Bryce Moore's Blog, page 162

Movie Review: The Jungle Book

Nothing like a massively out of date movie review to catch your interest this fine Tuesday, right? I mean, this has to be one of the most irrelevant reviews I’ve posted. I’m so out of date with new movies that I don’t catch them until they’re out on Netflix.

Sigh. How the mighty have fallen.

And it’s not even like I’m here to tell you that everything you heard about the movie was wrong. It wasn’t. It’s a gorgeous film, with incredible effects and a great version of the original movie it’s based on. So why am I reviewing it now?

I think it’s because it’s a movie that for the first three quarters, I thought I was going to give a 3 or a 4 to, and then the ending managed to bump it all the way to a 5/5, and I wanted to think about how that happened.

First, my issues with the first three quarters: the movie was good. Just good. I’d been told it was great, and so my expectations were very high heading into the film. Instead, I just sort of ended up wondering if all the hype had been overblown. Sure, the special effects were great, but wasn’t it really just a retread of the animated movie, except with some live action thrown in?

In addition to that, the dialogue was really bugging me. Not because of what was being said, but rather how. All the interactions seemed deliberate and drawn out. Someone would say something, and then the response always came a bit too  late. It was like the characters were communicating over a bad phone line. Sometimes this would happen even in the middle of one character speaking. They’d. Say something and. Then wait for a. Bit. Before finishing what they were. Thinking about.

It was like Captain Kirk had directed them.

So although the effects were great, I was thinking about settling in at a 4/5 rating. Maybe a 3/5 if the dialogue continued to bug.

But then the last quarter of the film hit, and everything came together. First of all, the plot took some great turns that I didn’t necessarily see coming. No huge twists or anything, but it managed to take what was in the original and make it new enough to surprise me and generate some really good emotions. That was very impressive.

Second, I began to believe the dialogue quirk was done deliberately. (Because seriously, why else would that happen? No way Bill Murray was goofing on his performance.) And so I asked myself why it was happening. The answer seemed clear: it was going for a more “storybook” approach. Again, riffing on the original, but in a new, interesting way. I know that might seem like a copout, but to me, it made the movie go from being a hodgepodge of effects and plot and retreading into a single complete package. The dialogue, the story tweaks, the acting, the echoes from the animated version: it all came together.

In the end, the climax of the movie really struck me. It resonated. And that was the final piece. As a whole, the movie thrilled me, and it managed to do it in a surprising way. So for that, it sealed the deal. 5/5

That’s my story, and I’m sticking to it. What did you think of the movie?

Book Review: The Golem and the Jinni

The Golem and the Jinni by Helene Wecker

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

It’s been a while since I reviewed a book, and what better book to break the silence with than this one? I’d heard good things about The Golem and the Jinni before I read it. Nothing specific: just that it was something I should check out when I could. I knew it was about . . . a golem . . . and a jinni, but that was about it.

And really, that’s all you need to know. It’s set in New York City in the 1800s and traces the life and adventures of the titular non-humans.

Is it fantasy? Sure. But it’s a pretty limited fantasy. There’s magic, but it’s mostly relegated to the background. In other words, if you’re not a typical fan of fantasy, don’t let that dissuade you from this book. On the other hand, there’s enough fantasy there so that if you typically *only* read fantasy, you still have a fair shot of really liking the novel as well.

At its heart, however, the book is about characters. It takes its time exploring who’s doing what and why. Don’t get me wrong: the plot is a good one, and the book really picked up speed toward the end, but the reason the plot works so well is that by the time we get to where the action takes over, we really care about all the main characters on the stage. We know them. We understand them. And (better yet) they’re consistent throughout. You don’t get any characters making decisions just to fit the plot.

It’s well written from start to finish, and I recommend it heartily to just about anyone. Thought provoking and attention grabbing. It’s rare you get both in the same package.

Check it out.

View all my reviews

Book Signing Next Week!

Just wanted to make sure all you lovely people out there knew that I’ll be at Barnes & Noble next Saturday (the 17th) from 1-3pm in Augusta, signing pretty much anything you put in front of me. In fact, if you bring something particularly noteworthy or unusual for me to sign, I’ll bring some prizes to hand out. But you’ll have to say the magic phrase.

Of course, this means I need to come up with a magic phrase. Something no one’s going to guess . . .

We’ll make it so that it’s something longtime fans would know. Let’s go with “Watch out for teacups.”

So. You bring something strange to sign and tell me the magic phrase, and I’ll give you something cool in return. Sound like a deal?

See you there!

What are Your Favorite Book Series?

For this week’s radio show, we came up with our top 5 book series. I (of course) had to narrow it down some, because that was too much of a question to commit to, so instead I chose my 5 favorite series from when I was a kid. They’re the books I’ve reread the most often, after all. These days, I don’t have too much time to reread books. Back then I did it all the time.

So check out the show, and let me know what series would make your top 5.

A Day Which Will Live in Infamy

Nothing says “Holiday Spirit” like watching a mini-series all about war, right? Right. Which is why Denisa had I have been working our way through The Pacific, the HBO produced sequel (of sorts) to Band of Brothers. You’ll recall we watched that back at the beginning of November, and so we wanted to give The Pacific a try as well.

The series is much different than Band of Brothers. I’d thought from the first that we’d seen about everything war had to offer, but The Pacific proved me wrong. Very wrong.

I had never taken the time to really look into what World War II looked like on the Pacific front. I knew about how it started (December 7, Pearl Harbor) and how it ended of course, but all the stuff in the middle? I somehow just glossed over it. It had to be kind of like Europe, except with palm trees and islands, right?

Nope.

This series is brutal. Flat out painful to watch. Soldiers turning from people into meat on both sides of the battle. Killing through every possible way. The series doesn’t pull any punches, but it seems like it would have been wrong to pull them. To depict it as anything less than what it was. The weather was brutal, the environment hostile. Torrential rainstorms. Deep mud. Disease. Sweltering heat. Lack of potable water. Difficulty supplying the troops. Faulty intelligence. Long, drawn out battles for months. There were invasions just as bad as D-Day, but we hardly hear anything about them.

It’s also so sad to see the way war necessitated a dehumanizing of the enemy. I get why it happened: it’s hard to kill another human, and it becomes much easier when you stop viewing the victims as actually human. I’d like to think we’ve come a long way since then, and that war like this is over, but I know that’s not the case. It’s happening even as we speak over in Syria.

Last night we watched the next-to-last episode. In it, one of the main characters, Sledge, has a key moment. He was introduced to us as a bright eyed young man ready and eager to do his part to defend his country. And over the course of the war, he’s just beaten down. He comes to the Pacific and witnesses troops doing atrocities. Digging through the mouths of dead Japanese soldiers to get gold teeth. (And sometimes, digging through the mouths of live soldiers.) His friends are killed. His orders are sometimes flat out wrong. And over the course of the series, he hardens himself to killing. He starts embracing the idea that the Japanese aren’t human. They’re just things to be killed.

He enters the house of a Japanese family. There’s a baby that had survived a bombing while the rest of the family died, and Sledge and his friend just stand there staring at the baby, listening to it cry and doing nothing about it. Things have gotten bad enough that you’re dreading what might happen next. Could they just shoot the baby to quiet it? But a different soldier shows up and soothes the child.

As Sledge is leaving the house, he hears a noise. He goes to investigate and finds a mortally wounded woman. She’s unable to speak, but she signals that she wants him to shoot her and put her out of her misery. And he has his gun all set to go. But then he hesitates, and finally he puts his gun down. Again, the assumption could be that he’d rather not waste a bullet. That he’d be willing to let her die alone in agony. But instead, he puts his gun down and holds her until she dies, comforting her. He finally rejects the dehumanization of the enemy, and he’s a better man for it.

It’s a touching moment, and very well done. The series is filled with character pieces like that.

Anyway. I’ll let you all resume your holiday cheer now. But on today, the 75th anniversary of Pearl Harbor, I wanted to take a moment to pay my respects to the people who fought and died in the war that resulted from that attack. I recommend the series, though be aware that it’s graphic.

When Christmas Trees Attack

I’ve had better days in my life compared to how my day went yesterday. A few worse ones, of course. But it’s not often you have a day that you’re pretty sure you’ll remember for quite some time, and for all the wrong reasons. I’ve had better ways I’ve responded to stress, too.

The day started out innocently enough. An average work day, though I was still getting over being sick. Nothing bad, but a lingering fatigue. You know how it can be. I’d come home and worked on writing, and all was still more or less on track. Then I got news that my step mother’s cancer had taken a sharp turn for the worse. (Believe it or not, I try to avoid talking too much about family on my blog beyond Denisa and the kids. And there are some things I just don’t mention. I only bring this up now to explain how the day went from fine to awful so quickly.)

The news shook me a great deal. It still has me unsettled and off balance, and this is now almost a whole day later. But Denisa was at work still, and I needed to get things moving with dinner and family activities. Mikulaš was supposed to come last night, after all. And that meant the kids needed to find their winter boots and clean them, and we wanted to decorate the Christmas tree on top of that.

I came downstairs determined to have a good evening. In retrospect, this was the wrong attitude to start with. I was Clark Griswolding the holidays. I’d put the movie clip in (from National Lampoon’s Vacation), but the language is too strong for me to feel comfortable. Here’s the edited quote I’m referring to. It comes toward the end of the movie. Everything’s been going wrong with the trip, and Clark’s family wants to bail out. When they suggest giving up on the vacation, this is his response:

I think you’re all [frakked] in the head. We’re ten hours from the [frakking] fun park and you want to bail out. Well I’ll tell you something. This is no longer a vacation. It’s a quest. It’s a quest for fun. You’re gonna have fun, and I’m gonna have fun… We’re all gonna have so much [frakking] fun we’re gonna need plastic surgery to remove our goddamn smiles! You’ll be whistling ‘Zip-A-Dee Doo-Dah’ out of your assholes! I must be crazy! I’m on a pilgrimage to see a moose. Praise Marty Moose!

This scene plays in my head whenever I go overboard on something. Usually in retrospect, of course. The same as it’s playing now. But I definitely feel obligated to have fun sometimes, even when it’s just not happening.

So I was stressed last night, and I was more stressed by the thought that we had to have a FUN night, and that made me snappy. I barked the kids into order and got dinner going. I managed to seriously upset one child to the point that they left the room completely, right before decorations were supposed to be going up. I sifted through Christmas tree lights and got them onto the tree, and then I plodded through the motions of what was supposed to be going on.

And then I realized what I was doing and backed off a bit. That was a good thing. The child rejoined us, apologies were extended, and it seemed like we might pull through that evening without too much damage.

Then I got an email about something at work that had to be taken care of right away. Fine. Everything seemed to be in order, so I headed up to work on a revision of a document that needed to be turned around ASAP. Halfway through the revision, DC came to the room, her eyes wide. “Mom needs you,” she said. “The tree fell down.”

Yeah.

I rushed downstairs to see the Christmas tree we’d spent an hour or two decorating, sprawled on the floor. Ornaments shattered. Needles scattered. Water everywhere. This was a first for me. It felt so . . . strange to see that tree like that. Like it was dead, honestly. Somehow we’d put too many decorations on one side, I think. Or else I’d pulled at it when I was putting on the lights. In any case, the tree had been imbalanced, and it toppled at last. Thankfully no one had been there to get hit when it fell.

Denisa and I scrambled to dry the floor and right the tree. Meanwhile, I still had that ASAP work assignment, so once the crisis had at least been patched, I headed back upstairs to finish. I got it done and sent back, and then I headed downstairs again to redecorate the tree.

It was a late night.

But it’s in the past now. The best thing about bad days is that usually things can only get better. Here’s hoping it’s all up from here.

Anyone else have a Christmas tree topple on them? I can’t be the first . . .

Trust Me: I’m a Librarian

One of the big announcements at Maine Library Association’s annual conference in November was that the Maine State Library had commissioned a survey to find out how trusted our profession is. Apparently there’s a common survey done every year to look at the reputations of many professions, from lawyers to nurses to car salesmen and everything in between. Except librarians. We’ve never been included in the survey, and this was an attempt to correct that.

The result? Librarians are the second most trusted profession in Maine. Right behind nurses, and ahead of pharmacists, medical doctors, and high school teachers. 78% of Mainers have very high or high trust in librarians. (2% of them think we’re shifty-eyed weasels, of course . . .)

Conversely, 79% of Mainers don’t trust telemarketers. At all. (But of course, 2% of them believe every word those telemarketers say. I’m baffled by some people.)

So this got me thinking: is there a profession out there that you highly trust? If you had questions about something and wanted honest answers, who would you go to?

I’m really happy librarians rated so highly, because I think that as a whole we do a good job with providing reliable data to people. We try our best not to be judgmental, and we focus on finding answers. Way to go, us!

And to those people out there listening to telemarketers for advice? Please come into a library and get some better answers. Just sayin’ . . .

Not My Child

I’ve always derived a sort of smug sense of enjoyment when I’ve read on Facebook the accounts of parents whose children come rushing into them the day (or hour) of a concert or a party or an important event, letting them know at that last minute that this oh-so-important event is happening. It’s not that I’m sadistic (much), but I’d smile and shake my head, confident in my own personal scheduling abilities and the effortless way I keep on top of all of my children’s schedules.

Yeah.

So yesterday I’m perusing Facebook, and the mom of one of Tomas’s friends is asking what time students need to be to the concert. I frowned at the post for a moment. Concert? What concert? Could she be talking about some older students? Maybe a high school concert? Must be. I haven’t heard about any concert. Then again, Tomas has been sick the last three days and stayed home from school. Maybe some sort of last minute concert had been thrown together?

I shift into research mode. A bit of Google-fu later, and I discover that this isn’t just some concert. This is THE winter concert for 7th and 8th grade orchestra. The main event.

And I had no idea it was even happening.

I’m still not convinced, so I go down to Tomas, who’s reading on a Kindle, trying to rest up so he can go back to school. “Is there a concert today?” I ask him.

“No,” he said, without even thinking.

“It’s December 1st,” I said. “There’s no orchestra concert?”

The Kindle dropped. The blood drained from his face. “It’s December 1st already?”

That answered that. Thankfully we still had 2 hours before the concert began, and Tomas was feeling well enough to go. Denisa took him (I stayed with the rest of the brood. Sick is running through the family at the moment.) All ended well. And from the sound of it, we weren’t alone in our last minute surprise. A number of other parents just found out about the concert this week.

Still, I can’t help but feel like I brought this upon myself. It’s what I get for thinking I’m so awesome when it comes to scheduling. We had a long talk with Tomas about it, and hopefully we’ll avoid a repeat of the experience, but as my kids grow older, I’m discovering more and more how complex their schedules can be, and how inexperienced they are at keeping on top of them.

It’s like Donald Rumsfeld said:

There are known knowns. These are things we know that we know. There are known unknowns. That is to say, there are things that we know we don’t know. But there are also unknown unknowns. There are things we don’t know we don’t know.

That’s what burns us all, in the end.

Searching for Success

I’ve written this blog pretty much every weekday for about ten years now, give or take. (Actually I just went and checked. My ten year anniversary will be January 17th. Coming right up!) And if there’s one thing I’ve learned in that time, it’s that there’s no way to know ahead of time when a post will be successful or not. I can spend an hour on a post. Pour out my feelings on the page and really put in a ton of effort. The resulting post might be fantastic in my opinion, but the moment I hit “publish”, it’s out of my hands as to whether people read it or not.

Oh, there are some things I can do to try and boost its visibility. I’ve posted some things to Reddit. Reposted things to Facebook later in the day if I feel like a post isn’t getting the traffic it deserves. But the sad truth is that even that isn’t enough to get things read.

Ten years doing this, and I still haven’t gotten it figured out. Yesterday’s quick “Come on, Mitt” post was my most popular post in months, easily. No one reposted it. No one retweeted it. But somehow it managed to find its way to an audience. Other posts end up being more of the “slow and steady wins the race” variety. For example, the one I wrote almost 3 years ago about getting into BYU continues to rack up the views each week. A little here, a little there, but it’s now the 6th most popular post I’ve ever written. It’s the second most popular post people have read this year. The second most popular post people have read this quarter. The second most popular post people have read this month. The third most popular post they’ve read this week.

You get the picture.

I don’t do anything to promote that post now. (Well, until this entry, I guess.) But people find it.

In a way, this is really frustrating. I write my posts so that people will read them. All of them. They’re all important to me (well, most of them, at least.) And if I could figure out a way to have them all get the attention they deserve, I’d do it. But in another way, it’s comforting. Because the same thing happens with everything out there. The books I write, for one thing.

I’ve finished 15 novels now. Two of them are professionally published. 2 are bouncing around editors’ desks, still trying to find a home. 1 is about to go out. But for all of them, once I’ve written them, much of their success is out of my hands. I can write blog posts. Do book signings. School visits. Conferences. But in the end, so much of their success is dependent on things other than me. I can move the needle only so much.

In a way, that’s depressing. But in a larger way, it’s freeing. It’s a big relief to know that if a book doesn’t do well, it’s not all on me.

And that’s my deep thought for today.

Come On, Mitt

I’ve been very public in my distaste for Donald Trump, and that distaste hasn’t gone anywhere. Many of his picks for his cabinet have been disappointing and alarming, but one had me see a little bit of hope for at least some stability: Mitt Romney as a potential Secretary of State. I really respected Mitt for how strongly he spoke out about the dangers of Trump, and I was hoping that he might somehow act as a counterbalance to what’s shaping up to be a very extreme slate of leaders.

Except then I read articles like this one, and I do a double take. Here’s Romney’s statement on Trump as of today (the bolding is my own, to make commentary easier later on):

I had a wonderful evening with President-elect Trump. We had another discussion about affairs throughout the world, and these discussions I’ve had with him have been enlightening and interesting and engaging. I’ve enjoyed them very, very much.

I was also very impressed by the remarks he made on his victory night. By the way, it’s not easy winning. I know that myself. He did something I tried to do and was unsuccessful in. He won the general election and he continues with a message of inclusion and bringing people together and his vision is something which obviously connected with the American people in a very powerful way.

The last few weeks he’s been carrying on a transition effort, and I can tell you I’ve been impressed by what I’ve seen in the transition effort. The people he’s selected as members of his Cabinet are solid, effective, capable people. Some of them I know very well. Nikki Haley and I go way back. She’s an outspoken, strong, powerful leader. Tom Price is someone who actually came to my office before he had run for Senate and we spent time talking about healthcare. What an expert and solid thinker in that arena and others. Jeff Sessions is someone who I knew through my campaigns, helped me very early on, he has a distinguished record in the Senate. And, of course many others, Betsy DeVos and a long list of people, very impressive individuals.

I happen to think that America’s best days are ahead of us. I think you’re going to see America continue to lead the world in this century. And what I’ve seen through these discussions I’ve had with President-elect Trump, as well as what we’ve seen in his speech the night of his victory, as well as the people he’s selected as part of his transition, all of those things combined give me increasing hope that President-elect Trump is the very man who can lead us to that better future. Thank you.

There are two ways to read this behavior by Romney. The optimist in me wants to say that Romney realizes this country needs every shred of stability it might get in the next four years, and that if he cozies up to Trump the right way, then Romney might be positioned to offer some of that stability. That Romney knows the only way to get anything good done at the moment is to talk the talk, and this is the talk that’s needed, distasteful as it may be.

Then again, the cynic in me would like to say that Romney was only speaking out so strongly against Trump because he was trying to position himself to potentially swoop in at the last second and get the Republican nomination so that he could try to be President once more. When that didn’t pan out, he’s now making a power grab to get a consolation prize, and he’s willing to do or say anything needed to get it.

Both of those narratives are possibilities. I imagine the truth is somewhere in the middle, though it might well be one or the other. Still, I can’t help wishing Romney’s statement was a bit less pandering. A few notes of “the way Trump ran his campaign was deplorable” would have been nice, as well as some “Some of his cabinet picks have been questionable, to say the least,” but maybe I’m just dreaming.

I have to remind myself: this is politics. Ugh.