Month: July 2007

OOTP: The movie

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I’m not a movie reviewer… I don’t have the vocabulary, or the discriminatory taste it takes. In other words, I like pretty much everything. I usually leave the detailed reviews to Hubby. 🙂 That said, I really liked Order of the Phoenix. No, it wasn’t perfect, but the good outweighed the not-so-good, and it turned out to be a good, tight, fun movie. And besides, it’s Harry Potter week, and I thought it might be fun to celebrate with a Harry Potter post a day. We’ll see if I can do it.

On to the movie…

The good: Luna was perfect. Just how I imagined her. Yeah, they could have done more with her, but I liked what they did do. The D.A. was excellent, too. Some of the best sequences of the movie. They managed Harry’s anger quite well — it came across loud and clear without being oppressing, which I often felt it was in the book. They slimmed and trimmed down the plot without doing much damage to the essentials, and kept most of the good stuff in. Fred and George went out with a bang, though I missed “Give her hell for us, Peeves!” Which leads me to Umbridge: she was perfect. Suitably prim and horrifying. Maybe not quite horrifying enough, but it worked. And while I missed the final moments with Dumbledore, the ending worked well enough for me.

The bad: Snape. They didn’t learn! This man is important, people, and they’re still not giving him his due. Sure, he had the Occlumency classes with Harry, but they weren’t intense enough. And, yeah, while they managed to get the pensive scene in (good for them), they missed out on a lot that they could have done to build up to Half-Blood Prince. I’m not sure how Snape is going to work in the next movie, or if it’ll even be remotely believable. Lupin also falls in the “they didn’t get enough to do” category: he was vastly underused, too.

The ministry fight — eh. Not bloody enough. Bellatrix wasn’t given enough to do (Helena Bonham Carter played her as deranged rather than really angry, which is what I thought she was), and I really wanted to see her grovel before Voldemort. Speaking of him, the final battle with Dumbledore was okay, and I liked how they portrayed his possession of Harry. Missed Dumbledore’s assessment of Voldemort: “You are quite wrong,” said Dumbledore…”Indeed, your failure to understand that there are things much worse than death has always been your greatest weakness.”

And, Kreacher was there, but just lurking in the background. I’m curious to know what role he’s going to play in Deathly Hallows.

Still, I thought it was a good movie. Funny, too, now that I think about it. Lots of wonderful, choice little moments.

What did you think?

Uglies

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Typically, I shy away from books with pictures of girls on the front that have tag lines, especially if those tag lines read: “In a world of extreme beauty, anyone normal is ugly.” I’d seen this book around, but every time, I looked at it and thought “Ugh. Chick book. Not my thing.” And walked on.

And then Inkling read the trilogy and was fascinated by it. And usually, when Inkling takes something seriously, it has to be good. (Since, as I’ve discovered over the years, she and I have similar tastes in books.) Still, it took me a while to get around to it, because every time I looked at it, I couldn’t get past the cover and the tag line.

Well, I’m glad it did, finally. Scott Westerfeld has written not only a good sci-fi/dystopian story, but a smart and thought-provoking one as well. The basic plot (the back cover blurb makes it sound like some dumb chick book): in the future, there are three types of people: littlies (those under 12), uglies (12-16), and pretties. When a person turns 16, it’s assumed that you’ll leave Uglyville (both literally and figuratively), and get the surgery that will turn you into a fun-loving, free-wheeling, extremely beautiful Pretty. Tally, with all her heart, want that. Until she meets Shay. Who doesn’t want to be pretty. She knows of a place — the Smoke — where you don’t have to become pretty, where you can stay ugly. Tally doesn’t understand this: who doesn’t want to be pretty?! But, Shay runs away, and then Tally is forced to make decisions that will change her life.

Really, it sounds silly, typed out like that, but if you knew the whole plot, it would ruin the point of the book.

Still, in addition to romance and adventure and typical end-of-the-world stuff (I loved all the descriptions of the Rusties), Westerfeld has some interesting observations about beauty and society. In fact, the whole book plays with our notions of what is and is not beautiful.

There was a certain kind of beauty, a prettiness that everyone could see. Big eyes and full lips like a kid’s; smooth, clear skin; symmetrical features; and a thousand other little clues. Somewhere in the backs of their minds, people were always looking for these markers. No one could help seeing them, no matter how they were brought up. A million years of evolution had made it part of the human brain.

Or this:

Back in the days before the operation, Tally remembered, a lot of people, especially young girls, became so ashamed at being fat that they stopped eating. They’d lose weight too quickly, adn some would get stuck and would keep losing weight… Some even died, they said at school. That was one of the reasons they’d come up with the operation. No one got the disease anymore, since everyone knew at sixteen they’d turn beautiful. In fact, most people pigged out just before they turned, knowing it would all be sucked away.

Fascinating stuff.

Still, it’s probably a bit predictable, and maybe even a bit done-before (when I was telling Hubby about it, he said it reminded him of Lois Lowry’s Gathering Blue). But for all that, it really was an excellent book.

Now I’m off to read Harry Potter. One week left…

Enchantment

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I first read this one, by Orson Scott Card, back in 1999, soon after it came out. I was leaving my job to spend some time in Germany so Hubby could do dissertation research, and my co-workers gave me a $100 gift card to Borders (they knew me so well!). This was one of the books I bought, and I was eagerly looking forward to reading it, being somewhat of a Card fan. This book was a big disappointment, though. I remember laying on the bed in our room in Germany, yelling at the book to stop moralizing and get BACK TO THE STORY. I sold the book as soon as we got back to the states.

And I have had no desire to read it since.

Until, now. And I did only because my on-line book group out-voted me (I voted for Ender’s Shadow, which I’ve also already read, but liked better…) and chose it to read for this month’s discussion. So, I checked it out from the library, tried to push away my pre-conceived notions of the book, and read it.

It’s not a bad story; in fact, it could have been a brilliant book. Put Sleeping Beauty in Russia, use Baba Yaga as the witch, and work magic into today’s world as well as that of long ago. Add some relationship complexity between the hero, Ivan, and the heroine, Katerina. He kisses her, but it’s not exactly love-that-works-at-first sight. They have to work to get their marriage to work, they have to learn to work together to save Taina from the clutches of Baba Yaga.

But, Card gets in the way of his own story. Or, at least, I got impatient with Card’s storytelling. I knew already that the book was full of tangents (though they weren’t as bad as I remember!), and yes, they still annoyed me. I decided, early on, to put a book dart whenever I got annoyed. There were at least a dozen. Now, in a nearly-400 page book, that’s not that many. Still, the story could have been tighter. If he had laid off the pages of descriptions (and barbs) of music, philosophy, religion, feminism, politics, culture, men-women relationships, and just plain musings, he could have had a tight, fun, interesting 250-page story.

And that book, I’d happily recommend to everyone. This one, not so much.

A Good Year

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I ended up reading A Good Year, by Peter Mayle. It was on the top of the pile, and it seemed like a sensible place to start.

That, and I knocked off one book for the Armchair Traveler Challenge.

A Good Year was a good book. Not a great book, though I think it may have aspired to greatness. Or maybe not. The best way to describe it is very laid-back. But then, it’s set Provence, and they’re nothing if not laid back there, right?

So the basic plot: Max is a London something-or-other high powered (never did figure out what), and he gets one-upped by this total jerk at work. So, in a fit of anger, he quits. Jobless, and soon to be homeless, he checks his mail and discovers that he’s inherited a house and vineyard from his uncle who recently died. So, encouraged by a friend, he moves to Saint-Pons and tries to begin again.

There’s heavy elements in there — Max’s midlife crisis, trying to fit in to a foreign culture, romance, wine smuggling (if you could call it that). But there just wasn’t the tension needed to make a really good book. It’s hard to feel anger for the wine smugglers (since they’re taking a batch of wine made in the vineyard and jacking up the prices and keeping the profits; smuggling is the wrong word, but you get the idea) since you never really get to know the “bad guys” (they just kind of appear and disappear). The only one you can even get a sense for is Nathalie, but even she’s not that fully developed as a character.

It’s hard to feel passion for the romance, since it just kind of happens in the background, too. Empty-shell, hard-on-love Max finds romance in Provence. No tension. It just happens. And it’s not all that satisfying when it does. Max also finds friendship in the “quirky” characters that surround him: Roussel, the worker who makes the wine that’s smuggled; Madame Passepartout, the eccentric housekeeper; Christie, the long-lost American daughter of Max’s uncle (there’s a bit of underlying tension there, but it’s easily dissolved).

In short, there’s conflict, and tension, but it’s all in the background. Nothing, really, comes through. What did come through was, well, the wine. Wine tasting, wine growing, wine making, wine drinking. There’s a LOT of wine in the book. And with wine, of course, good food. There’s a lot of that, too. And it’s beautifully described. I can say this about this book: Mayle knows how to describe a place so that you feel like you are there and how to write a good meal so that you can almost taste the food.

But in the end, in spite of the amount of wine that was drunk and the amount of good food that was eaten, it left me unsatisfied. And I find that highly disappointing.

Which one?

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I faced a dilemma late last week… I finished Wildwood Dancing, the last of my book pile, and I needed to stock up. Which got me wondering about choosing the next book. How does it happen? What’s the thought process behind it all? Sometimes it’s easy: like after finishing Sunshine, I consciously picked something completely unrelated because I knew if I read another fantasy after that one, I wouldn’t be giving it a fair chance. Other times, it’s just a whim: which book is “calling” me, which one would be just perfect for the mood I’m currently in. And then there’s the obligation books: book groups, blog challenges, ones that “have” to be read for whatever reason.

I was sitting on my bed Saturday morning, looking at the pile of books I’d picked up at the library the day before. One book for online book group (Enchantment, by Orson Scott Card), one book for on line book challenge (I decided to start with A Good Year, picked completely at random), one book a friend has been asking me to read (Uglies, by Scott Westerfield) and one book that I felt I should read (The Birchbark House, by Louise Erdrich). And none of them seemed compelling. Sigh. I could bail and read Half Blood Prince, which I’ve been meaning to do before next Saturday, but I’m not sure I’m in the mood for Harry Potter. Yet.

I’m not sure I’m interested in help picking out which book to read next. What I am interested in is how you go about picking your next book. How do you decide which one next?

Wildwood Dancing

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I was supposed to get this one done before June 21st, for the Once Upon a Time challenge, but I didn’t, thanks to the library. But, better late than never, right?

This book, by Juliet Marillier, has gotten mixed reviews across the blogosphere. Some people love it. Some people not so much. I think I fall in the not-so-much category.

It’s not that the book was bad. In fact, it was a quick read. (For plot summaries, you can check out Becky’s and/or Erin’s reviews.) But, for me, it just didn’t sit well. For one, it just seemed too long. Even though it went quickly, I kept checking to see how much more left to go. Usually not a good sign. For two, I have little patience for “true love”. Especially when characters waste away because of it. I’m not terribly romantic (as my hubby often remarks), and I don’t have much tolerance for the heartbreak and heartsickness of true love. So when Tati, the oldest sister, lay dying because she couldn’t see her true love — an almost-Night Person (I totally missed that there were vampires in this book. Vampires are the in thing, aren’t they?) — I just gritted my teeth and plowed through. Please. Girls wasting away because they can’t be with someone they love? Not my idea of a good time. (Maybe having four girls has warped my sense of romance. I wouldn’t want them to think this was an acceptable way of handling disappointment or longing. Eating cake, however….)

And, I have to admit, I didn’t really care for the main character, Jena. I liked her a bit — she was feisty and quite capable, but she was just so practical. So sensible. The opposite of Tati. Which isn’t bad. (Ah! I’ve hit upon it here: Tati and Jena were opposites, both with their loves but not knowing how best to obtain that.) But she had to have EVERYTHING spelled out to her before she was able to act. It seemed for someone as capable as Jena, she ought to be able to do something without waffling about everything. Especially the important things.

The only thing I really enjoyed was loathing Cezar. He was a good villain — one of those that just give you the creeps. Not evil because he’s a monster, but because he’s a man who went wrong. (He didn’t get a good end, though; he just kind of petered out.)

The one redeeming factor is the absolutely beautiful cover. But then, we’re not supposed to judge a book by it’s cover, are we?

Eat Cake

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It was probably inevitable that I read a book called “Eat Cake”, where the description on the back begins: “Ever since childhood, Ruth has found baking cakes to be a source of relief from the stresses of life.” Well, yeah. A novel with cake as stress relief? That’s the book for me. (Mmmmm, cake.)

So, Ruth is a 50-something housewife whose husband has a perfect job, whose 16-year-old daughter Camille doesn’t talk to her except in anger, and whose mother has been living with them for a year ever since her house was broken in to. Things are going pretty well when she gets a double life-whammy: her husband gets laid off from his high-paying job, and her estranged father breaks both his wrists and comes to live with her family. So, of course chaos — and cake — ensues.

The plot itself is a feel-good-and-find-your-purpose-in-life one, nothing deep, or spectacular. It’s just a fun ride. I probably would have been more moved by it if I had read it a couple years ago. But I found this book to be YUMMY. Jeanne Ray just knows how to describe cake. The whole act of choosing which cake to bake, baking it serving it, eating it… it becomes an art form. While I’m probably not even going to attempt any one of the dozen cake recipes in back (no one else would eat them, and I DO NOT need a whole cake to myself), I loved reading about them. Ray should write more food-based books, because she does that part so well.

I’ll leave you with my favorite passage in the book:

Cakes have gotten a bad rap. People equate virtue with turning down dessert. There is always one person at the table who holds up her hand when I serve the cake. No, really, I couldn’t, she says, and then gives her flat stomach a conspiratorial little pat. Everyone who is pressing a fork into that first tender layer looks at the person who declines the plate, and they all think, That person is better than I am. That person has discipline. But that isn’t a person with discipline, that is a person who has completely lost touch with joy. A slice of cake never made anybody fat. You don’t eat the whole cake. You don’t eat a cake every day of your life. You take the cake when it is offered because the cake is delicious. You have a slice of cake and what it reminds you of is someplace that’s safe, uncomplicated, without stress. A cake is a part, a birthday, a wedding. A cake is what’s served on the happiest days of your life.

Amen.

Rockin’ Blog?

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Actually, if you’d asked me, I would have said that I’m the furthest thing from rockin’, but Dewey seemed to think that I qualify, so here I am.

So, even though I don’t consider myself a “rockin’ girl blog”, I feel a sort-of obligation to pass along the tag. Here goes:

1 and 2. I’m going to tag the awesome editors of Estella, Andi and Heather. Putting together a respectable webzine every month, on top of all the craziness in their normal lives. That rocks.

3. Turtlebella over at Slow But Steady. Because she really does rock.

4. Nancy over at Bookfoolery and Babble. Because only a rockin’ girl (um, woman!) could live in Mississippi and have a good attitude about it. That, and I love her photos.

5. And all the good friends I’ve made blogging these past three years. (How do I manage to fit them all in a list of five?) You’re awesome, ladies.

Feel free to pass along the tag.

It’s July!

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And the latest issue of Estella is up online. It’s a great one — devoted to YA books (Not that I’m biased about the greatness of YA books or anything). My contributions (it’s my blog, so I can plug my stuff, right?) are a review of a not-so-good book (though I’m going to have to come to terms with the fact that I seem to be the only one out there who doesn’t like it!), and a really good book. Interestingly, I found it more difficult to write a review of the good book — only because I wanted to do it justice, and I’m not sure I did. And the author of the good book graciously let me interview him… I think I need to do more interviews with people overseas. It was really quite neat sending off an email at 10 p.m. and having a response waiting for me the next morning.

There’s lots of other really good stuff in this issue, too. Go and enjoy.