susie.  The story is about how Susie’s family reacts, not about why she was killed.

My other big problem with the book is that I think it goes on too long.  The book follows Susie’s family for 8 years after her death, but large portions of it felt forced to me, especially in comparison to the early sections of the book.  It seemed like Sebold really wanted to have a happy ending to the story, but she knew that there really couldn’t be one until several years had passed.  The end result of this is that the first year and a half after Susie’s death are really well chronicled, but then the next 6 years are flashed by really quickly to get to the point where the family can finally reconcile because they’ve all moved on.  I don’t remember if the movie includes this section of the book or not, I’ll have to watch it again and see where the movie ends.  (Big Spoiler)  The part of the ending that really felt tacked on to me was showing Harvey’s death.  Again, it doesn’t matter what happens to him, and showing his death doesn’t add to the book.  His death feels kind of like a fan-service moment.  He was a horrible person, and in life – and especially in fiction – we like to see horrible people get what they deserve.  I’m sure there are a lot of people who see his death as a moment of vindication in some way, to me it felt tacked on.

Overall Grade

It’s rare to see a book deal with a topic as difficult as this one, and it’s hard to find one that deals with it as effectively as this book does.

8/10

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by Adam on May 31, 2012  •  Permalink
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Sociopaths in our Culture – Part 3 – In Fiction

This post is the third in my series of posts about Sociopaths in our Culture.  The first post, concerning the definition and description of sociopathy, can be found here.  The second post, where I look at the cultural adaptation of sociopaths, can be found here.

There are a great number of characters in fiction (including movies, books, and TV) that could easily be classified as having Antisocial Personality Disorder.  By my own way of looking at it, I see three different ways in which characters with APD are used in fiction.

For reference, let’s put the definition and indicators up again: A pervasive pattern of disregard for and violation of the rights of others, beginning in childhood or adolescence and continuing into adulthood, and indicated by three (or more) of the following:

  1. Failure to conform to social norms with respect to lawful behaviors as indicated by repeatedly performing acts that are grounds for arrest.
  2. Deceitfulness, as indicated by repeated lying, use of aliases, or conning others for personal profit or pleasure.
  3. Impulsivity or failure to plan ahead.
  4. Irritability or aggressiveness, as indicated by repeated physical fights or assaults.
  5. Reckless disregard for safety of self or others.
  6. Consistent irresponsibility, as indicated by repeated failure to sustain consistent work behavoior or to honor financial obligations.
  7. Lack of remorse, as indicated by being indifferent to or rationalizing having hurt, mistreated, or stolen from another person.

The first is very obvious; a great number of the villains in books are obviously sociopaths, many of them wanting nothing more than to destroy all or part of the world.  One of the better examples is probably Raj Ahten who is the primary antagonist of the first four books in David Farland’s Runelords series.  Ultimately he has a noble goal – he is trying to unite the countries of the world in order to face a bigger threat – but the methods that he uses are brutal as he tries to subjugate society.  (Looking at the list, you could diagnose him with #’s 1, 2, 4, 5, 7.)

The second use of APD in fiction comes from a variety of book with a specific type of main character.  While not the most common, there is a history of books being written about antiheroes, characters that in most other stories would be the primary antagonist.  (For antiheroes I’m using the classical definition as described in the Writing Excuses podcast.)  Looking through my list of reviews, the only true antihero book that I have on there is Perfume by Patrick Suskind.  But I’m going to talk about a different book for this, Waiting Period by Hubert Selby Jr.

Selby is one of my favorite authors, and Waiting Period is one of my favorite books of his.  The basic premise of this book is simple; a man who is depressed decides to kill himself.  He decides that the best way to kill himself is to buy a gun and end it quickly.  Because of the laws he has to wait several days before he can get his gun.  During this time, he starts to think a little differently about his situation in life.  He starts to think that his life isn’t the problem; the problem comes from people in power keeping everyone else down.  This leads to him deciding that he needs to kill the people who have been causing the problems rather than himself.  He is in many ways the prototypical APD case, and is easily diagnosed with symptoms #1, 4, 5, & 7.

The third use of people with APD is not one that many people commonly think about.  In many cases, the primary protagonist in many novels could easily be diagnosed with having APD.  The main reason most people wouldn’t consider them to have this personality disorder is because they’re doing noble things.  But if you look at their patterns of behavior, several heroes of stories show consistent signs of APD behavior.  Two characters that easily fall into this category are Kelsier from Mistborn (#’s 1, 2, 4, 5, & 7) and Kvothe from The Name of the Wind and The Wise Man’s Fear (#’s 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, & 7 – yes, he shows all of the common symptoms at times).

Not everyone with Antisocial Personality Disorder is a serial killer – in fact many people who could be diagnosed with APD are very successful people.  This series of posts started because of the ways that I saw H. H. Holmes being depicted in media.  I don’t think anyone can argue that what he did was horrible, but the worst thing you could do is simply dismiss someone because of his or her behavior.  Take the time to understand different personalities, and try and figure out why they exist.  Many times people with strange patterns of behavior are the most interesting to look at.  This is true in both fiction and real life.

Realize that any time you’re dealing with people with different personalities or conditions it’s never an issue of “us vs. them.”  We all have numerous aspects to personalities, and there are no clear dividing lines between groups of people, it really comes down to a matter of degree.  It’s also worth considering that there is no condition that is inherently good or bad.  We all have different tools for use, and from there it’s simply a matter of what we decide to do with them.

Hopefully you enjoyed this series of posts (and hopefully I didn’t ramble too much).

The definitions from this series of posts come from my psychology textbooks that I used in college.  My Abnormal Psychology textbook is the Hansell & Demour Abnormal Psychology (2nd edition).  Also of use was my textbook from my Personality class, which is the & Buss Personality Psychology (4th edition).  Obviously I also used my lecture notes from these classes, for which I thank my professors.  If you are interested in further reading into this topic I would highly suggest looking into both of those books.

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by Adam on May 31, 2012  •  Permalink
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Sociopaths in our Culture – Part 2 – Cultural Adaptation

This post is the second in my series of posts about Sociopaths in our Culture.  The first post, concerning the definition and description of sociopathy, can be found here.

Continuing with my discussion of Antisocial Personality Disorder, we come to the question of how these people continue to survive in our present day culture.  In general, about half of our personality is based upon our genetics, while the other half is based upon our upbringing.

One of the most commonly used and widely accepted models for analyzing overall personality is the Five Factor Model (FFM) used by Costa & McCrae.  Their model assumes that personality can be broken down into the five factors of Neuroticism, Openness, Extraversion, Agreeableness, and Conscientiousness.  The two that are relevant to this discussion are Agreeableness (A) and Conscientiousness (C).  Agreeableness is a measure of how well the individual cooperates with other people, while Conscientiousness is a measure of how hard people work as well as how much planning they put into a situation.  Generally a person who has been diagnosed with APD will rate very low on A & C as compared to the average of the population as a whole.

Like anything else in genetics, your personality isn’t simply going to be the average of your parents.  There is going to be some variation from your parents.  If you have parents who are fairly low on A & C, there is always a chance that you would end up scoring even lower on both measures.  The biggest issue with this is that having low A or C would seem like very poor personality traits.  This would lead you to think that over time these personalities would be slowly phased out of the gene pool.  So why are they still around?

The answer is simple, these are adaptive traits and in many circumstances people who possess these traits can be highly successful in society.  I know it sounds strange, but if you stop and think about it, it’s fairly easy to think of situations where it’s advantageous to be low on A, C, or both.

The clearest situation where someone low on A would be successful would be any situation where there is competition.  Lets look at sports for a moment.  (I’m watching the NBA playoffs as I type this, which is one of the reasons I’m using this as an example.)  One of the most highly regarded players in the NBA is Kobe Bryant, and in listening to analysts discuss his play, he is often described as having a killer instinct, or being ruthless.  To me at least, both of those adjectives sound like works that you could use to describe someone very low on Agreeableness.

So what about low C?  One of the clearest markers for low C is showing low remorse for other people’s well being.  The easiest situation to see where this would be advantageous (and oftentimes encouraged) would be in a time of war.  If you’re a general of an army, there are times when you have to be willing to send people into battle, knowing that in many cases they won’t be coming back.

It’s also very easy to see how it can be balanced in society.  A good example of this is the movie The Invention of Lying (which I have to confess I haven’t actually seen, but the previews got the premise across very well).  If you live in a world where everyone is honest and considerate, it can be quite advantageous for a single person who goes against these traits.  If no one ever lies, then the first person that starts to lie will be able to abuse that ability because people aren’t accustomed to anything other than the truth being told.  However, if too many people exhibit that behavior, more people become wary of it and it becomes a less adaptive strategy.  The constant cultural adaptation that we experience means that the level of people who exhibit dishonest and/or violent behavior will be fairly stable over time.

Tomorrow I’ll post part 3 – Sociopaths in Fiction

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by Adam on May 30, 2012  •  Permalink
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Sociopaths in our Culture – Part 1 – Definition

One of my biggest complaints about Erik Larson’s book The Devil in the White City is that I felt like I’d been sold the wrong book.  The title of the book (which is one of the main selling points) leads you to believe that the book is going to be primarily about H.H. Holmes, who was one of the first recorded serial killers in America (as well as one of the most prolific).  While the book did discuss part of Holmes life, I really thought that it was shoehorned into the book with the goal of helping the book to sell better.

I was still interested in learning more about Holmes, so I watched a documentary about him on Netflix that was directed by John Borowski.  The documentary was very well done and had a lot of interesting information about Holmes, some of which was included in Larson’s book, but much of which was not.  If you’re interested in learning specifically about Holmes, I would suggest Borowski’s documentary before Larson’s book.

H. H. Holmes mugshot from 1895

While contrasting the two works, I noticed a big difference in the tone that was used when they were discussing Holmes.  Early in the Larson book, he is very derogatory and almost dismissive of Holmes.  I understand that it’s his book and it’s going to be styled by his opinions, but I think it leads to a kind of “us vs. them” attitude when dealing with sociopathic individuals, which I consider to be the wrong way to look at it.  The Borowski documentary is much more even in tone when looking at Holmes’s actions, which allows you to draw your own conclusions.

I have a big problem with trying to create the “us vs. them” attitude with anything, it doesn’t work and ultimately causes more problems then it will ever solve.  It’s easy to simply dismiss someone as insane, to call them a psychopath.  It makes us feel safer because there’s no way that we could ever do anything like that, we’re normal.  And while it’s the easy way to look at things, and it makes people feel better, it’s also dead wrong.

The first thing to discuss is the proper term for a serial killer, antihero, psychopath, whatever you normally use.  The term used in the DSM IV-TR and accepted by the APA is Antisocial Personality Disorder (APD).  Is that a bit of a politically correct term?  Yes, but it’s the proper term.  Now, for the fun part that will probably surprise most of you, it isn’t nearly as rare as you think it is.  My Abnormal Psychology textbook lists the lifetime prevalence of APD as being 2% of the overall population.  In the 2010 Census the US Government listed the population of the country as just under 309 million.  Which means that there are potentially as many as 6.18 million people in this country who could be considered sociopaths.  (Please keep in mind that 2% is the figure that my textbook uses, although I don’t recall exactly which books they come from, I’ve heard estimates as high as 4% of the overall population.)

So what exactly are the symptoms to be diagnosed with APD?  Once again I turn to my Abnormal Psychology textbook:  A pervasive pattern of disregard for and violation of the rights of others, beginning in childhood or adolescence and continuing into adulthood, and indicated by three (or more) of the following:

  1. Failure to conform to social norms with respect to lawful behaviors as indicated by repeatedly performing acts that are grounds for arrest.
  2. Deceitfulness, as indicated by repeated lying, use of aliases, or conning others for personal profit or pleasure.
  3. Impulsivity or failure to plan ahead.
  4. Irritability or aggressiveness, as indicated by repeated physical fights or assaults.
  5. Reckless disregard for safety of self or others.
  6. Consistent irresponsibility, as indicated by repeated failure to sustain consistent work behavior or to honor financial obligations.
  7. Lack of remorse, as indicated by being indifferent to or rationalizing having hurt, mistreated, or stolen from another person.

Obviously not everyone who is diagnosed with APD is a serial killer, and there are killers who couldn’t be diagnosed with APD.  Any time you encounter someone with a different overall personality or viewpoint, it’s easy to break the discussion down to “us vs. them.”  But the better reaction to have is to take some time and examine their situation.

Tomorrow I’ll post part 2 – Cultural Adaptation

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by Adam on May 29, 2012  •  Permalink
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Sacre Bleu

Sacre Bleu is the newest book by Christopher Moore, and I have to say, I’m a bit torn by the book.  This book is very different from Moore’s other works, and I’m still going to use the Satire tag for it, but it’s really by the slimmest of margins.  This book is better categorized as a historical Fantasy novel, which is not something I generally read.  The biggest difficulty in describing this book is that I think I would have enjoyed it more if it were written by someone else.  It seems so stylistically different from Moore’s other works (especially his Vampire trilogy) that it doesn’t feel like one of his books.  The only problem with saying that is that if the book had been written by someone else, I wouldn’t have read it.  Anyway, on we go.

Book Stats

394 pages

Satire, Fantasy

Setting

Yes, I’m starting with Setting first for this review, because it really helps to set up the other aspects of the book.  The book is set in Paris in the 1890′s, and many of the characters in the book are famous painters from that place and time.  There are smaller vignettes from other times throughout the book, but it revolves around Paris.

Character

The main character of this book is Lucien Lessard, a young man who works as a baker in Paris.  He is also a bit of an aspiring artist, and in his youth he studied painting with several masters in the area.  Lucien was an interesting character, but really nothing about him stands out to separate him from the story.  To me the most interesting character in the story is Lucien’s friend Henri Toulouse-Lautrec, who was an actual painter living in Paris.  Moore depicts him as being very eccentric and an alcoholic, but he is also the primary source of the humor in the book.  While these two are the central characters of the story, the rest of the characters who inhabit the pages are also very well written.

Plot

The book begins with the suicide/murder of Vincent van Gogh.  In reality his death is considered a suicide, but Moore presents it as a murder, asking why a man would shoot himself and then walk a mile to try and get help.  Moore shows the man, who is simply known as The Colorist, killing van Gogh as he claims van Gogh owes him a painting.  After this we move on to Lucien, who is receiving the news of van Gogh’s death.  As Lucien is telling Henri about van Gogh he meets Juliette, a former model and lover of his.  This is where the book starts to get into the Fantasy elements, as we start to learn about the mystical power behind a certain shade of blue.

Enjoyment

Ok, if the last sentence of the Plot section doesn’t sound quite like me, it’s because I pretty much stole it from the dust jacket for the book.  It’s really difficult to talk about the plot of this book without spoiling parts of it.  The closest book to this in that aspect is probably Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go, the primary difference is that this book moves faster in the earlier sections.

In Moore’s afterword for this book, he talks about where the idea came from.  And as odd as it sounds, it all started with him wanting to write a book about the color blue.  The amount of research that he put into this book was staggering, as he looked into the lives of all the painters he depicts (as well as many who didn’t show up in the book).  He did this for several reasons, the first was so that he could try to depict their personalities as they actually were according to their letters and biographies written about them.  And the second was because several scenes in the plot were inspired by actual events in the lives of the artists.

One of the central ideas in the story – the power of the ultramarine blue paint – also stems from history as the pure pigments used to make the paint were for some time more expensive than gold.

But getting back to the book at hand, I really enjoyed it.  I would argue that the central theme of this book is the power of the arts.  Coming from my background, this is a powerful theme for a book.  I am a huge fan of the arts, and at one time or another I’ve studied several different forms of art.  I was a music major for several years in college, and I’ve taken several art classes throughout my education as well.  My study of literature has been more personally driven than academically driven, but I’ve taken quite a few classes that study writing (both recent writing as well as classical, and by classical I mean ancient Greek).

Ah, I almost forgot to mention this part!  Included throughout the book are quite a few paintings done by the artists who compose the cast of the novel.  Moore takes all of these and attaches quotes from his story to them, weaving them beautifully into the overall story.  There are also quite a few times throughout the book where the actual text is printed blue, which is a bit strange at times, but it works with the book.

Overall Grade

An interesting story with a lot of basis in actual history.  A wonderful testament to the power that the arts can have.

8/10

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by Adam on May 28, 2012  •  Permalink
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The Devil in the White City

I think the first time I heard about this book was when my wonderful Greek Myth teacher mentioned it one day in class.  So when I saw the book while wandering around Barnes & Noble a while ago, I decided to buy it.  Along with having it mentioned by a teacher who’s opinion I highly respect with regards to books (I’ve read several other books on her recommendations and enjoyed them all), the title of the book is something that is definitely going to get you to at least look at it.  On with the review.

Book Stats

390 pages (after that there were another 50 pages of notes and indexes)

Non-Fiction

Enjoyment

The way the book is described by the blurb on the back cover is as a story that revolves around the story of two very different men who lived during a seminal time in the history of Chicago and this country as a whole.  The two people who form the basis of this book are Daniel Burnham, who was one of the central architects of the World’s Fair in Chicago in 1893, and H. H. Holmes, one of the first and most notorious serial killers in American history.

While that’s how the book is sold, upon reading it I saw it as coming across a little differently.  Most of the book focused on Burnham and the World’s Fair.  Strewn in throughout the book are mentions of Holmes and his actions, in large part because he was living in Chicago during the time of the World’s Fair.  Ultimately though, Holmes was active before, during, and after the World’s Fair.  Here’s what I think really happened when Larson was writing this book.  He was interested in writing about the World’s Fair – and justifiably so, there was a lot of interesting information in the book about the World’s Fair – but he needed something to help sell the book.  During the course of his research he found out about Holmes, and decided to include information about him in the book.

So really, the two people whose stories form the basis for this novel come across more as a marketing decision than anything else.  A book about the World’s Fair could be interesting, but it’s not going to sell as much as a book about a serial killer.  Whatever your thoughts about what this means about our society, the truth is that violence sells more than engineering, architecture, and landscaping.

So now that we have my thoughts on how the book came to be in its current form, lets talk about how the book works out.  There is a lot of good information in the book, and Larson works hard to craft an interesting story, but it feels like too much of a train wreck for me.  The title of a book is the first promise that the author makes to the readers, and after finishing the book, I feel lied to.  The decision to focus more on Holmes for the marketing worked well enough to get me to buy the book, but it wasn’t enough to keep me thrilled for the duration of the book.

In the end, this was a very well written book about the Chicago World’s Fair of 1893.  But if you’re looking into this book for information about Holmes, I’m sure there are other books that focus much more on his story rather than other events of the time he was living.

Overall Grade

A well written book, but it wasn’t the book I wanted to read.  If you’re interested in architectural and engineering history this would be an interesting book, if you’re interested in the life of one of America’s first serial killers, you can probably look elsewhere.

5/10

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by Adam on May 25, 2012  •  Permalink
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Posted by Adam on May 25, 2012

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Red Riding Hood

So a little over a year ago there was a movie version of Red Riding Hood released in theaters.  I remember seeing some of the ads for the movie and thinking that it sounded pretty interesting.  Cut forward to a couple of weeks ago before I went down to Baton Rouge for the USBC Open.  I wanted to bring my iPod, but didn’t have a charger for it other than my laptop.  What I did have was a gift card to Best Buy that my younger brother had gotten me for Christmas.  So I went up there to purchase a wall charger, which cost about $20, my gift card was for $30, so I decided to go through the movie section, found Red Riding Hood, remembered thinking it looked pretty cool, so I bought it.

In hindsight that was probably a poor decision.

I don’t talk about movies often on my blog, mostly because I haven’t been watching any new movies recently.  But since I watched this one, I figured I’d talk about it.

To begin with, I absolutely loved the premise of this movie.  Most of us know some version of this story, whether it’s the Grimm’s Fairy Tale version, the Bugs Bunny version(s), or whatever, we’ve all heard the story.  What a lot of people don’t know is that original Grimm’s Fairy Tales were often very dark stories, and I was intrigued by the idea of a darker remake.  (That said, I recently purchased a copy of Grimm’s Fairy Tales from Barnes & Noble, and read the story of Red Riding Hood before I started this post, and it wasn’t a terribly dark story.)

Unfortunately, the premise of the story was about as interesting as the movie got for me.  There were far too many things about the movie that really annoyed me.  The first thing that set me off was the camerawork, which actually annoyed me before we even saw any of the characters.  The opening shot is an interesting aerial shot of the forest around the town where the story takes place.  Unfortunately the camera starts to twist and bend in ways that actually cause the shot to be a little nauseating.  And it just gets worse from there.  One thing that this movie does constantly is make use of a handheld camera.  I can’t think of a single movie where that works out well, it’s a gimmicky shot that just doesn’t work.  Use a tripod or a steady-cam people, they’re there for a reason.

Another thing that annoyed me was that they forced a love triangle into the plot.  Love triangles can work, it can cause a great amount of tension in the story, and it can create fanatical fanbases, unfortunately, it’s also really easy to screw up.  If it’s going to work, it really needs to come across as though both sides of the triangle are viable options.  In the movie, the person Valerie loves is presented as being mysterious, brave, and capable, but also very poor, so of course her parents refuse to let her marry him.  Of course the person she is engaged to is more well off in the world, but isn’t shown to have too many likable qualities early on.  It just didn’t seem – authentic at all.

There were too many times when the movie felt like it was trying to be in two different time periods at once.  The movie is set in a pseudo-medieval European village.  There were quite a few times when the dialogue came across as sounding far too much like 21st century English slang rather than medieval English.  I would have preferred had it been that way constantly, as opposed to showing up just often enough to irritate me.

There were also too many moments where aspects of the characters or the world came across as not fitting in with the overall setting.  Once again, pseudo-medieval Europe, roughly 1600′s.  There were too many times when the women in the movie accept being objectified in one scene, only to spend the next scene discussing 20th century women’s liberation issues.  I’m really not trying to sound like a jerk when I say this, but I don’t care either way how you want the characters to act, but PICK ONE.  There was another huge anachronism in this movie that annoyed me to no end.  We’re setting the movie in a fictional world based around a folktale, check.  Would the villagers in the movie really act out a scene from another folktale within our world.  Probably not.  But wait, it gets better.  What other folktale do they use – the Three Little Pigs.  That’s right, in a world where werewolves actually exist, they tell stories in which wolves are laughably incompetent, complete with the “I’ll huff and I’ll puff and I’ll blow your house down!”  Pick ANY other story, just not one that has a wolf!  Any story told in this village about wolves would be cautionary tales about how wolves are deadly monsters, not that they can’t break down houses!  And my last rant about that part, if you’re going to talk about how the house made of bricks is the safest, have the houses of the villagers in the movie be MADE OUT OF BRICKS!  Ok, moving on to another topic.

The werewolf in the movie, when you finally see it, is big, standing on all fours, it’s looking people in the eye.  Throughout the course of the movie you’re shown several people who have been killed by the werewolf, and their corpses look relatively untouched.  If a werewolf is big enough to look people in the eyes while standing on all fours, when it takes a swipe at you, it’s taking your head off.  If you wanted to shy away from the gore to avoid getting an R rating, don’t show the corpses, because it’s yet another thing that knocked me out of the story.

Throughout the entire movie, I was in turn annoyed, frustrated, angry at the characters, confused by the camerawork, and questioning the dialogue.  That said, there is one saving grace for this movie.  The ending was far superior to the rest of the movie, even if I thought it was very poorly foreshadowed.  You’re constantly pointed away from the actual villain, which makes it seem like a big twist, but it’s almost completely impossible to see the foreshadowing for the twist without already knowing it.  You don’t walk away saying “I should have seen that coming” like you do for a well foreshadowed twist, it’s more of an “Ok, I guess that works.”

Overall Grade

It’s a very interesting premise, and the last 5-10 minutes were quite good.  Unfortunately, it’s a train wreck getting there.

3/10

2 Comments
by Adam on May 22, 2012  •  Permalink
Posted in Movies, Ramblings
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Posted by Adam on May 22, 2012

http://blizzerd03.wordpress.com/2012/05/22/red-riding-hood/

Bite Me: A Love Story

I just finished the third book in Christopher Moore’s vampire trilogy, and the first word that comes to mind is simply wow.  Everything that was set up by the first two books came back in this book, with a lot of Moore’s humor, and a very bittersweet ending that worked perfectly.

Book Stats

309 pages

Satire

Third book in the trilogy (sequel to Bloodsucking Fiends and You Suck)

Characters

All of the characters from the first two books are back; Tommy, Jody, The Emperor, The Animals, Rivera and Cavuto, Abby, Jared, and Stephen “Foo Dog” Wong.  A much larger portion of this book is told from Abby’s point of view, complete with it being as though she were doing multiple blog posts about what’s going on throughout the course of the book.  All of the characters in the book are just as much fun as they were in the first two books, and they’re still in some very strange situations.

Setting

The Emperor’s domain, San Francisco.

Plot

I don’t think I can begin to summarize the plot of this book any better than the blurb on the back of the book does, so I’m going to copy it here, because it gets everything across and is really funny at the same time:

The city of San Francisco is being stalked by a huge shaved vampyre cat named Chet, and only I, Abby Normal, and my manga-haired love monkey stand between the raveous monster and a bloody massacre of the general public.

Whoa.  And this is a love story?

Yup.  ’Cept there’s no whining.  But there is everybody’s favorite undead couple, Tommy and Jody, who’ve just escaped from imprisonment in a bronze statue.  And now that they’re out they’ve joined forces with Abby, her boyfriend Steve, the frozen-turkey-bowling Safeway crew, the Emperor of San Francisco and his trusty dogs Lazarus and Bummer, gay Goth guy Jared, and SF’s finest Cavuto and Rivera to hunt big cat and save the city.  Really.

Enjoyment

Generally when you think of the dichotomy between sanity and insanity you picture it as a straight line, with sanity on one side and insanity on the other.  Using this model there’s a very fine line between the two, but it’s definitely there.  After reading this book I might have to rethink using that model in the future.  Moore goes so far off the deep end of insanity in this book that it ends up coming full circle and actually making sense.  If you were to read off some of the elements of this book to someone unfamiliar with Moore, they’d probably think you were talking about a farcical movie (a la Scary Movie and it’s sequels) where the story is nothing more than a framework for a bunch of non-sequitar jokes.  I said in my intro that the ending was bittersweet.  To an extent I think that’s because I didn’t get the ending I was expecting, but looking back at all three books of the series, it’s really the ending that makes the most sense and fit with the story Moore was telling.  So while it wasn’t the ending I was expecting, it was definitely the ending that the book deserved.

Overall Grade

I’ve said it in every review I’ve done of Moore’s books, and it’s warranted here as well.  Do not dismiss Moore as someone who is simply writing humor, he has serious chops as an author, and simply chooses to be funny.  His books are all a joy to read and I highly recommend them to everyone.

9/10

1 Comment
by Adam on May 21, 2012  •  Permalink
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Posted by Adam on May 21, 2012

http://blizzerd03.wordpress.com/2012/05/21/bite-me-a-love-story/

You Suck: A Love Story

While I’ve read quite a few books by Christopher Moore (You Suck being the sixth of his books that I’ve read), this one was definitely a new experience.  This is the first book of his that is a direct sequel to one of his other novels.  As such, there are all the rules of continuity and continuing the characters to follow, much like in any series.  Moore does all of this very well, while still keeping the humor flowing throughout the book.  Anyway, on with the review.

Book Stats

328 pages

Satire

Sequel to Bloodsucking Fiends

Characters

Jody and Tommy are back once again, although by the first sentence of the book Jody has changed Tommy into a vampire.  They’re essentially the same characters that they were in the first book, which means that it’s still a lot of fun to watch as they adjust to their new lives with both of them being vampires.  Of the new characters in this book, my favorite was Abby Normal, a teenage goth girl who realizes very early on in the book that Tommy is a vampire and wants nothing more than to be their new minion.  The sections written from her viewpoint were written as though they were diary entries, and were littered with her paraphrased comments about what everyone actually said.  She was a very well written and snarky character who was a lot of fun to read about.

Setting

We’re back in San Francisco, the Emperor’s domain.

Plot

The plot deals with Jody and Tommy adjusting to both of them being vampires, as well as the after effects of giving the Animals from the grocery store over half a million dollars.  There’s also the matter of the 800 year old vampire who begins the book trapped in a bronze statue.  The overall story kind of meanders along for most of the book, but it’s still a fun read because of the humor throughout the book.

Enjoyment

The story in this book is weaker than in Moore’s other books, but the humor is there in full force.  This book is a great example of how having interesting characters in unique situations can create lots of chaos and some very funny moments.  There were a couple of sections where the plotting was a little iffy, including some sections at the very end.  But if you’re going to read this book, it’s going to be primarily for the humor, and in that category it works out very well.

Overall Grade

It’s not Moore’s best book, but an average book by Moore is still well worth reading.  I’m looking forward to starting the third book in the next couple of days.

7/10

3 Comments
by Adam on May 19, 2012  •  Permalink
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Posted by Adam on May 19, 2012

http://blizzerd03.wordpress.com/2012/05/19/you-suck-a-love-story/

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