Kat’s Film and Book Reviews

That last one was hard, wasn’t it?  Annie got it–it was All That Jazz, from 1979.  The line was spoken by Roy Scheider.

Okay, ready for the next one?

People all say that I’ve had a bad break. But today…today I consider myself the luckiest man on the face of the earth.

Maximum Ride

The Fugutives, Books 1-3

James Patterson

image courtesy of hatchette book group

Book 1 Maximum Ride: The Angel Experiment

Book 2 Maximum Ride: School’s Out Forever

Book 3 Maximum Ride: Saving the World and Other Extreme Sports

The Maximum Ride books by James Patterson can be consdered two trilogies starring the same characters. The first trilogy is The Fugitives, the second is The Protectors. This review will concentrate on The Fugitives, a group of genetically altered kids who struggle for simple existence against those who created them and pursue them still.

The kids who star in this series are ages 6 through 14, and have DNA that has been altered to be 98% human and 2% avian. This 2% has given the kids distinct birdlike characteristics—most notably, each has a set of wings and can fly. They are also tall and proportionally stronger than most human beings.

Because of this birdlike humanity, they call themselves a flock, rather than a family. Each member of the flock was genetically altered either before or after their conception and birth in experiments conducted at a facility they know only as The School. They lived in cages and were treated like animal experiments rather than like human children. The one kind influence in their lives was one of the scientists, Jeb Batchelder, who treated them humanely, and eventually rescued them from the school and took them to live in a hidden home deep in the mountains.

When the book opens, Jeb has disappeared and left the oldest member of the flock, 14-year-old Max, in charge of the family. Max, the eponymous Maximum Ride, is strong and caring, and takes personal responsibility for the well being of her flock. She can be bossy and overbearing, but she is loved by her flock and manages her little family as well as any 14-year-old could. There is absolute trust and loyalty between the members of the flock: 14-year-old Fang, a dark, quiet boy who functions as Max’s right hand; 14-year-old Iggy who is blind as a result of past experiments performed on him; 11-year-old Nudge who talks incessantly but has a gift for computers; 8-year-old Gasman, or Gazzy, whose gift (to the delight of middle school readers everywhere) is exactly what you’d expect the gift of someone called the Gasman to be; and Gasman’s biological sister, Angel, who develops gifts in telepathy, mind control, talking with animals, and breathing under water.

The flock’s hiding place is soon discovered when agents from The School, genetically altered half-men half-wolves called Erasers, find their hideout and kidnap Angel. Max resolves to get her back, even if it means returning to The School and the horifying memories it contains for all of them.

From that point on, througout the three volumes, the action rarely stops. There’s a reason this part of the series is called The Fugitives; for three volumes these kids run and run and run. They are guided and protected by Max, who struggles to keep them safe even as she has to deal with her own feelings of inadequacy, fear, and anger. She doesn’t make every choice well, but we never forget that she’s 14. How many 14-year-olds have to face assassins every single day?

These kids can’t trust anyone, and every time they start to do so, it blows up in their faces (sometimes literally). Yet all they want is to be regular kids. Their ongoing, often interrupted quest in the three books is to find their parents, to find out why they were given into the hands of the coporation that made mutants of them. The answers aren’t always pleasant.

It’s heartbreaking to see the flock, during their few forays into normalcy, wish so badly for it to go on, but even the youngest kids enter every room with their eyes on the nearest exits, and not even the simplest everyday tasks are undertaken without knowing what their backup plan is.

It’s no wonder, when she has to be so strong to keep her flock safe, that Max has a hard time letting herself be vulnerable. She develops feelings for Fang, but every time she comes to the point of having to open herself up a little bit, she can’t do it. This leaves Fang frustrated and angry, and Max confused and hurting.

Those human moments are why we read these books. I read the first three books in just a few days, I didn’t want to put them down. As an adult, I could do without the bathroom humor, but I recognize that gas jokes have a hallowed place in the middle school psyche. And at times the continuous action gets to be a little much. It’s really an action series with emotional scenes, not an emotion series with action scenes.

Even so, the characters are real and interesting. They make age-appropriate decisions and mistakes. Most of the humor—led by Max’s sarcastic narration and smart aleck comments—is truly funny, and the whole thing has a tinge of realism that’s a little disturbing. Experiments are being done on humans right now that confound the DNA code of different species, so why wouldn’t we end up with bird kids? And why wouldn’t we believe that the scientific community set out to destroy experiments that they didn’t consider useful? It’s already happening.

The books are fun, funny, compelling, emotional, interesting, current, and well written. They aren’t perfect, but I don’t want to enumerate all the flaws. You don’t really notice them at first, anyway. Maximum Ride is like a good action movie; you don’t think to question it until you leave the theater and are driving home, and you say, “Hey, wait! How could that happen?” Incredible coincidences, occasional pacing problems, and plot points that float unaddressed for far too long would be on the list, if I were to list it, which I’m not. Like I said, you don’t notice. Not at first, anyway, and by that time, Max and her flock are long gone.

Okay, that last one was Airplane!

Many of you got that right, but Annie got it first.  So, now our score is Annie 2, Nancy 1.

This week’s might be a little harder, but here we go:

It’s showtime!

This line has been copied a jillion times, but I want the original, the one everybody copies even if they don’t know it.

Good luck!

Erich Segal, best known as the author of the book Love Story, died Sunday of a heart attack.  His funeral was today in London.

Image courtesy of the Telegraph

Few people know (I certainly didn’t) that Segal was a classics professor at Yale when he wrote Love Story.  I, like many emotional teens, read, loved and wept over Love Story, and even briefly bought into its tag line: “Love means never having to say you’re sorry.”

Obviously, he shouldn’t have been giving out relationship advice, but Love Story still stands as a romantic favorite for readers everywhere.

It was made into a movie in 1970 with Ryan O’Neal and Ali MacGraw.  Segal co-wrote the screenplay, and the movie was nominated for 7 Oscars.

O'Neal and MacGraw in 1970's Love Story

Segal had been struggling with Parkinson’s for 25 years.  His daughter, Francesca, said in his Eulogy today, “That he fought to breathe, fought to live, every second of the last thirty years of illness with such mind-blowing obduracy, is a testament to the core of who he was — a blind obsessionality that saw him pursue his teaching, his writing, his running and my mother, with just the same tenacity. He was the most dogged man any of us will ever know.”

A full list of his novels and works on the classics can be found here.

Rest in peace, Erich.

…and yes, I know it’s Tuesday.  I crashed Sunday afternoon and slept for about 3 hours, and then yesterday the kids were home all day.

So, the score stands at Annie 1, Nancy 1.  And here’s our new quotation:

You ever seen a grown man naked?

No Country for Old Men

Directed by Joel & Ethan Coen

Rated R

2007

Warning: Possible spoilers. I’m trying to be oblique, but I might be giving some things away.

This review has taken me forever to write. I sat down and watched No Country for Old Men, and a week later, words still eluded me. Then I got the DVD for my birthday, and I’ve seen it a couple times since, but I feel like I’m still sitting stunned, with my mouth hanging open. The Coen brothers, Ethan and Joel, are geniuses with such a sense of a story’s deepest truths that the story weaves its way into the viewer’s thoughts and feelings and doesn’t let go. They always do this; all their movies are so enduring, so rooted in the human condition, that they are unquestionably among those few that will last past their own generation.

The story follows three men. Ed Tom Bell, played by Tommy Lee Jones, is the Sheriff of a Texas border county, and while he has a small-town sense of ownership over his territory, he also has the sense to know that his desert county is a major stop in drug trafficking between Mexico and the US. Josh Brolin plays Llewellyn Moss, a good old boy who was in the wrong place at the wrong time, but tries to make it work to his advantage. Finally, Javier Bardem plays Anton Chigurh, a ruthless, creepy, and unstoppable assassin who is determined to take care of unfinished business—namely, Llewellyn Moss.

Javier Bardem as the unstoppable Anton Chigurh

One thing the Coens have always done well is the casting of their films. True, they do have some stock players (John Goodman and Steve Buscemi come to mind), but every movie is perfectly, exquisitely cast. Jones, Brolin, and Bardem offer the kinds of performances in these roles that don’t even require dialogue or action; the most intense, riveting scenes are the ones in which no one says anything and nothing seems to happen, and yet the tension mounts second by second (at one point, my son, playing computer games in the other room, shouted, “I don’t like this movie, it scares me!” We shouted back, “How can it scare you, nothing is happening!” But it was in fact extremely scary right at that moment). Only the most gifted actors can pull that off, and only the most insightful directors know enough to let them.

Nothing in this movie works out the way the viewer expects it to. It doesn’t matter; we can’t look away. And in the end, we really, really wish it had ended differently, but we also know that this was inevitable. We might wish it was different, but we also recognize that this was how it had to be. It was inevitable.

Josh Brolin as Llewellyn Moss

There are still pieces of this movie I don’t understand. What was with all the animals, especially the black ones? Who won in the end? Where did the Mexicans come from? Why didn’t Carson Wells just turn and shoot Chigurh, or run from him? Why didn’t Bell find Chicurgh, and why didn’t Chigurh kill Bell? What did Bell’s dreams mean?

As Ed Tom Bell might say, probably I don’t understand. I like things to fit together, for all the pieces to fall into place by the end, and this movie stubbornly resists that. That might be deliberate; life just doesn’t tie together that easily. And while fiction isn’t life, it does remind one that even if the loose ends still dangle, there are enough reasons to come back again and again and again. I’ve seen this several times now, and it never gets old, and I never, ever feel like I’ve experienced everything it has to offer.

Tommy Lee Jones as Sheriff Ed Tom Bell

Image courtesy of FusedFilm.com

Some creative differences between Sam Raimi, who was in the early stages of directing Spider-Man 4 with the original cast, and Sony Pictures effectively mean that the long awaited 4th installment in the Spider-Man franchise will not see the light of day.

Sony set a release date of May 2011, but Raimi said that was too soon, he couldn’t do it the way he wanted to do it in that time frame.  On top of that, troubles with the script kept the studio pushing back the start date time after time.  In the end, Sony opted not to change the date, and Raimi and the whole original cast bowed out.  Word is that Tobey Maguire was not all that  upset, and the parting between Raimi and Sony seems to be fairly amicable.  Sony certainly had some nice things to say about Raimi in their official press release (more on that in a sec).

Sam Raimi

But even if Sony’s done with the Raimi-helmed franchise, it’s not done with Spidey.  They are going to entirely reboot the series in 2012.  So, 2011 is out the window altogether, but Spider-Man will start over 2 years from now.  I’m not as thrilled about that, but they are already looking at James Cameron to helm the reboot.  They seem to be committed.

So what will Sam Raimi do next?  He’s considering a new franchise, World of Warcraft.  Isn’t that a video game?  I’m sure Raimi can do well with it, if anyone can.  And Sony, working through Columbia Studios, will stick with the all new Spidey 4.0.

Tobey Maguire

Here’s Sony’s official press release, if you’re interested:

Culver City, CA (January 11, 2010) — Peter Parker is going back to high school when the next Spider-Man hits theaters in the summer of 2012. Columbia Pictures and Marvel Studios announced today they are moving forward with a film based on a script by James Vanderbilt that focuses on a teenager grappling with both contemporary human problems and amazing super-human crises.

The new chapter in the Spider-Man franchise produced by Columbia, Marvel Studios and Avi Arad and Laura Ziskin, will have a new cast and filmmaking team. Spider-Man 4 was to have been released in 2011, but had not yet gone into production.

“A decade ago we set out on this journey with Sam Raimi and Tobey Maguire and together we made three Spider-Man films that set a new bar for the genre. When we began, no one ever imagined that we would make history at the box-office and now we have a rare opportunity to make history once again with this franchise. Peter Parker as an ordinary young adult grappling with extraordinary powers has always been the foundation that has made this character so timeless and compelling for generations of fans. We’re very excited about the creative possibilities that come from returning to Peter’s roots and we look forward to working once again with Marvel Studios, Avi Arad and Laura Ziskin on this new beginning,” said Amy Pascal, co-chairman of Sony Pictures Entertainment.

“Working on the Spider-Man movies was the experience of a lifetime for me. While we were looking forward to doing a fourth one together, the studio and Marvel have a unique opportunity to take the franchise in a new direction, and I know they will do a terrific job,” said Sam Raimi.

“We have had a once-in-a-lifetime collaboration and friendship with Sam and Tobey and they have given us their best for the better part of the last decade.This is a bittersweet moment for us because while it is hard to imagine Spider-Man in anyone else’s hands, I know that this was a day that was inevitable,” said Matt Tolmach, president of Columbia Pictures, who has served as the studio’s chief production executive since the beginning of the franchise. “Now everything begins anew, and that’s got us all tremendously excited about what comes next. Under the continuing supervision of Avi and Laura, we have a clear vision for the future of Spider-Man and can’t wait to share this exciting new direction with audiences in 2012.”

“Spider-Man will always be an important franchise for Sony Pictures and a fresh start like this is a responsibility that we all take very seriously,” said Michael Lynton, Chairman and CEO of Sony Pictures. “We have always believed that story comes first and story guides the direction of these films and as we move onto the next chapter, we will stay true to that principle and will do so with the highest respect for the source material and the fans and moviegoers who deserve nothing but the best when it comes to bringing these stories and characters to life on the big screen.”

The studio will have more news about Spider-Man in 2012 in the coming weeks as it prepares for production of the film.

Ready, everyone?  Right now, Annie is the one to beat.

Score:  Annie 1, everyone else 0.

Allll-righty then!

Why do we Americans take such delight in British titles and honors (sorry, titles and honours)? I don’t know, maybe because we don’t have any of our own. Maybe because the titles we do have are boring. Who would rather have a Secretary of the Treasury when you could have a Chancellor of the Exchequer?

Sir Patrick Stewart

Two of my favorite British Hollywood-types—Patrick Stewart and Peter Jackson—have been knighted by Queen Elizabeth. Both have made incredible contributions to film. Sir Patrick is best known for his role in Star Trek: The Next Generation, of course, but his list of theatrical accomplishments include stints with the Royal Shakespeare Company and shows playing in London’s West End. One of my favorites of his roles is his Ebenezer Scrooge in the 1999 made-for-TV version of A Christmas Carol.

Sir Peter Jackson

Sir Peter did The Lord of the Rings trilogy, which is a personal favorite of mine, but he’s done a lot more than that. I’m particularly looking forward to seeing The Lovely Bones, though it’s gotten pretty mixed reviews, and I can’t wait to see The Hobbit.

Congratulations, milords!

I’m usually going to do movie quotes and book quotes on Sundays, but I missed this week and thought I’d catch up. Can you guess the movie this comes from?

My mother thanks you. My father thanks you. My sister thanks you. And I thank you.

Let me know if you need a hint!  And remember, I’m a big fan of the classics.  And I love lists…