Month: November 2015

Terrible Reviews: Paper Towns

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Usually I disclaim that I call these Terrible Reviews because I am by no means qualified as a film reviewer, and thus my reviews are likely to be terrible. However, this time, I feel pretty confident in telling you that this film has earned a terrible review.

First of all, this is one of so many novels which was a book first, and the transition from book to film is always fraught with difficulty. You can’t hope to translate the nuances of language from the page to the screen and have that warm, fuzzy feeling carry over with them. And to be fair, I haven’t read John Green’s Paper Towns prior to seeing the film, as I did with The Fault in our Stars. That said, I might have read TFIOS after having viewed the film, but I don’t think I’m going to bother reading Paper Towns at all.

**Also, edited after the fact: For some reason, I ended up having a lot to say about this movie. I don’t know why; maybe it’s because I felt so removed from the narrative that I had time to think about what it was that was removing me from the narrative. Anyway, read on at your peril.**

This is the part where I warn you that there are spoilers ahead. If you’re one of those who cares about such things, you might want to look away, perhaps at the slowly mounting list of things to be done around the house before Thanksgiving.

I’m going to go ahead and acknowledge that I am not the target audience for this film. I’m not a high schooler, and I’m not a romantic, and I’m double definitely not a hopelessly romantic high schooler. I’m thirty and change, jaded and grumpy. So this film is on its face Not For Me.

But here’s a film which features a bland-as-butcher-paper protagonist pining after a quirky-as-pineapples-in-pink-tutus imaginary female love interest with some really frankly hard-to-swallow-even-based-on-a-pretty-substantial-willful-suspension-of-disbelief events driving the story, though to say the story is “driven” is a metaphor I’m going to unpack in a minute. It’s not so much “driven” as it stalls out halfway up the hill and coasts backwards while you try like hell to figure out how to get out without shredding your face or breaking any limbs.

Now, maybe I’m just too old. It hurts my soul to say that, but I fully appreciate the possibility that Paper Towns might be the Breakfast Club of this generation, and I just don’t get it. But I don’t think so. I think the reason The Breakfast Club was so important for my generation (and still is, I humbly think) was because just about anybody watching it could see himself in one of the characters. I don’t feel that happening here. In fact, I don’t know if anybody can particularly see himself in these characters. But enough pining for my own lost childhood. Let’s dive in.

The Good.

The film’s central message — that nobody really knows who they are, and everybody is doing their best to figure it out — is one that I can get down with. My writings here at the blarg over the past (almost) two years are evidence of my selfsame quest. There’s an existential doubt there that the film communicates well, though I’ll point out that other films do it better (The Breakfast Club, not to beat a dead horse).

Also, there’s a decentish road trip sequence which captures nicely the soul-crushing monotony that a supposed romp across the country actually entails. I don’t know, however, if the filmmakers’ intention was to serve up a boring cross country jaunt. Further, again, so many other films tackle the romanticization of the road trip, and do it so much better.

In seriousness, the protagonist’s sense of doubt is pretty real, I would say, in upper-middle class, white America. He’s on a fast track to college and a career that he feels pretty confidently is the “thing he should be doing,” but his encounter with The Girl is the monkey wrench in the machine. His growing certainty that there’s something more and that maybe he’s been looking at his life in the wrong way is a sentiment that will echo with impending graduates. Again, though, this is not a new idea … again, it’s done (better, I think) in The Breakfast Club.

Then there’s the concept, which is actually pretty fascinating: the “paper town” being a fictional place that exists only on a map. It’s kind of a lovely metaphor for the lead female’s grail-quest to figure out who she really is; the only place she can find herself is in a place that literally doesn’t exist.

The Bad.

Oh, boy. Okay. I just sang the protagonist’s praises so that I could decry him here, because he is as compelling a central character as a slowly melting ice sculpture of a pile of cow dung. He’s not charismatic, but he’s not a wallflower. He’s not dashing, but he’s not  better off wearing a paper bag on his head. He’s not a jock, but he’s not a glasses-and-suspenders clad nerd. He’s a scoop of vanilla ice cream, but not even a heaping scoop with the bursting bits of vanilla beans that explode on your tongue; he’s the factory-made processed stuff flavored with chemicals derived from chemicals that were probably used to condition car bumpers or something. It’s hard to root for him or even to care about his struggle, because in the first place, he’s just so very lacking in flavor, but also because the stakes couldn’t be lower. Regardless of how this little love story plays out, he’s gonna be fine.

Then, there’s the girl. She might as well be wearing a big neon sign that says “I am that girl who’s not like the other girls.” She’s “delightfully” quirky and “refreshingly” blunt in her no-nonsense, no B.S., no rules approach to the world. My wife actually put her finger on it: “She’s the Cool Girl that the protagonist laments in Gone Girl.” If you didn’t read / see that one (you should, if only to see Neil Patrick Harris get his throat slashed open in one of the most genuinely fargoed-up things I’ve ever seen on film), Cool Girl an invented construct of male-centric media, a female who genuinely likes “manly” things and eschews “girly” things. She doesn’t play by “girly” rules but she is still quintessentially feminine, working her wiles upon the men in her life unintentionally through her cuteness and coolness, and remaining oblivious to how much these men want and desire her. Okay, maybe I overexplained that one a bit, but this is the character. She laments the entire town she lives in as being “made of paper,” the people and places made of flimsy, immaterial dreams and aspirations.

The problem is that as vanilla as the boy is, the girl is off-the-wall to the same degree. They are light and dark, oil and water, peanut butter and whatever the opposite of jelly is. If he’s too boring to care about, she’s too ludicrously constructed to believe. She traveled with a carnival for three weeks as an eleven year old? She routinely runs away and her parents don’t call the cops? She defaces property, going so far as to leave her name and signature at the crime scenes, and nobody ever presses charges against her? She somehow has connections that allow her to traipse around executive boardrooms in bank buildings? In what effing universe is even a single one of these things possible?

Now, apparently, it has been said that author John Green constructed these two characters to sort of spoof the roles that they, admittedly, take up to eleven. And I can see that… but I don’t see what the end is for all those means. If you’re spoofing the roles, why isn’t the story funnier? (The film has its funny moments, but it’s not a comedy.) If you’re just leaning on the trope, what’s the point? I seriously can’t figure out if the explanation that they are designed to be caricatures holds water, and that’s a problem if you view films critically, as I do.

We just won’t even mention the cardboard cut-outs that make up the rest of the cast. Or the fact that for each of the three “outcast” guys at the core of the film, there’s a perfect dream-girl who thinks he’s dreamy when they get to know each other. Or that there are conveniently six seats in the minivan that they trek across country in. (One seat never gets filled; ooh, symbolism.)

The WTF.

Again, I fear that maybe I’m just too old, but here are a few questions I found myself asking during the film:

  1. What parents — when called by their high-school child during hour 7 of an at-least-72-hour road trip — simply allow the thing to go off without raising a fuss?
  2. How does a 17- or 18-year-old girl manage to simply disappear while still apparently having her cell phone? (She explains to the protagonist, as if he were a simpleton, that she speaks to her sister every day.)
  3. Is she trying to be found or isn’t she? She leaves all these “clues” behind, but the hero tracks her down on some seriously flukey and frankly nonsensical coincidences and good fortune. If you’re trying to be found, you have to do better than hoping that the finder will find an atlas (an ATLAS, of all things, in the age of google) in your ex-boyfriend’s house. If you’re NOT trying to be found, what’s the goldfingered point of leaving behind addresses of your secret hideouts and cryptic messages that point to your secret location?
  4. Do none of these kids have parents? Seriously, there are five kids on this multi-day road trip, and apparently all of them just went for it and left their parents flapping in the breeze. NOBODY had parents who called the cops?
  5. How did “the gang” just barely make it back for prom riding directly there in a van, but the hero manages to derp around town for a few hours, find the girl, sit down to a lengthy milkshake and conversation with her, have his heart broken, then take a BUS home and still make it to prom in time to share a dance?

I have a pretty forgiving suspension of disbelief, but this isn’t some tacky, there-are-no-rules farce like a National Lampoon flick. The story seems to want to be taken seriously. Yet there are these tremendous gaps in the story that can’t be filled by any amount of audience-goodwill spackle. It asks too much of its audience. Or maybe I’m too old.

Maybe it’s poking fun at a genre of romantic comedy, coming-of-age stories, but I don’t see what point it’s trying to make, if so. Maybe it’s trying to follow the tropes of those genres only to buck our expectations at the end, but again, it’s not particularly original in doing so, and it’s no payoff when the “surprise” ending comes. It’s kind of like a whoopee cushion that the prankee discovers without sitting on it, then he picks it up and makes the fart noise anyway. It’s just weird.

Then there’s the pacing. My god, the pacing. Snails could outrun the narrative of this thing; in fact, there are sequences in the second half of the film where you see a map of the eastern seaboard with the classic dotted line creeping off the gang’s progress. In the scale, it positively creeps. I remember thinking, yep, that’s about how fast this feels. The central conflict (Cool Girl has disappeared) doesn’t begin until almost the halfway point of the movie; the first half is all taken up with the girl committing felonies (sorry, “pranks”) against a host of people who have wronged her. It’s fun, but my wife and I found ourselves looking at each other to ask, “exactly where is all this going?”

Back to the Redbox first thing in the morning, that’s where.

The Verdict.

Okay, so maybe I haven’t been particularly impartial throughout this film, but frankly, I’m disappointed. I’m a big fan of John Green. I’m especially fond of his youtube channels — Mental Floss and the Crash Course series are both educational fun worth checking out — and I dug The Fault in Our Stars even though I didn’t fawn over it like, I feel, much of its audience did. (Again, I’m not the target demographic, but I will maintain that much like with The Notebook, TFIOS illustrates that the line between “stalker” and “persistent love interest” shifts wildly depending on how good-looking the pursuer is.)

In short, this effort feels hollow. Formulaic. As immaterial and fleeting as paper. Perhaps, then, the film is spoofing itself: It takes characters who don’t matter on a love story that isn’t real, toward a romantic payoff that does not exist. A Paper Romance.

Or maybe it’s just a bad movie.

All that said, John Green does have a knack for a nicely turned phrase, so I’m willing to bet the book is a fair bit better than the movie. For me, though, the movie was bad enough to make me seriously skeptical about the strength of the source material.

Sorry, JG. Maybe I’ll give it a try again on your next novel.

To the best of my knowledge, all images are copyright of Fox 2000 pictures, and based on source material by John Green.

Totally Not Helpful

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Reading the search results that lead people to my site (when they aren’t blocked… thanks Google) is sometimes insightful, sometimes telling, sometimes hilarious.

Today’s gem?

what happens if you accidentally inhale a puff of comet

You’re not going to see me going grammar stickler all over somebody’s search terms. It does, however, give me a fit of the giggles that somebody — presumably in a panic after breathing in a lungful of bathroom disinfectant — stumbles onto my site, looking for some sort of deliverance from their freshly bleached trachea, and finds only my short story about a kid who sneaks onto the train that carries the elderly into space on a one-way trip.

Totally not helpful, but maybe I have a new reader.

Unless the comet did its work and ravaged his throat and windpipe enough to make my site the last thing he saw. Which is, if you think about it, kind of still a win.

The War On The War On The War On Christmas

Pavowski14 Comments

Two things:

  1. Christmas is not under attack.
  2. Even if it were under attack, there are few things in our society so likely to survive an attack as Christmas.

Still, you can’t swing a pixelated cat this season without running into something like this:

Which, holy crap, is awesome. But frightening. But mostly hilarious and awesome.

The opening salvos in the perennial “war on Christmas” sounded a few weeks ago, when Starbucks had the gall to roll out a “holiday” cup design that had a little less vaguely Christmas-themed adornment than in years past. The valiant defenders of Christendom and Christmas quickly recognized the slight and wasted no time returning fire upon the hapless soldiers on the front line: the poor and uninterested baristas who put the cups into their hands. Which is a little like if I, upset over all the prematurely wilted spinach I’ve gotten lately from my Kroger, go in and dump a bin full of rotten greens on a bagboy. In classic smug (and most importantly, easily bandwagon-able) fashion, throngs of Christmas crusaders took back the coffee bar by claiming their names were “Merry Christmas”, thus forcing the disinterested twenty-somethings to make the totally-not-Christmasy-at-all red cups absolutely Christmasy.

(Fixed, apparently.)

Still, blink and you might have missed it. Already nobody cares about the cups anymore, much like nobody cares about the religious lunatics who felt slighted by the cups. There is, after all, actual persecution and marginalization happening in the world without entitled yuppies inventing more of it.

But we know what’s coming.

Because Thanksgiving is almost here. And Thanksgiving, for all that most of us look forward to guzzling gravy straight from the boat and possibly embedding our heads inside the cooked turkey’s flavor-cavity (what, am I the only one that starts Thanksgiving dinner that way?), is nothing these days but the red carpet leading up to Christmas’s door. The decorations are going up. The soundtrack at the mall is changing from inane pop music that nobody listens to to the heartwarming Christmas songs none of us listen to. (The previous sentence is correct.) (And seriously, give me Elvis Presley and Burl Ives and keep the rest of the holiday tunes.)

Fox News will cry persecution first. Actually, they probably already have. Then, under pressure from … people, apparently, or maybe just because they see Fox doing it so they feel they should jump in, CNN will “investigate”. Then it’s only a matter of time before the local reporters in your city are standing in front of a nativity scene in your neighborhood, as stony-faced as if they were standing witness at a murder scene, to tell you about the protests outside such and such government building and the pushback from whatever organized blah-blahs. (I seriously got weary in the middle of typing that sentence and just gave up.)

Let’s be honest. Christmas is not under attack. And even if it were, the “attack” means about as much as an army of clowns attacking Fort Knox with toothpicks. Christmas is woven into the thread of our collective national consciousness. Atheists and Jews celebrate Christmas: it’s a good way to feel involved, and it’s too exhausting not to. Christmas is going nowhere. It’s too much a part of who we are.

But neither are the eternally put-upon going anywhere, which means that every year we will have to put up with the rhetoric (and let’s be honest, the whining) of those who feel that the rest of the world is at war with Christmas. And, internet society being what it is, mockers of those who complain about the world being at war with them live for this season too. The War on the War on Christmas is as predictable as December 25th itself.

It’s endlessly amusing to me that in this season which is supposed to be about lifting each other up and expressing warm feelings and charity and giving and vaguely-defined general good will that throngs of idiots will take to the internet and the street and whatever soapbox is to hand to get good and wound up about this invented conflict.

Which is why, this season, we need to declare war on the War on the War on Christmas. All of these people need to go. People are allowed to say “Merry Christmas”. People are allowed to not say it. Government buildings should maybe not decorate themselves in explicit Christian iconography because, you know, that irritating little Constitutional bit about the separation of church and state. But that doesn’t stop you from decorating your house, or from going out and seeing other houses decorated, or from going to the mall and wading around in the Santa Claus orgy that’s been going on there for weeks. Fargoing live and let live.

But of course, that also means that we need to stop giving attention to the squawkers who ridicule the idiots getting upset about this stuff in the first place. Live and let live. Just like anything else on TV and in the news: if you don’t watch it and don’t care about it, pretty soon, they’ll stop running it.

So declare war on the War on the War on Christmas. Ignore all the hate-babble and go and have yourself a merry little whatever.

Just make sure you spend lots of money.

That’s the real reason for the season.

That, and Rambo Jesus. Sorry. I just had to post it again.

This post is part of SoCS. Head to LindaGHill‘s blog to check it out and get involved. And, yeah, I’m still taking something of a break from my standard re-motivational weekend rambles; it feels odd to write about writing when I’m not actually writing much. Regularly scheduled programming will return someday.

Toddler Life, Chapter 331: Dinner Plans

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Parenting is nothing if not a slow ceding of control over your own life to humans less than half your size. You think you’ve got things more or less figured out, and then along come the sprouts and you realize that not only is the world not what you thought it was, but it’s incredibly and ridiculously more dangerous than you thought. I personally can no longer do the dishes without keeping a wary eye on the upturned silverware on the tray in the dishwasher. Incidentally, you also learn just how slippery certain surfaces can become when covered in chocolate milk or melted popsicle or (and this is happening alarmingly often of late) toddler vomit.

Control slips away by degrees.

First, it’s sleep — you are now slave to the sleep schedule of somebody who has no need for an alarm clock to wake up at 4 AM or earlier.

Then, it’s evening entertainment — gone are the days of late (or even evening) movies. Banished are quiet dinner dates. No more can you even enjoy a leisurely glass of wine while cooking. The rugrats steal all this away in great grabbing gusts.

But there was another milestone, another reckoning of just how far we’ve fallen, and it’s come over the past few weeks, because our oldest has started to develop a taste and preference for certain foods. Pizza is a big hit, though he knows he can’t have it all the time. Grilled cheese is a several-times-a-week favorite.

But you know the toddlers are running the house when you’re having bacon and eggs and pancakes for dinner on a Wednesday.

Respectable adult life, I hardly knew ye.

wtf wordpress?

Pavowski7 Comments

Why, when wordpress redesigns their drafting page, do they always get rid of the word counter down at the bottom? And why does the drafting box always shrink?

The word counter is a thing I’m constantly concerned with (because, I don’t know if you’ve noticed this or not, but like faculty meetings at my school, I tend to run a little bit long). Especially for my fiction, which I’m working on getting tighter, but for my everyday posts, I’m making an effort to keep things concise. Wasted words are wasted time, and I don’t like wasting my time or anybody’s who reads the site. Without that counter, I can feel myself (already even within this post, and the parentheticals aren’t helping) adding words in one after another just by dint of the fact that nobody’s there to stop me, and no word counter is there to shame me.

And the layout. I swear, the webpage is using about 50% of my monitor’s horizontal space to display the text box, with great blank swathes down either side of the page, like they mowed the center of the yard down nice and neat but left the sides on “jungle” setting. Add in the toolbar creeping from the top and I can see my words taking up about 33% of the available space.

33% of the space, when the words are all I care about.

Did I accidentally tweak a setting? Or has wordpress just “fixed” my “problems” for me?