Day Six: Killarney, Pt. 2

For the first time on the trip we get to sleep in, which means I wake up for breakfast at seven-thirty instead of six-thirty in the morning, and I don’t have to put my luggage outside our door. Pure bliss.

Our first excursion of the day is a drive around the Ring of Kerry. It’s a shame that we’re coming to this area so late in the trip, because so many people have told me that the Ring of Kerry boasts some of the most beautiful landscape in the country. Unfortunately, I’ve seen so many picturesque coastlines, I’m kind of landscaped out. The days are blending together, and one rolling green hill looks exactly like the next. The days are blending together as well. I’m starting to get vacation fever, where I can’t remember a time when I wasn’t living on a bus. Is it day? Is it night? How many thatch roofed cottages are too many?

We stop at what our guide promises to be an absolutely spectacular view, and apparently he was right, because one of the pictures I took from this spot is now the background on my iPad and it still makes me want to cry a little every time I look at it, especially when I’m playing the Lord of the Rings soundtrack on said iPad at the same time. On an unrelated note, I eat seafood chowder for the third and final time on our trip.

We eventually return to Killarney for our jaunty car rides. My tour book calls it a “jaunting” car ride, but I swear, our guide said jaunty and I like the sound of that better. We climb up onto old timey wagons as our jaunty car driver doles out plaid fleece blankets. I am squashed in on a bench next to a cop from New York (or was it Boston?) of Irish descent and his sassy blond wife. Our driver is a short squat fellow who looks like a Mary Poppins extra and pronounces his “th’s” like “t’s.” I don’t remember his name, but the horse was named Charlie. Alka, a doctor from New Jersey, keeps sassing our driver about his jokes. I knew I liked her for a reason.

Riding through a national park, our driver points out a herd of deer, which are allegedly of Japanese origin, and are kept in this park for the sole purpose of feeding an indigenous eagle. It is illegal to hunt the deer, as this is the eagle’s only source of food. In hindsight, this story sounds kind of crazy and I’m wondering if our guide was just making crap up.

The jaunty car takes us to Ross Castle, where I once more harass my mother to take comical photos of me climbing around the ruins. On the way back, Alka convinces our driver to let her sit in the front, and then drive the jaunty car. This lady is out of control, and I am greatly amused. While I appreciate how modern travel allows us to cross countries and even continents in a matter of hours, there is something about traveling by horse that is charming and magical. For a moment, I almost wish I was one of those awkward girls who grew up on farms and learned to ride horses since she was three. I don’t want the ride to end. I want to jump on the horse and run away to join a traveling Irish circus.

Back in town, it instantly starts to pour and my mom and I duck into a shop to purchase my father a hat very similar to the one our jaunty car driver was wearing. When the rainstorm intensifies, we help the lady shopkeeper drag her racks and baskets into the store. See Ireland? See what a kind, helpful American I am? Wouldn’t you like to have me dwell within your borders? I thought you’d see it my way.

We’re on our own for dinner, and I am horrified to discover I am craving pizza. After a deal of whininess on my part, we walk back into town and find a nice, relatively inexpensive Italian restaurant to eat at. It’s not bad, but it’s no Papa John’s pizzeria.

Back at the hotel, we sit down with a lovely lady from Vancouver for a drink. I proceed to get slightly buzzed and tell her how happy it makes me to meet a successful, beautiful single woman who is 40. We talk about marriage, choosing our future paths, and just life in general. I think for the first time what an opportunity it is to go on one of these tours. You’re thrust into close quarters with a bunch of strangers, and while some of them might be real weirdos, you can also meet some really incredible people. With that thought, I fall into bed, now more than just buzzed, and quickly pass out.

Day Five: Killarney

I don’t remember much about the next morning, because I was hungover. I remember wanting a Perrier and settling for the Ireland equivalent. Our first stop of the day was a quick stroll round the quaint village of Adare, chalk full of thatched roof cottages. Most of our time in Adare, however, was spent trying to find dental floss. There was none to be had, at least in the sense there was nothing like the spools of thin waxed string that we crazy Americans are used to. We did manage to buy a sack of individual thick threads that the lady at the apothecary claimed would be exactly like our dental floss, only it wasn’t at all, and I could barely get it in between my teeth.

For the first time ever, I managed to doze on the bus. It was that or get even more nauseous from the constant twisting, winding coastal roads. At last we stopped for lunch, in the most whimsically named town ever: Dingle. Needless to say, Dingle was a real delight.

If you’ve ever heard of the town of Dingle, you may know that it the city has a mascot. That mascot is Fungi the dolphin. Fungi is actually a real dolphin who likes to hang around the bay in Dingle. He first showed up in 1984. In case you hadn’t checked a calendar in awhile, it will soon be 2012, which makes Fungi a few years past the typical twenty-five year dolphin lifespan. Our tour guide pondered the question of what Dingle will do when Fungi is no more. Along the wharf was a charming statue of Fungi. Somehow I managed to bamboozle my mother and Evelyn into taking comical pictures with the Fungi statue. Joy is had by all.

I have to say the only downside to Dingle was the dog poo that seemed to be all over the city, in spite of the numerous signs posted telling people to clean up after their dogs. Did the people of Dingle just not care? Maybe they didn’t have as strict of fines as they do in Los Angeles. Or maybe the dogs are all jealous of the attention Fungi gets, and aims to ruin Dingle tourism. All I know is that it took fifteen minutes, several puddles of rainwater, and a very thin twig to clean off my mother’s shoe.

After saying goodbye to Fungi and the good people of Dingle, we continued down the coast, expecting to wind our way up to some famous rock or something up on a hill. Perhaps if we’d actually made it up to said rock, I’d remember the name, but we didn’t so therefore I didn’t. After the previous day’s downpour, a coastal bridge had washed out, denying us access to this mysterious rock and the picturesque landscape leading up to it. You could literally look across the enormous hills and see the long strips of brown where the rain swept the dirt from the mountain top down to the sea. What was most impressive though, was the skillful way our bus driver Mickey managed to turn the bus around on a narrow coastal road without falling off the edge, or running down one of the various sheep or cows meandering around the place.

All in all, it wasn’t the most exciting day, but it was a nice break. We arrived in Killarney that evening and had a bit of time to just relax, take a hot shower before we dined at the hotel on horribly salty mackerel. If you can imagine the texture of cooked fish, only instead of a meat or fishy taste, it’s like you dumped an entire container of Morton’s onto your tongue. I believe it was that evening that I vowed to stop trying to eat in Ireland and just stick to the Guinness.

Day Four: Ennis

The next morning, I awoke too tired to even feel angry anymore. It only took four days to break my spirit. You win, bus tour. You win. We actually managed to get downstairs to breakfast early, only to find half the old people from our tour were already milling about the lobby, getting cranky that the hotel hasn’t opened their breakfast buffet yet. Probably because they all went to bed the previous night at 7am.

Our first stop of the day is a little town called Knock. There wasn’t much in Knock, other than a rather large shrine to the Virgin Mary and a surplus of religious themed gift shops. Apparently, back in 1879, an apparition of the Virgin Mary, Saint John and Saint Joseph appeared to about seventy people in this very spot. This made me think of when I was little, and my catholic nanny would tell me all sorts of miracle stories about holy statues coming to life and saving kids from fires. The statues in Knock, however, did not do any of this while I was there, but maybe that’s because I’m not a Catholic. It was all a little awkward to watch people trying to go to church when you‘re just a tourist who wants to snap a few pics and then use the bathroom.

Previous in the trip, we’d experienced a bit of rain, but nothing that made me regret the absence of a Disneyworld poncho. Then we got to Galway for lunch. My mom and I took refuge in a delightful little crepe restaurant where we drank tea and gorged on sugar and dough.

The rain did not stop, and in fact, seemed to intensify, almost as if it knew where we were going next. The Cliffs of Moher. (Which, by the way, is pronounced like ‘more’ not like ‘mo-hair’…I think) Our guide made a point of telling us how many people either jumped to their deaths or accidentally fell off every year. This would not be the last time we received such a warning. I’m not sure if this is a statement about the stupidity of tourists or the dangerous quality of Irish national landmarks.

Even with the rain and the cold and the hail that eventually stabbed us in the eyes, I think this was another of my favorite places of the tour. I know there are beautiful landscapes in California, but so far, Ireland repeatedly beat any coastline I had ever seen in the states. We hiked as far as we could along the path, thankful for the large stone barricade that stood between us and a long plummet into the ocean. I think I could have wandered back and forth along the cliffs all day, but unfortunately, the rain had managed to permeate every layer of clothing I was currently wearing, which was a lot. We hopped back on the bus and over to our hotel, where we could blow dry my coat for our fancy castle dinner.

Fancy castle dinner?! Say what? Have you ever been to Medieval Times, or even a renaissance festival? Well, going to Bunratty Castle was sort of like that, only about a million times better because you were in an actual castle with authentic Irish people. We even had to climb an authentic super creepy and narrow spiral staircase. They really ought to have let us climb the staircase before they started dishing out the mead, or honey wine for you non fantasy nerds out there. As I sat on our long bench, trying to get my mom drunk on white wine, I pondered what would ye olde lord of Bunratty think if he knew back then what would become of his home hundreds of years later? And will we eventually suffer the same fate? Will our boring modern houses one day be visited by moon children of the future? Will they sit in mock-Ikea furniture and try to imagine what it was really like to live in the 2010s, back before they had eyelid TVs and colleges on Mars? Keep in mind, I pretty much consumed an entire pitcher of red wine myself, not to mention the mead. I think I remember at one point yelling at my mom, taunting her that one of our new friends was cool because she was drinking more than my mom. Needless to say, we all had a really good time.

Before each course, a chap in what looked like Shakespeare pumpkin pants would present a dish before an old couple they’d chosen to be the lord and lady of the house, so they could deem it worthy or not. The traditional singers and musicians were all quite skillful, even if their costumes looked like something from a Halloween shop. And because you can’t go anywhere as a tourist without audience participation, one of the lads from our tour was thrown into a dungeon and made to sing in a comical fashion for the amusement of young and old, but mostly old. The evening ended with me attempting to go to the bathroom in the disgusting, toilet-paperless bus toilet, giggling to myself that I could add “castle” to the list of historical places I’d gotten drunk in.

END OF DAY FOUR

Day Three: Sligo

Another cheerful morning! Thankfully, I’ve already given up on any semblance of looking attractive, which really streamlines this getting dressed process. I figure in a week, I’m going to smell like Irish hotel anyway, so why not take the pressure off right away. Down at breakfast, we were delighted to find that in addition to the heart attack Irish breakfast special, this hotel offered croissants and tiny wrapped blocks of cheese. Later, my mom will reveal to me that she has shoved some of each into her purse for us to snack on later. I don’t know why this amuses me as much as it does. It makes me feel like I’m in Lord of the Rings. Characters in fantasy books are forever walking around with wheels of cheese and loaves of bread in their satchel. It’s a fitting metaphor, especially if you know my relationship with my mom, dutifully dragging me around while I whine and collapse from exhaustion. It kind of happens a lot.

I was truly quite excited for our first stop of the day, the Giant’s Causeway in County Atrim. According to my trusty guidebook, the Giant’s Causeway is a natural phenomenon of these crazy looking hexagonal rocks formed by a volcano fifty billion years ago. Our bus dumped us out at the little rest stop where were told to await another bus that would take us down a short drive to the rocks. After standing in the cold for an eternity, I decided to ditch the oldies and the bus and walk down myself, because that‘s what hip, rebellious young people do. We don’t play by the rules! And then my mom came along after me, probably to make sure I didn’t faint and accidentally fall into the ocean, because that’s what mom’s do. Take care of their idiot, rebellious children!

Though it was windy and cold, within a few minutes I could no longer see the small visitor’s center and gift shop. On one of me was a tall, rocky hill. On the other, the coast. I had this feeling that I didn’t want to blink, I wanted to somehow freeze this image in my mind. There are not words for it, other than it was all very Lord of the Rings, right down to the bread and cheese in our purse.

http://i.pbase.com/u47/jflogel/large/33978808.GiantsCauseway7.jpg

The actual site itself was even more stunning, and I can easily believe how people thought it was a magical place. I began to climb out onto the rocks pillars of rock, toward the ocean. There were a few other tourists there doing the same, so I figured at least I wouldn’t be the only moron who plummeted to my death. There, on the edge of the water, feeling a wind that was literally strong enough to knock me down if I wasn’t careful, I had either a transcendent or cheese ball thought, depending on how you look at it. It was a reminder of how puny and weak we are, that we can build our skyscrapers and are compuphonepads and they all mean nothing up against a wind that was strong enough to knock the air out of my lungs. No joke. For a few seconds, I held my arms out Titanic style and just let the sea spray hit me. Later, I would find that while I was getting my mind blown by the destructive beauty of nature, the oldies safe on solid ground snapped some very comical photos of me looking like a jackass.

And on we went! We stopped in Derry for lunch, where I had my first of what would many bowls of seafood chowder on this trip. Unfortunately, the first place was the best, and I proceeded to lament that most wondrous original bowl for the remainder of my trip. None other could live up to it’s precedence. If you’re ever in Derry, the restaurant was called Fitzeroy’s. I warn you now, if you go there, be prepared to give up ever eating chowder anywhere else again. It was that good.

We made one more stop in Donegal as we continued on toward Sligo. By then I was starting to get antsy on the bus, so I decided to prove our guide’s claim that there were eight million sheep in Ireland. Thus, my mother and I began to count the sheep. Ironically, we did not fall asleep at all, but became very agitated when the bus was moving faster than we could count, which in turn led to a lot of hysterical laughing and screaming of “Quick!!! How many over there? Twenty? Fifty?! HOW MANY?!” Eventually, this devolved into a lot of rough estimating and upon reaching eight hundred, we gave up. In conclusion, there are in fact, a lot of sheep in Ireland.

The bus arrived in Sligo for the evening. We would be staying that night in an old train station that had been converted into a Best Western. After settling in, I headed back down to the lobby to explore. On the way, I ran into one of the ladies from our tour, Alka, a doctor from New Jersey. “Have you found the computer yet?” she asked. I nodded and told her where it was. “I always know if I find you, I’ll find the computer,” she explained with a laugh. This was when I realize how crazy I’m going being disconnected from Los Angeles. I was so excited to get away, and yet my brain is still suck there. Clearly, I’m not drinking enough on this trip.

END OF DAY THREE

Day Two: Belfast

I was once told by a doctor that when you lose a night of sleep, you can never truly make up for it, no matter how much rest you get in the following days. Which is probably why in spite of having gone to bed at like nine o’clock our first night in Ireland, I feel like death upon waking up the following morning at 6:15am. As my mother reminds me I need to get my suitcase ready for the porter to pick up, I instantly regress to the state of angst-filled teenager, cursing the ill stars I was born under, and wondering how anyone could be so unlucky as I am at this moment, in Ireland on a vacation that I really didn’t have to pay for! Woe is me! Curse you evil world!

Eventually I get out of bed, and a little after that we’re back on the bus, now heading to Northern Ireland. Our first stop is in a city called Downpatrick, where St. Patrick is allegedly buried. You know, St. Patrick. The one of banishing snakes and green beer fame? Yup, that guy. They say he’s “allegedly” buried there because he died in roughly 460 AD, and I guess they didn’t have DNA tests back then so nobody‘s completely sure. While touring the cemetery, I made sure to take about fifty million pictures in case any ghost decided to reveal themselves. Unfortunately, the only thing that was revealed was my inability to take quality photos.

A few hours later, we make it to Belfast and stop near the city hall to grab a quick lunch. Over a delicious meal of fish and chips, my mom and I make friends with some of the other tour goers. Everyone we meet is beyond nice and inquisitive to my job and life, making me feel even worse for my judginess earlier. But there is always one downside whenever I meet new people. I get to explain all over again that no, I’m not in college right now. In fact, I actually haven’t been in college for three years, and that was grad school, and no no, I’m not a child prodigy, I just look like it. Yup, almost 30. Yes, I get that a lot. After lunch, I try to stand in the sun so maybe my skin will wrinkle faster.

We arrive at our hotel in Belfast, which despite being in Ireland was apparently assembled by Swedes, because our bedroom looks like an Ikea display case with modern furniture and a crazy computer console on the desk. The computer had a huge welcome message for Ms. Steinhoff (I assume my mom) and… Steinho? I am not kidding, it says Ms. Steinhoff and Steinho. HOW DID THEY KNOW???

A brief interlude. Shortly after arriving at this hotel, I almost fall down a flight of stairs and die, but am saved by our tour bus driver, a delightful Irish fellow named Mickey, who grabs me before I plummet to what could only have been a most painful demise. Mickey and I quickly bond over this incident and become best friends for life. I instantly become cooler for having an in-joke with the bus driver.

Next up, a tour of the city. The tour mentioned that Belfast happens to be where the Titanic was built. They showed us a bright, shiny new museum (not open yet, we drove by it) that has been constructed for the hundred year anniversary of the Titanic’s sinking on April 14, 1912. If you’re interested and have a bazillion dollars to burn, there is going to be a memorial cruise next April that will follow the Titanic’s voyage across the Atlantic, stopping on the spot it sank on the proper night, then hopefully continuing on what would have been its route to New York City.

ENOUGH ABOUT HISTORY! Now on to what Ireland is really known for. The drinking. The tour ended with a stop at the Crown Bar, a beautiful old Victorian pub filled with these tiny cubicles where guests can seclude themselves for a night of Guinness binging. The story goes that you can leave the door to your “snug” as they’re called, open if you wish to invite others in, but were originally built as a way for people to drink unseen. That’s Victorian morals for you I guess. It’s okay to be an alcoholic, just don’t let anyone SEE YOU being an alcoholic. We linger at the bar until our Guinnesses (Guinnessi? What is the plural of Guinness??) have all been quaffed, and then head back to the hotel. Somehow I manage to direct my mother and our new traveling companion, Evelyn, back to the hotel without anyone getting murdered.

We dine in the hotel restaurant and are seated next to a family from our tour. The most remarkable fact concerning this event, is that the family contains young people. YOUNG PEOPLE!!! They invite me to go walk into the city for drinks, and I very much want to join them on this journey. I’m a young person! I like drinking! I’m super hip! Okay, I’m moderately hip. I can pass for hip if I need to. If someone held a gun to my head, I could hopefully convince them that I maybe knew a few hip people in college. I really do want to go to bar and hang out with these young people…. But instead I pass out in the hotel at ten o’clock.

And so ends DAY TWO.

Day One: Dublin

Our trip to Ireland got off to a rocky start before we even left the country. Before we even left the state, actually. We awoke Wednesday morning to find our flight from Detroit to Philadelphia had been canceled, and after a phone call to the airline, they placed us on another flight at 4:15, a couple hours before our previous flight. This meant we had to race to finish packing and get on the road to Detroit, roughly an hour and fifteen minutes away. Arriving at around 1:15, we are informed immediately upon checking in that the four o’clock flight has also been canceled. Our last chance is a flight at 1:15. Oh wait, it’s already 1:15! Good luck catching it, because this is Detroit and we will absolutely not help you any more than we absolutely have to. Long story short, after begging a few kind strangers to cut in the security line and running halfway down a terminal in my socks, my mother and I are the last ones on the plane and make it to Philadelphia, where we have like four hours before our connecting flight to Dublin! Hooray U.S. Airways!

Cut to: Dublin airport. I’m delirious from lack of sleep. There are absolutely no red heads in the airport. I try to look as cool as possible, standing next to my mom and dragging my purple luggage. As I scan the crowd gathering for our tour group, a horrible realization dawns upon me. These are all old people. Old or at least middle aged. Young people stay in hostels. Young people go backpacking across Europe. Young people do not take bus tours. What have I done?!

We get to the hotel and are allowed a brief time to sleep before our trip begins in earnest. In our room, my mother and I are baffled by an inability to turn the lights on. We discover a key slot beside the front door. Apparently, to either save money or energy, you have to keep your room key in this slot anytime you want to turn on the lights. While I appreciate the effort to save on resources, it is rather difficult to stumble around in the dark looking for a keycard when you have to pee in the middle of the night.

After a lot of juvenile whininess on my part and a lot of Mother Teresa like patience on my mother’s part, we walk to a nearby café to enjoy a bit of breakfast. Now the traditional Irish breakfast is made up of the following: sausages (bangers), bacon (rashers), another type of sausage, fried eggs, a grilled tomato, and something that may have had mushrooms in it, and toast. So basically, a whole lot of meat and carbs. What they did not have was fresh fruit. This is the moment where I realize how incredibly spoiled I’ve become living in southern California. Not everyone lives in a magical world of sunshine and citrus. But a impending case of scurvy is a small price to pay for escaping the traffic and smog of Los Angeles.

So our first night in Ireland, I almost got my mom murdered. Okay that’s an exaggeration. After ditching the old people on the bus, we set out into Dublin, happy and carefree, ready to enjoy all that this beautiful city had to offer! Our first stop was at a Starbucks. YAY!!!! No, this was just a stepping stone. A coworker had recommended to me a good area to find tradition Irish music. We set off in what I thought might possibly be the right direction. Now, I’m usually rather good at following maps, but since I refused to take out said map because I didn’t want to look like a tourist, we ended up wandering into some sketchy area. I don’t know if it was actually sketchy but it looked and felt sketchy, so I ended up having to take out my map anyway and steer us onto safer streets. Afterwards, I realized we weren’t anywhere near where I had been trying to get us. The lesson of the day is acting like a tourist might be uncool, but so is getting murdered in an alley in Dublin.

END OF DAY ONE

I Like My Houses Murderery and My Mental Patients Charming

Last weekend, I saw the film Dream House. If you have seen The Amityville Horror, The Shining, Shutter Island, or The Number 23, then you have also seen the film Dream House.

My immediate thought upon exiting the theater: At least Daniel Craig got a wife out of the movie. And a hot wife, too!

As I’m sure I’ve said before, I’ll pretty much see any horror movie. There are only a few things that are beyond my tolerance level, and even those I usually end up watching anyway, because I’m a sick, twisted individual. I think there’s only ever been a couple times in my life I’ve been so disturbed by a movie image that I wondered why I was subjecting myself to this horrid torture. The first was during the opening of the film, Ghost Ship, where about forty people are cut in two by an errant guide wire, and then flop around for a few minutes before they die. Even writing that makes me want to grab my stomach and go “eeeee!” I think the second moment may have been during Piranha 3D. There were so many mangled legs and torsos and decapitated heads and dismembered members, that I had to stop for a moment and think, “Really? You couldn’t go on in life without seeing a piranha eat its way through the back of a porn star‘s head?” But other than that, I’m up for anything. Except maybe The Human Centipede. That's just nasty.

Dream House, however, wasn't nasty, or gory, or disturbing. It was just boring. Even the handsomeness of James Bond couldn't save it. SPOILER ALERT. I’m about to tell you exactly what was so bad about it, so if you’re going to ignore me and the reviewers who gave it a whopping 8% on rottentomatoes.com, then maybe you should go back to playing words with friends on your iPhone.

This movie is very difficult to describe, due to its awfulness, but I’ll give it the old college try.

Daniel Craig decides to give up his cushy job as a publisher to build a dream house with his family and write a novel. Only none of that is real! He murdered his family for no reason, and then forgot about it and was really in a mental hospital. But they had to let him go because there was actually no evidence he actually committed the crime. And now he’s seeing either the ghosts of his dead family, or just hallucinating because he’s crazy pants. Only that‘s not entirely true either, because some other dude killed his family, and he just forgot that, too! But not Naomi Watts’ character, the kindly neighbor across the street. She never gave up hope that her best friend Daniel Craig was magically not the murderer after all, which he wasn’t. The movie ends with Daniel Craig staring at a bookstore window, where his novel he wrote "Dream House" is now a bestseller. Really, Dream House? A published novel balances out family murder? This is almost as bad as A Beautiful Mind where they claimed love cured schizophrenia.

There was a half-hearted attempt to throw in some creepy visuals, like a millisecond shot of the two daughters blending into the wallpaper in a ghostly fashion, as he realizes they are in fact, either spirits or delusions. The house shifts back and forth from moldering pile of wood to cozy fantasy home. Other than that, the only scary parts of the movie was the horrid dialogue.

Oh, the dialogue! Not since poor Natalie Portman in the new Star Wars movies have I ever seen such a abysmal case of good actors gone bad. I don’t like to throw around the word atrocious, because it makes me look like a pompous twit, but the dialogue in Dream House was atrocious. And unnatural. I think maybe the film was written by a robot, and not David Loucka as the internet claims. It relieved me to learn that both Rachel Weisz and Daniel Craig were unhappy with how the film turned out and threatened not to do press for it. That’s scruples for you!

If there is one silver lining of this film, is that it made Rachel Weisz leave her fiancé, Darren Aronofsky, who I have never forgiven for creating the movie Pi.

Wash Your Hands After Reading

A lot of people have been asking me about the movie “Contagion,” which came out in theatres a couple weeks ago and directed by Steven Soderbergh (Sex, Lies & Videotape, Traffic, Ocean‘s 11-13). It seems weird to say I enjoyed it, but I did, though it certainly lacked a strong story arch of typical Hollywood films. It’s more of a factual timeline: what procedure would we follow if this sort of global health crisis actually happened. Who are the important players. How bad could this situation actually get? The answer seems to be pretty damn bad. The good news, you get to see Gwenyth Paltrow cheat on Matt Damon and then die. The bad news is, after watching it you will probably think you are going to die. I know I did!

The movie starts with a woman (Paltrow) at the airport in Chicago, talking on the phone to the man she just cheated on her husband with. She looks tired. If you walked into the theater without reading the title or knowing anything about the film, you’d think this was some sort of relationship drama or thrilling crime movie where a husband goes insane and kills his cheating wife. This movie is not that exciting… in a typical sense. Again, you’re fascinated to see how bad things will get before they turn it around, and the answer again is quite bad. But the film has a very slow pace and focuses more on presenting a ton of factual evidence than titillating us with gruesome death scenes.

In fact, they kind of gloss over the five billion people dying part. We see mass graves, lines of carefully packaged bodies (they mention they’ve run out of body bags so have to make due with taped trash bags) and empty streets with garbage piled up. We see many people die, but only one main character. This is Kate Winslet, who plays a young CDC worker in charge of organizing disease control in one city. As she tries to make the local government officials see just how terrible the situation becomes, she eventually succumbs to the illness herself, dying in one of the very makeshift hospital facilities she helped to set up.

The mystery of how the disease started and spread definitely added to the “excitement,” almost like it was a CSI episode, showing close ups on different characters as they encountered Paltrow’s character and in turn were infected. The waiter who picked up her martini glass. The Japanese business man whose dice she blew on in a casino. The British model-type who picked up Paltrow’s phone when she forgot it on the bar counter. It both fascinated and terrified me, even if you ignore everyone around you, you can’t ignore the germs they’re shoving in your face.

I think that’s what is most compelling of all. Not the film itself but my reaction to it. It has in the time since made me so conscious of how often I touch my face. There’s actually a line in the movie, we touch our faces something like two thousand times a day. That seems insane. But then you add on to that number every time you hold your phone up to your face, after you set it down on a table, or in a pocket, or dropped it on the ground. Not to mention if you eat something and use silverware, which unless you just washed it before eating has either been sitting in a tray or worse for hours before you shoved it in your mouth. It all takes me back to my History of Sickness and Disease course back at U of M. Remember the days when we didn’t know about hand washing? No wonder we all died from the flu. And movies like Contagion seem to suggest that sure, our science and our knowledge of hygiene has improved, but as humans, we’re still disgustingly filthy creatures. How many times have you been in the bathroom at a public place and watched someone half ass wash their hands after using the facilities? Enough to make a movie like Contagion seem chillingly possible.

If Rats Could Hold Scissors, This Is What Would Happen

From the man who brought you the Hellboy movies, and that freaky white eyeball hand monster in Pan’s Labyrinth, comes a brand new horror film based off of a 1973 TV program where the monsters are a hoard of tiny gray hunchbacks armed with scissors. That film is: Don’t Be Afraid of the Dark, written and produced by Guillermo del Toro.

I heart this man. He makes fun movies, and he makes lots of fat jokes about himself. What’s not to like?

So, the latest bit of awesomeness from Mr. del Toro is not only this film, but a companion book entitled “Don’t Be Afraid of the Dark: Blackwood’s Guide to Dangerous Fairies.” Leave it to Guillermo to turn fairies into murderous beasts. It’s not the most original recipe for horror. You start with your average creepy New England house and throw in a supernatural creature that only one person can see. In this case the baddies are evil, teeth-eating “fairies,” who try to lure the young, mentally-unstable Sally into their fiendish games to chomp on her chompers. But del Toro couldn’t be average if he tried and the resulting film is anything but boring. (Though to be fair, the fairy attacks get a little redundant before the final girl vs. fairy battle royale.) Highlights include an old timey Victorian nature painter getting sucked into a furnace after he smashes out his maid’s teeth and Katie Holmes being thrown down some stairs. Weeee!

If you like the sort of flick where a person may or may not be getting her head ripped to pieces in a bear trap, then this is not the movie for you. If however, you enjoy suspense and creepy houses and insane historical figures, then by all means you should definitely see this film. I can’t compare it to the original, because in my opinion, the 1970s never happened, thus the original doesn‘t exist. Sorry to everyone ages forty-one to thirty two. YOU WERE NEVER BORN!

It’s a tricky thing basing a movie around a child protagonist. Even if the film deals with serious story matter, many adult viewers simply tune right out whenever they see a child in the lead. But del Toro certainly doesn’t seem to have a problem pulling it off. Pan’s Labyrinth proved that for sure, and I feel Don’t Be Afraid of the Dark fairs just as well in that track.

The movie is fun, but to be honest, the book is what gives it that added air of mystery. Remember that dude who got shoved into a furnace in the movie? Well, that’s the alleged Blackwood who “wrote“ Guillermo del Toro‘s book. Think Audubon, a.k.a. the dude who painted every single picture in every single bird book ever printed, ever. Imagine if that dude went insane after coming across some less than typical “creatures” on his nature hikes. Imagine that those same “creatures” tried to eat his face off, and then he wrote a book so that others might avoid the same fate.

Then he went insane and bashed out his own teeth before getting turned into an evil fairy himself.

Blackwood’s illustrations are beyond weird and disturbing, which is exactly why you should at least go leaf through the book at your local purveyor or lender of bound paper goods. The cover alone displays a terrified child, entwined in villainous, Poltergeist-style tree branches, being held just inches above a sea of dark, spindly, twisted claws, ripping forth from the soil to drag the child down to hell. You will want to tear out the page and tape it on your wall so it can haunt you and inspire you to write or draw something equally deranged and brilliant.

Oh Guillermo del Toro! What amazing thing will you do next? Wait, I know this one. The answer is help write the Hobbit movies and down the line do a Cthulhu movie.

And you all wondered why I wanted to name my child after him.

This Book Could Only Have Been Improved With A Batboy

As I’ve mentioned before, when I’m trolling the bookstore for new reads (and new nerd boyfriends) there are key words I look for when reading dust jackets. These are words like “wizard,” “viking wizard,” “airship,“ and “magic orb of doom.” Is this the best method for picking out a book? Probably not. Which is why I look at the cover, too. It’s a very serious process.

This week my literary fishing yielded me an excellent choice. The title: “Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children,” written by Ransom Riggs. I think the fact that the author sounded like a 1800’s cowboy was also a selling point. On the cover was a black and white photo of a girl dressed in a flapper-style dress… floating an inch off the ground. Peculiar indeed!

Here’s the story. Jacob, a modern day young man hears stories from his grandfather about escaping Poland before WW2. Leaving all his family behind, he went to stay at a safe house for children in Wales. Except it wasn’t just a safe house, it was a school for kids with weird abilities and powers. An invisible boy. Another with bees in his stomach. A little girl who can fly. Of course, like every obnoxious sarcastic teen, the main character doesn’t believe his grandfather, until LIFE CHANGING EVENTS force him to seek out grandpa’s alleged school of freaky tots.

Danger. Monsters. Thuggish 1940’s Welsh village folk. Other than the occasional awkward moments of teen romance between Jacob and one of the “peculiar“ girls, I thought it was an excellent story, surpassing the rather narrow framework of most young adult fiction. I liked the historical elements tied in, the attacks on the small island town by Nazi planes, the ideas of xenophobia vs. tolerance. I don’t mean to detract from the enormity of those real historical tragedies that occurred during this time period, but making Jacob’s family Jewish just added to the complexity of the work. We’ve seen over and again the Christ mythology creeping into the works of famous fantasy authors like C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien, so it’s interesting to finally see a character with a different religious background interacting with some fairy people. I’m probably reading too much into this idea, but whether or not Riggs intended this to be something of note, it certainly got me pondering. Let me clarify though, this is not a book about the Holocaust or Jewish culture. It’s just the story of a boy with Jewish ancestry who finds out his Holocaust surviving grandpa grew up to be a kin to Buffy the vampire slayer.

What really set the book apart though were the included pictures. Throughout the text, Riggs placed authentic vintage photos taken from various artistic collections to match characters being mentioned. Some were simply old-fashioned and creepy, and only gained greater meaning through their pairing with the novel. Some, however, were rather curious indeed, like the floating girl on the cover. Now in a world of modern photoshop, such pictures aren’t really remarkable, though Riggs insists that they haven’t been altered. Him, I believe, but what about the weirdos who shot the photos back in 1930 or whenever? Who knows. Maybe someone did have a second mouth growing out of the back of their head, or maybe there was a primordial dwarf who was so small they could fit her inside a mason jar.

If nothing else, real or not, the photos prove that people at the turn of the century were some real freakshows. For example, one picture shows two identical twin children in weird clown outfits with one pulling a rope out of the other’s mouth. Why was that photo taken? What does it mean? Is it part of a circus show? Or was Mommy and Daddy hitting the cocaine a little hard before family portrait day? Who knows? The book just goes to show you that even if magic doesn’t exist in our world, we will never lack for things that are peculiar.

Magicians Are Like Lying Wizards

This is not another attempt to talk crap about Christopher Nolan, I swear. I actually really liked his movie “The Prestige” when I saw it back in 2006. What was there not to like about this movie? Hugh Jackman and Christian Bale play two finely sculpted magicians in Victorian England AND David Bowie plays Nikola Tesla!!! Seriously, more famous musicians need to play famous inventors or scientists. I would now like to write the film where Tom Waits and Eddie Vedder play the Wright Brothers.

My point is, I liked “The Prestige.” It’s great. You should totally go rent it, or Netflix it, or however it is that people watch movies these days. “The Prestige” is an enjoyable movie. But do you know what was even MORE ENJOYABLE? The book.

Yup, it’s based off of a book, like almost every other movie in Hollywood right now. A fabulous book actually, written by a fellow named Christopher Priest. It reads sort of like if Jane Austen wrote a book about magicians trying to kill each other.

This is one of those stories that talking about it in too much detail kind of ruins the whole party, so I’ll try not to let slip too many spoilers. I think it’s safe to say that the book is a lot clearer on what the heck is happening than the movie. The movie is all mysterious and suspenseful, but the book relies more on possibly untrustworthy narratives and misinformation to hide its secret plot points. Still, I felt at the end I had reached a satisfactory conclusion, which is something Mr. Nolan seems hesitant to offer up in any of his films.

Wait, I promised not to talk crap about Christopher Nolan. Okay, back on topic. The book.

Priest’s “The Prestige” is far creepier than the movie. Again, it’s a matter of carefully revealing enough about… certain events… to make readers wonder what these characters are talking about, but never fully coming out or showing you until the very, very end.

Okay, enough of the vagueness. Now I’m just going to throw a bunch of buzz words at you so as not to ruin the experience but at least give you a little taste of what the story holds:

Racks of dead bodies.
Insane foreign inventors.
A ghost with a knife.
Dark family secrets.
Childhood electrocution.

If my memory serves me correctly, the movie only had two out of five, so my sheer math, the book should be better, right?

The book version also throws in a whole present day sub-story where the descendants of each magician meet up again to uncover their ancestors’ torrid past. At first it seemed like an annoying stutter step to the real action. But just when we think the magicians’ demises will never be explained, Priest snaps us back to the present, into a darkened cellar, for one final chapter. This chapter turns out to be one of the most intense, terrifying, parts of the whole book. Everything up to that is a character study, a mystery, but that last chapter is like a shot of adrenaline mixed with hillbilly moonshine: intense and crazy.

So this is why I like the book better, not because the director did a poor job, but simply because there wasn’t enough time to tell the full story. Nolan’s film runs two hours and ten minutes even after cutting out huge chunks of the book. But if you read it, you’ll see how readers are left with an entirely different feeling at the end of the book than at the end of the movie. The book is darker, more haunting, but in my opinion more satisfying in the end.

The 90s Were A Weird Time For Everyone

Over twenty years ago, a young Steinho got her own TV in her bedroom. This was partially due to wee Steinho having sleeping problems, which in turn was possibly due to dreams about man eating pigs and alien death worms, which is a story for a different day so back to the TV. It was an old TV without a remote, where you literally had to push buttons on the box to change the channel, and there were only eight buttons.

Some of the programs I liked to watch included “In Living Color,” “The Arsenio Hall Show,” and the home shopping network. I can’t explain these choices, other than that I thought Arsenio Hall was simply a newscaster, and then his opening monologue was not a series of jokes, but the same as watching someone like Peter Jennings. I remember after the whole Sinead O’Connor ripping up a picture of the pope situation, Arsenio had “the Pope” on his show to rip up a picture of her. I actually believed it was the pope, and was quite impressed that this holy man would take the time to amp up his cool image by visiting a late night talk show.

Anyway, in the grand scheme of evening television watching, I was exposed to a lot of weird programs in my battle with insomnia. Probably one of the strangest ones came in 1992, going on my tenth year on this planet. It was a post apocalyptical sitcom entitled “Woops!” It only aired I think nine or ten episodes, but the fact that it lasted even that long remains puzzling.

Here’s the logline of “Woops!” in a nutshell. Six crazy characters survive a nuclear holocaust and live on a farm. And it’s a comedy!

The show included such fascinating stories such as this golden nugget: the feminist plain jane discovers a magical crystal that makes her boobs grow bigger! See, that’s the good thing about starting with such a wacky concept for your show. Once you set the bar, things like magical crystals are totally acceptable! And how about this gem of an episode! The only black survivor happens to be a scientist, and the smartest one of the bunch. But when the former business man gets amnesia and believes he’s still living in a pre-apocalypse world, he thinks the sophisticated scientist is really his old black chauffeur! And he makes him sing Old Man River? Say whaaaat? These are the sort of wacky shenanigans you can only get on a one season failed sitcom. And on the Fox network no less!

Now, I don’t have a photographic memory, but I do have a pretty good one. I don’t know why “Woops!” stuck in my head. Yet, there it was. A shining beacon of bad TV. I can still picture the white dude being driven around on a tractor while poor scientist man sang Old Man River. I must’ve been only one of ten people to ever witness this scene, because I’ve been asking people for the last 20 years if they’d heard of the show, and no one ever said yes. And it was so crazy of an idea, no one could believe such a show could actually exist. I am not kidding when I say at some point, I wondered if I’d imagined it. After all, I’d been ten-years-old and prone to insane night hallucinations.

Then I read Phil Rosenthal’s book (blog post from March 23rd) and in a casual reference he mentioned the TV show. Oh, Phil Rosenthal, thank you! And not just for hugging me when I met you back in March. You gave me the gift of sanity.

You’re probably wondering, why the fizzle am I talking about a TV show that was canceled twenty years ago. Well, the honest answer is simply because it’s comical and I was thinking about it today. The intelligent answer, is that I’ve learned a lot about the television business in the last two years. The lesson of “Woops!” is how difficult it is to actually make a successful TV show. First you have to write an amazing pilot episode, and find a network/production company who wants to produce this pilot. Then if the pilot is good, maybe the network will pick it up for a certain number of episodes. And even then, if they don’t like the first ones you film, they can take those episodes back at any time. Twenty episodes can become thirteen can become six. If you look up “Woops!” on the internet, you‘ll see there were a few more they made that never aired. There are probably heaps and heaps of unaired shows, or shows that only ten people have seen before they were pulled. Most of these are terrible, but sadly some are really great, and were canceled simply because not enough people liked them. “Firefly” and “Freaks and Geeks” are two that I lamented the end of.

But there’s two sides to every coin. Yes, a lot of good shows get canceled too soon. Then, there are the shows like “Woops!” which lasted ten episodes. That’s ten more than a lot of scripts get and the fact that it got made at all just gives me hope. Because no matter how bad some of my ideas are, they’ve got to be better than “Woops!”

There Are Worse Imaginary Friends Than An Octopus Monster

I am very fortunate to work in a profession where my nerdliness is not only tolerated, but encouraged to grow like some kind of heinous, flesh eating monster plant. Such was the case this past week when the subject of conversation turned to H.P. Lovecraft, specifically the Cthulhu mythology. Much to my surprise, it would appear that far less people know about Cthulhu than I imagined. Shocking, I know! It’s sort of like that time my sister didn’t even know what a necromancer was! I thought doctors were supposed to be smart!

Anyway, who the heck is Cthulhu? Well, the simple answer is he’s a bad ass octopus-dragon-man being who’s trapped in a frozen underwater city, because if he wasn’t, he’d be busy taking over our dimension or at the very least, hanging out with his fleet of Cthulhu cult worshippers. Lovecraft first brought Cthulhu onto the literary scene in 1928 for the pulp magazine “Weird Tales.” A fairly appropriate title, I’d say.

I’ve always wondered, what exactly was going on in the brain of young Howard Phillips Lovecraft, considering just how weird his tales are. I mean how crazy does a man have to be to invent a maniacal squid alien monster living in an ice city? He certainly has an interesting history, riddled with despair and mental disease. With all that happened, I suppose the real wonder would be if Lovecraft had become a boring, stable investment banker instead.

The family madness goes all the way back to when little Lovecraft was only three years old, when his father, a traveling jewelry and precious metal salesman, was first institutionalized after going “acutely psychotic” in a Chicago hotel room. What on earth does that mean? Well, apparently it means he had syphilis and went mad from it. Sources are unsure if young Lovecraft ever knew the true nature of his father’s illness, though, so if you’re reading my blog, ghost of H.P. Lovecraft, sorry you had to read about your crazy father‘s STD on a web diary.

Thank goodness Lovecraft wasn’t completely alone after his father’s death. No, he had Whipple Van Buren Phillips to take care of him. Suddenly the name Cthulhu doesn’t seem all that weird. Seriously, I want to time travel back to this era just to meet Whipple Van Buren Phillips and say, “Hello Mr. Phillips,” and have him say, “Please! My friends call me Whipple!” Anyway, we science fiction/horror nerds should all say a little thank you to good old Whipple, for he was the first one to introduce young Lovecraft to the macabre and strange, telling the boy ghost stories he’d written himself, much to H.P.’s mother’s dismay. Well, dear old Ma had very little to say in the end. She ended up in the same mental institution as her dear husband did, though not necessarily from the same STD. And despite Lovecraft’s moderate success, he only continued to grow poorer and poorer the older he got, until finally dying of intestinal cancer, Bright’s disease, and malnutrition at the age of 47.

In conclusion, writers have horrible lives.

No, that’s not the point I’m trying to make. I would simply like to pose the question, was it the harsh circumstances of his life that lead Lovecraft’s mind to wander to these dark, disturbed worlds? Had he been wealthier and happier with more stable, less diseasy parents, would his lack of misery led to a lack in creativity as well? Or would his mastery of prose simply have churned out brighter stories and adventures? How fine is the line between genius and totally whackadoodle crazypants?

And if you have an answer to this question, I’d love to hear it. Because, I may or may not have written a story where some sort of demonic earth monster rips a bunch of gold prospectors to pieces before nailing their body parts to a tree, and I’d kind of like to know exactly how crazy that makes me.

Well, At Least The Title Wasn't A Lie

Listen, I know we all get old some day, but have you seen Harrison Ford in “Cowboys & Aliens?” He looks like King Triton after the sea witch turned him into one of those shrimp slug things. Seriously, he was two seconds away from yelling “Get off my lawn!” at Daniel Craig.

That film had a whole heap of potential. Cross genres are cool, and John Favreau is fresh off the success of two “Iron Man” hits. Though to be absolutely honest, “Iron Man 2” was a little bit of a shambles. Still, it had impressive action sequences and Mickey Rourke with a freaking bird. Made no sense, but it was entertaining. “Cowboys & Aliens,” however, was about as dull as a sixty-nine year old man who used to be in better shape riding a horse around the desert and yelling at people.

What a coincidence, that’s exactly what that film was! Oh, and just to warn you, if you’ve really got your heart set on seeing this film, it would probably be a good idea to stop reading now. From here on out, it’s all smack talk.

I didn’t have terribly high expectations going into “Cowboys & Aliens,” but I certainly expected more than what they offered, especially considering the cast and director. But as the film started, my gut instinct started gurgling up trouble when I noticed there were no less than six screenwriters credited to the film. For peeps not in the biz, this basically means it was passed back and forth between a multitude of creative people, which typically leads to one of two possible outcomes. 1. The script is overcomplicated and convoluted, with numerous plot holes and characters that come off as schizophrenic. Or, you get a film like “Cowboys & Aliens,” watered down, with possibly a clear plot, but no real depth, character or heart. As the movie progressed, I held out hope that at least Daniel Craig’s hotness could keep me entertained. Alas, no. Sorry Daniel, you are not quite hot enough for even that.

What makes it even worse is that “Cowboys & Aliens” started out so strong. It had one amazing action sequence when the aliens first attacked the town (most of what was featured in the trailer), and then after that it was chaos. Seriously, the final ultimate battle looked like they told a bunch of extras to just to ride their horses around in circles while screaming and firing their guns wildly into the air like Yosemite Sam.

The characters were stunted and vague. They went from apathetic to melodramatic with no build in between. And as for our leading lady, I never thought there would be a human being with bigger eyes than Elijah Wood in Lord of the Rings. Olivia Wilde seems to have him beat. I don’t remember her eyes being this gigantic when she was in “House” or “Tron,” but maybe they CGI’d them up a bit while they were working on the aliens.

And the aliens! Oh dear lord. Was there a sale on CGI aliens this summer? Please, someone who has seen both “Super 8” and “Cowboys & Aliens” this year tell me if I’m wrong. I won’t say they looked exactly the same, but they looked similar enough to me that my monkey brain made a subconscious note of it. Regardless if they look the same or not, the alien was not mind-blowingly original. I have not read the graphic novel this film is based on, (for inquiring minds, it's written by Fred Van Lente and Andrew Foley) so possibly they were just copying what had already been established in the comic. Further research necessary.

“Cowboys & Aliens” is sadly another case of excellent premise and poor execution. They probably spent a lot of money on getting big budget stars and putting together flashy effects, without a whole lot of substance to glue it together. I am very quick to forgive films with lame plots as long as the effects and visuals rock off my proverbial socks. Heck, even if the effects aren’t good and the acting’s terrible and cheesy, a movie can still be fun! Instead I was left staring at Harrison Ford’s wrinkles and looking at my watch.

Even Gary Oldman's Mustache Can't Make Me Smile

Dear Christopher Nolan,

I saw Captain America today, and I finally discovered what I don’t like about your movies. They are not fun. Captain America was fun. I felt good watching it, even in the “dark moments.” It’s not that I expect comics, or comic book movies, to be cheerful romps through and through, but there’s also this little thing called depth. Complexity. Emotional layers. Not just sad and dark all the time. Am I getting my point across, or would you like me to pull out my thesaurus?

Yes, throwing a few jokes into the mix can lead to a certain amount of cheesiness in your film. I can’t count how many times in Captain America when Chris Evans flew or drove or punched his way through a room without getting hit by a single bullet. I swear, I could almost see the POWS and THWOKS superimposed every time he punched a Nazi super soldier in the jaw. Sure, Captain America was unrealistic and dopey at times, but do you know what it was NOT, Christopher Nolan?

1. Boring.
2. Broody.
3. Confusing.
4. Too long
5. Full of Katie Holmes.

So you can keep your dark, emo, tortured Batman, and I will keep my campy, brightly colored FUN Marvel comic movies.

Now, let me play the devil’s advocate to myself. Batman is about a guy who lost his parents to thugs. He’s a rich guy, who goes a little crazy being a vigilante. I can see where that storyline might make you want to play up these themes of “dark knights” who must sacrifice their own image for the sake of the stupid, innocent sheep of Gotham.

Now, let me play devil’s advocate to that devil’s advocate! The original Batman comics were as campy and cheesy and ridiculous as the rest!!! Do you remember the show with Adam West, Christopher Nolan? Do you?!?!? I believe I recall a joke about a ball point banana or something? I’m not saying they were good, I’m just saying, BATMAN DOES NOT HAVE TO BE EMO! In fact, comic book heroes can be both serious AND funny! You can use humor to lighten the mood, AND lull audiences into a sense of false security. Then, when something bad happens, it actually has an impact, and audiences actually give a crap about your characters! Shocking, I know.

And since I just saw it, let‘s use Captain America as proof of my argument. Starts off as a skinny, awkward nerdlington, then gets pumped full of magic juice by a zany German scientist! I’m laughing already. Captain America saves a bunch of people, looks really good doing it, says some cool lines, and he’s a hero! Weee! Next, Captain America gets his little wacky multi-ethnic team together, lots of laughs at their expense, ha ha ha etc. They win some battles, and the Captain delights us in some cheesy dialogue about not understanding women after his girlfriend tries to shoot him in the face. Then, after all that, something tragic finally happens, and we actually feel bad about it! Why? Because we haven’t been bombarded with sorrow and internal torment from the first second.

Maybe I should have just waited until you were asleep, Christopher Nolan, and Inceptioned this idea into your head. Or maybe I should just shut my trap since you’re the one sitting on a giant pile of money and acclaim and not me, but haters gotta hate. I left Captain America feeling excited and gleeful. Christopher Nolan, your Batman just brings me down.

Ironically, Heath Ledger, who was the only thing I did like about The Dark Knight, seemed to be trying to tell you the same thing. Why so serious?

Love,
Steinho

Harry Potter and the Franchise of Plenty

It’s been over ten years since I first climbed down off of the pretentious trolley and read the first book in the Harry Potter series. Like with many things, (Mac products, Christopher Nolan movies) I resisted it for a long time simply because it was popular and I like to be contrary. Then one day, I think it was my junior or senior year in high school, I was at my friends house baking a cake. I don’t know what you did for fun in your teenage years, but apparently we liked to bake. We must’ve forgotten some key ingredient because my friend had to run to the store. Why she left and I stayed when it was her house, I can’t tell you. All I know is that in the time she was gone, I read a third of “Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone,” which she had left on her dining room table. It was magical and fun, and appealed to the fantasy nerd in me.

Any fantasy scholar knows Harry Potter is not the first child wizard learning magic to come on the young adult literature scene, but it seems the first to resonate with such a massive audience. What could be more appealing to children, or any reader for that matter, than a story of a boy who had nothing, but grew to possess powers and great strength. A young lad faced time and time again with obstacles, but through his own abilities and good friends, always comes out on top, no matter how dark it may look at times. It’s probably the same reason why Star Wars is so popular. It’s the most basic hero’s journey of all time.

After that serendipitous baking mishap, I couldn’t resist any more. This was just after the fourth book had come out, and I went on to read all four within a week. Then the waiting began. Over the years I have eagerly anticipated the release of the remaining three books, and all eight Harry Potter films. I’ve dressed up for Harry Potter parties, lied to friends about social obligations to attend midnight screenings, and almost broke up with a boyfriend once after he questioned why it was so important I pick up “Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix” the night it was released. Like for many people, Harry Potter had become more to me than just light reading. It was a ticket to someplace special and joyous, both intensely captivating and surprisingly meaningful.

Yet I felt curiously empty of emotion when I finally sat down in a theatre to watch the final film adaptation of book seven, “Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows.” Maybe it was because I already knew how it was going to end. I remember reading book seven a few years back. I stayed up all night to finish it, finally collapsing on my friend’s bed, well after dawn. I’d been emotional then. Tired, and sad, wanting more and feeling dissatisfied. J.K. Rowling had given us such an elaborate world, so dense and detailed, and then it was just gone.

The film, less than two hours, was exactly what I’d expected of it. It had all the important parts, the glowing hero moments and the quiet tragedies. I enjoyed it, to be sure, especially when gangly, awkward Neville finally gets to kick some ass in Harry Potter‘s army of wizard teens. But still, it was a far cry from the frenzied joy I’d felt for previous Potter releases, and I don‘t believe it was due to any fault of the film. In the last ten years of Harry Potter films, I have been constantly asked how the books compared to the movie, and every time I had a rather difficult time answering. In reality, it’s never truly the book we’re comparing it too, is it? It’s our own imaginations. How did we imagine Hogwarts to look? Or any of the characters? To be honest, it’s been so long since that initial reading, the film actors have nearly drowned out my initial impressions. In the book, I loved that Rowling described Hermione as having bushy hair and buck teeth, and therefore resented poor Emma Watson’s prettiness from day one. This is the nature of the adaptation. No matter how good the film is, it can never be good enough.

So I implore you all, if you haven’t read the books already, and you’re interested in seeing the movies, read the books first. They’re terribly easy to get through, and at times make much more sense with all the little bits and pieces filled in. And I promise you, while it may not be the moment of literary nirvana I experienced in my youth, at least it’ll make you hate Hermione a lot less.

Good Cop, Extrasensory Perception Cop

At times it seems that the comic world has exhausted its store of superhero powers. Telekinesis, super strength, lightning speed, laser eyes, even some of the weirder stuff like mutant wings or feet or the lamest of all, talking to fish.

Well, someone finally found a super power that hadn’t been used yet. CHEWING! Yay originality!!!

How could masticating comestibles save helpless citizens from super villains? A little thing called cibopathy. And what the hell is that? It’s something I assume was made up by John Layman and Rob Guillory, the creators of the graphic novel “Chew.” Cibopathy is a extra sensory ability where a single bite of food can tell that person where an apple was grown, or how horribly a cow felt during slaughtering. It also helps the hero of “Chew” solve crimes…by tasting blood and eating pieces of bodies.

Yeah, okay, so that’s pretty gross, but it’s also wicked cool. Such is the power of Tony Chu (haha, it’s funny because his name is Chu and the book is called CHEW! I love word play!) Tony Chu starts off as just a cop in the Philadelphia PD, until he uncovers a serial killer after eating a bowl of soup tainted with the murderer‘s blood.

Tony then gets a job working for the FDA, which in this world has expanded its reign of power due to a nationwide bird flu epidemic. Now, instead of busting drug rings or weapon smugglers, the regular policeman go after poultry dealers and chicken speakeasies, and the FDA trumps all other law enforcement officers.

Everyone thinks Tony is a freak, which I think is part of the appeal of his character. He’s a good cop, who would rather just play by the rules instead of eating decomposing human toes. His timid, awkward behavior irritates most of his coworkers, but makes him the perfect type of hero readers will root for. He’s truly a good guy, just socially inept, somewhere along the lines of a shyer, quirkier, Asian Peter Parker.

“Chew” is strange, dark and has been known to make me shriek with laughter in the middle of a crowded laundromat. For example, John Colby, Tony’s former partner in the Philadelphia PD, is an obnoxious renegade cop. Think every 1980s action film hero that played by his own rules. At the beginning of the first volume, Colby takes a butcher knife to the face. Normally, people die in that situation, but not Colby. No, he is too cool to die, and so he becomes a cyborg. I think Colby is probably the funniest character in my opinion, or at least has the best one liners. Like this little gem: After the now bionic Colby takes Chu to a bar, he warns him saying “Don’t go using your crazy hoodoo to tell me my drink has trace amounts of rhino snot or pterodactyl jizz -- or anything else that’s gonna ruin my good time.” If a man said that to me in a bar, I think I’d take notice. If that man was also a hot graphic novel character who was part cyborg, then I’d probably propose marriage. But I guess I’m just that kind of girl.

I don’t want to give away the entire story, so I’ll conclude by saying that you really ought to read “Chew” now, before Showtime turns it into a TV series and either does such an amazing job it ruins the reading experience for you, or does such a horrendously nauseating job that it ruins the reading experience for you. It’s allegedly being made by Stephen Hopkins, the director of “Predator 2” and “The Life and Death of Peter Sellers,” so make of that what you will. I’ll keep my snarky judgments until it airs. Until then, I have one more volume to read, “Chew: Just Desserts.” Sounds delicious.

I Expect Perfection From My Props Department

There are people who enjoy the movies, who might refer to themselves as “movie buffs,” if you will. These people know a lot of trivia, enjoy discussing their favorite directors, and like to discuss with their friends afterwards what a movie “meant.”

I am not one of those people. If you work in the television or film industry, you may understand what I’m about to say a little better than everyone else. After years of going to see at least a movie a week in theatres, watching even more on netflix or DVD, not to mention the endless scripts I’ve read during class, internships, and in my own free time, I have nearly lost my ability to suspend my disbelief. For the layman, I refer to the act of letting oneself be completely absorbed into the story and can laugh, cry, gasp, and cheer with the characters as the journey on the screen progresses.

Flashback to:

Int. The Grove Movie Theatre - A week ago (Night)

Steinho sat alone in the dim movie theatre, irritated by the fact that the new assigned seating policy forced her to sit next to a couple on a date when there were five million empty seats available.

The film was “Super 8,” and on a purely superficial level, I enjoyed the film. No. The train wreck in the beginning was incredible and intense, and the teen actors were quite good. They were weird looking and funny and behaved more like normal teens than in any other movie I’ve seen lately. Do I think it was a classic? No.

Without going into an intelligent, analytical film review, I’ll get straight to the point. Towards the end of the film (SPOILER ALERT) the young hero, Joe, played by unknown actor Joel Courtney, watches with his roguishly handsome cop father, played by Kyle Chandler, as an alien being finally escapes the grim clutches of the government.

Wait, wasn’t there already a film with that plot line produced by Stephen Spielberg? Anyone? Anyone?

So anyway, they’re watching E.T., I mean the alien, prepare his ship for blastoff. This process apparently requires sucking up all the metal left lying around the street. Cars, skateboards, appliances, and Joe’s dead mother’s locket. Just as it’s about to be ripped away from him by magnetic forces, Joe snatches the locket in mid air, and it opens, revealing a photo of him and his dead mother. Joe and his father embrace, and at last, they’re both able to let her go, symbolized by Joe physically releasing the locket into the air.

What a touching moment! Except for the fact that the picture was upside down.

Wait, what? What nonsense are you talking Steinho?

Yeah, so when the locket flew out of his hand, he caught it with the charm pointing up into the sky, upside down. Yet when the locket opened, the picture was perfectly oriented for Joe and his pop to have their touching moment. So either Joe’s mom walked around wearing an upside down picture in her locket, or this was a conscious decision to fuel the emotional moment, which I totally get. We go to the movies for escape, not to face the harsh laws of reality and gravity.

The locket bit was so far into the film, and so minute, it certainly didn’t keep me from enjoying my cinematic evening. There were other things that accomplished that, like the overall anticlimactic ending. But I bring this up, because it was remarkable how quickly my brain picked up on it. I wonder, am I forever unable to watch anything without thinking of the number of scripts the production assistant had to copy? Or if there was a meeting between the director and the head of props concerning which way should the picture face in the locket? Have I become a freak of nature…or has my mind and powers of observation simply been honed to a razor sharp edge? Or, does this merely mean I have too much time and need to go watch some “Futurama” reruns?

All of the above.

In Which the Author Proves the Full Extent of Her Nerdliness

Last Friday, at ye local purveyor of books, Messrs Barnes and Noble played host to one of my favorite actors, Simon Pegg. You may remember him from such films as “Shaun of the Dead,” “Hot Fuzz,” and most recently, the grown up version of E.T. “Paul.” He was visiting the book store to promote his new biography, “Nerd Do Well.” Now, normally I am not a fan of the celebrity biography. Or regular biographies. Histories I like, but only when they’re written in the style of a sweeping epic fiction novel.

To be honest, the only part of Simon Pegg’s biography I’ve read since purchasing it five days ago was the few chapters I took in while waiting in line during the signing. No offense to Mr. Pegg, but the book was the equivalent of all that chocolate the little children ate in “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory” to try to meet Willy Wonka.

I purposely went by myself to the book signing, and I’ll tell you why. Having lived in Los Angeles for almost six years now, I’ve gotten used to running into Orlando Bloom at a breakfast place on La Brea or the guy who played Hiro from Heroes in West Hollywood. Celebrities are typically very boring, shorter versions of the people they play in the movies or on television. Except for when they’re your nerd hero. In that case, they are not boring at all, and in fact make you act like Renfield from Dracula. For those of you unfamiliar with this character, Renfield used to serve Dracula with undying devotion and later ate bugs. I did not do this when I finally met Simon Pegg, but there were a few minutes as I approached his table where I thought I might puke on myself.

I’m getting ahead of myself though. I’ve gone to a few of these book signings before. Basically you show up early, stand around for an hour or so, then spend five minutes oggling at the celebrity/writer in question before you are herded towards the front, someone slaps a book with your name written on a post-it note onto a table, and the celebrity/writer endeavors to make small talk with you in the time it takes them to sign your and their name and whatever witticism they choose to grace you with.

I arrived for the Simon Pegg signing about an hour and a half before he was supposed to come on the scene. The geeks, dweebs, nerds, and spazzes were all lined up in numbers. I’m very sorry to say it, but these were some of the least attractive people I have ever seen. I spend so much time trying to convince the “normals” that nerds can be attractive, functioning people, too. Unfortunately, none of those people decided to show up to the book-signing that night. There were a few normals mixed into the crowd, including one of the lovely accountants from another Disney show who I recognized. Still, this was definitely one of those situations where I felt out-nerded by the masses. There were girls giving him fan art. If you don’t know what that is, you’re probably too cool to be reading my blog.

At long last, Mr. Pegg arrived on the scene. Like always, he was shorter in real life. Most of all, he looked very normal. Like a normal dude I might run into walking around England. When the press started flashing his photo, he seemed rather pained to be standing there, holding a copy of his book. Not angry, or obnoxious or anything bad. He seems the sort that when he says he’s not doing this for the publicity and fame, you actually believe him. I was instantly charmed.

Back to the part where I was standing five feet from him and thought I might faint or hurl. The regimental bookstore employee passed my book over to the table and I shuffled forward, my mind blank. I was a writer dammit! Where was my banter? My hilarious quips? But every ounce of cleverness had evaporated into the ether.

The scenario went a little like this.

Simon Pegg: Hello, Amanda. Thank you for coming.
Me: Thank you for coming….. I like your hat.
Simon Pegg: Thank you.
Me: I’m sorry. I tried to think of something clever to say, but I couldn’t.
Simon Pegg: (Charmingly disarming) I’m going to tell you a secret about this hat. I’m only going to share it with you. It’s a Canadian hat.
Me: (Swooning) Your secret is safe with me.

Then we talked for two seconds about Vancouver and Mission Impossible:4 and then he shook my hand and it was all over. I walked away, clutching the autographed book like it was a notebook doodled with hearts. So thank you, Simon Pegg, wherever you are, for making this nerd feel even if just for a few moments, that I was a little cooler than I really am.

Camus Would Have Been More Interesting With Pretty Pictures

After submerging myself in last week’s death overload, I decided to cleanse my pallet this week by reading “Daytripper,” a graphic novel written and drawn by Brazilian duo, Fabio Moon and Gabriel Ba. And, it also turned out to be about death. I hope the universe isn’t trying to tell me something.

Okay, that’s a heinous lie. To say “Daytripper” was just about death would be missing the whole point of the comic. It would be like saying Star Wars was merely about space, and Lord of the Rings was just a little tale about stolen jewelry. “Daytripper” is an existential piece of art. It was beautiful, both in its vibrant, skillful illustrations, as well as its meaningful themes. After a lifetime of more typical comics, with their over the top violence and hyper-reality, it’s nice to come upon something truly poignant and thoughtful. That’s not to say superhero comics are incapable of possessing weighty topics or heart wrenching, emotional storylines. Really, I was simply pleased that “Daytripper” was something unique, something I’d probably never have discovered had it not been recommended to me. I always like when I push myself out of my typical reading repertoire and am pleasantly surprised.

The story of “Daytripper” focuses on Bras de Oliva Domingos, a Brazilian man who is simply trying to live his life to the best of his ability, the same as any man or woman. He struggles in his writing career, he searches for love, lives, learns, all that jazz. The graphic novel jumps back and forth through time, each chapter showing Bras at a pivotal moment in his life. At age twenty-eight, when he sees his future wife for the first time. At eleven, stealing his first kiss. At forty-one, experiencing the birth of his son. Each chapter ends with Bras dying shortly after these momentous occasions, posing a whole fleet of questions. When does life really begin? Does it take a dramatic moment to stir us into true existence? What does it mean for us to die? How are we shaped by each tiny event we experience, each seemingly trivial moment? And how are life and death linked? Like I said, existential up the wazoo.

In the end, we make the biggest leap from reality. Instead of another chapter and another important moment in Bras‘ life, things take a turn for the dreamlike. For the first time, it seems to show Bras after his various accidents, contemplating his own mortality and asking the very questions the work hints at to its readers. Characters from different time periods appear side by side, Bras running as a child through the fields, only to come upon his own son, the same age. Throughout it all, Bras’ father, who happens to be a writer himself, explains to Bras that every story must have an end, just as every life must eventually conclude in death.

Dare I suggest that the point is not to focus on each chapter as an individual, because the worth of one life cannot be judged by any particular event, only the greater whole? I suppose I can suggest all I want, but books like “Daytripper” are not meant to be deciphered in clear terms. They are meant to be poured over and experienced. I feel like I need to invent more lovely and artistic words to even describe it.

Two chapters in, I worried that “Daytripper” would leave me in the same funk I’d felt after “Machine of Death.” The reality was quite the contrary. “Daytripper” made the process of death almost poetic. The stunning visuals and the real, human interactions between characters left me feeling, if not utterly blissful, than at least calm and contemplative. As far as existentialism goes, that’s all you really need.