Archives for December 2006

I’ve been a fan of Orson Scott Card ever since I picked up a copy of Ender’s Game in middle school. Like everyone else who has read it, I dreamed of being summoned up to Battle School and shooting and soaring my way to the top of the Battle Room scoreboard. I would be a toon leader, second in command to the great Ender Wiggin. And when the hour of his greatest need arrived, he would call upon me to fight at his side as a member of his jeesh.

Ah to be young again, to dream.

The fact is, Card is a master storyteller. My experience with Ender’s Game is not unique. Novel after novel, story after story, Card creates characters who are so memorable, so original, so full of heart, that you embrace them as soon as you meet them and beg them to never leave. Ender, Valentine, Alvin, Sarah, Mack Street, Jason Worthing, and more, all have permanent residents in my mind.

Since reading Ender’s Game, I’ve read nearly everything Card has written. And that’s saying a lot. Small libraries could be built that hold only his work. I love his fantasy, his science fiction, his biblical fiction, his short fiction, his contemporary fantasy (yes, that’s different, in my opinion, from traditional fantasy), his plays, his comics … goodness, even his poetry. Even the stories he’s written that he doesn’t like or that he thinks are flawed are favorites of mine.

So it should be noted that I approached Empire not as an objective reader, as someone ignorant of the author’s talents and mildly skeptical of his abilities to entertain me. No, sir. I came as a diehard fan. I knew this book was going to be good. And I was right.

Empire is a pulse-pounding military thriller that demands to be made into a film. It’s so cinematic, in fact, that if it ISN’T made into a film, it’s only because the Hollywood Liberal Left can’t stand the idea of any liberal being portrayed negatively on screen. Villains, you see, must be the conservative right, the “oppressive” Christian majority.

The truth is, Empire is wonderfully nonpartisan. Card doesn’t choose sides. There are good guys and there are bad guys. Card does not (as one review I read insinuated) vilify Blue States and wave a flag for the Red States.

The premise of the novel is this: in the near future, America experiences a second civil war after the president, the vice president, and secretary of defense are assassinated. The army special-ops officer who was assigned to think up presidential assassination attempts — so that such attempts could be thwarted — discovers that his plan was used to do the dirty deed. In other words, he’s been unknowingly helping the bad guys all along.

The bad guys turn out to be members of the “Progressive Restoration,” a group of rebels who believe that the White House was stolen from the rightful party and who now feel it their duty to take it back. The action cranks into high gear when tall, bulletproof machines roll into New York City and begin shooting everyone wearing a uniform. Chaos ensues and readers will find that a long, sleepless night lies ahead. Once the action starts, you can’t put this book down.

What’s most amazing about Empire is its believability. The notion of another civil war at first seemed unlikely to me. We’re so much more advanced and educated as a nation than we were back in the 1860s. Times have changed. War means guns, Americans killing Americans. And so much has happened since the Civil War to unite us as a nation, that the idea of picking up arms against each other once again seemed implausible.

But by golly if Card hasn’t done it! The case was made, and once the shooting started, it all felt real. A second civil war no longer feels like such an unlikely occurrence. Empire is a dark look into what could happen if the political divide continues to divide.

If you’re a lover of thrillers — and even if you aren’t — you must read Empire. It’ll stir you, sober you, and motivate you to put your hand over your heart. A wonderful read.

I should also mention that Card shares some of novel’s success with the guys at Chair Entertainment, who approached Card with the idea in hopes of collaborating with him on a game/novel/movie franchise centered around the same idea.

I’m not a gamer, but Empire was so engrossing and so full of action that it might make a gamer out of me when the game is finally completed.

No one would argue that M. Night Shyamalan, the director of The Sixth Sense, stole the idea for his film from the Dean Koontz’s novel Odd Thomas. The film came years before the novel. If anyone unconsciously copied it was Koontz, right? Well, knowing Shyamalan’s penchant for copying, I’d side with Koontz. Shyamalan must have got his hands on a time machine back in 1998, jumped into the future, read Odd Thomas, then jumped back to 1998 and sold his movie. Koontz, in my mind, can do no wrong.

He certainly does no wrong here. Odd Thomas, which if you haven’t already guessed, is about someone who can see dead people, is masterful. Odd — that’s the character’s true given name — is not an eight-year-old like Haley Joel Osment. He’s a twenty-year-old short-order cook living in the fictional town of Pico Mundo, California, right on the sweltering Mojave Desert.

Unlike the ghosts of The Sixth Sense, the dead in Odd Thomas can’t speak. But like the film, only Odd can see them and only until they choose to move on to the hereafter. Since Odd grew up in Pico Mundo and knows many of its residents, the ghosts are generally people he knew in life, like an English teacher from high school. The one exception is Elvis Presley, who for some reason unknown to Odd has made Pico Mundo his waiting room to the after life.

Besides seeing and avenging the dead, Odd also possesses a psychic magnetism, the ability to find the villain without really looking for him, like a bloodhound led to his prey without following a scent. Odd merely pictures the person’s face in his mind, drives around at random, and then finds the person he’s looking for.

Because he’s had this gift, or curse, of seeing the dead for so long, and successfully used his instinctual magnetism on so many occasions, Odd is fearless. Or I should say, he’s uninfluenced by his fear. He does get afraid; he just doesn’t let it stop him from plunging into danger and tearing after the bad guy.

Within Pico Mundo (Spanish for Little World) is a special circle of friends who know about Odd’s abilities. They comfort him, console him, and in the case of the town’s police chief, rely on him to catch the bad guys.

Koontz is a master creator of vivid, endearing characters, people who in their own world would get no special notice, but who are, in fact, extraordinary. In the case of Odd’s friends, they’re people who are kind and beautiful and simple and exactly the type of people you wish YOU had as friends. I fell in love with them immediately.

Rather than give away the plot, suffice it to say that Odd Thomas is a book that demands to be read quickly. Koontz knows the meaning of narrative drive. He hints at impending danger and the foreboding big event just enough to keep us reading.

It’s a wonderful, frightening, imaginative, heart-braking story. But a warning: if you try to avoid stories that involve truly evil people, skip this one. Evil is abundant. But in Koontz’s mind, evil needs to be present. Otherwise how would we recognize and appreciate the good? Simply put, Koontz is a story teller who shines light into the darkest places, not to show us the dark, but to make the light all the more discernible.

Meryl Streep and Lily Tomlin did a snappy banter bit at this year’s Oscars before they presented the lifetime achievement award to director Robert Altman. The whole performance was an homage to Altman and his films. Fast, seemingly improvised dialogue is his trademark. Well, that and having large, talented ensemble casts.

The ony other Altman film I’ve ever seen is Gosford Park, and I enjoyed that immensely. Too bad I can’t give the same praise to A Prairie Home Companion.

The movie A Prairie Home Companion is little more than an episode of the radio show. And not a particularly interesting episode at that.

To be fair, I’m not a fan of the radio show. This isn’t to say I don’t like it. I do. I just don’t go out of my way to catch it. True fans do. True fans know precisely what time it comes on public radio and keep their schedules free so as not to miss it. That’s not me. I’ll listen to the show if I’m in the car and I don’t have an audiobook handy, but not otherwise.

When I DO listen, however, I enjoy it. I find Garrison Keillor comfortably charming and can’t help but smile at his Guy Noir bits or his off handed recollections of growing up on Lake Wobegone.

And I guess that’s why I was so disappointed by the movie. Unlike the radio show, it just wasn’t funny. Sure, it had a few chuckles here and there, but most of it was boring. Garrison Keillor, bless his heart, is a radio actor, not a screen actor. He’s got no film presence. No measure of that special Hollywood … something. No million dollar smile.

In fact, he doesn’t even have a one dollar smile. His only expression is a deep, somber frown. I’m not exaggerating. Happy, sad, remorseful. It’s all the same long face. He’s No Emotion Man.

Kevin Kline, on the other hand, was fun as Guy Noir, although the filmmakers’ decision to use Noir as the theater security detail instead of as his true pulp detective self on some mysterious assignment was a huge mistake.

Woody Harrelson and John C. Reiley as slightly off-color singing cowboys gave the movie its only real laughs. Their song about dirty jokes had Lauren and I rolling.

Virginia Madsen played an angel character that made no sense whatsoever. She could be seen by some people, but not others. And the ones who COULD see her didn’t seem the least bit bothered by her being there. I mean, what stage manager would tolerate a stranger strolling around backstage unescorted? What’s worse, no one batted an eye when they found out she was an angel. HELLO! If someone tells you she’s an angel, you’re going to have a reaction, whether you believe her or not.

The Special Features showed some making-of documentaries, but they weren’t anything to write home about. I WAS intrigued by Robert Altman, however. He died recently, so I wasn’t surprised by his old and fragile appearance. In the documentaries, he was almost always sitting on set, and when he did move around, it was with a slow, measured shuffle, as if he feared falling over with every step.

Garrison Keillor wrote the screenplay, and the plot, if you can call it that. The premise was that the theater had been sold and this was the last performance of the program’s successful thirty-year run. What was odd was that no one seemed particularly broken up about this fact. Only the sandwich lady showed any emotion over it. No one else seemed to care.

And if the characters don’t care, why in the world should I?

Perhaps I’m too accustomed to movie conventions. Or maybe I’m too uncultured, incapable of recognizing the genius that is Robert Altman. Either way, A Prairie Home Companion is a film I’ll soon forget.

Despite getting mixed reviews, The Da Vinci Code made a boatload of money when it hit theaters, with a large portion of the ticket sales coming from overseas, suggesting that the novel by Dan Brown was as big a hit, if not bigger, outside the US as it was within. That’s amazing to me, especially considering how immensely popular the book was here in the grand ole U. S. of A. I mean, how can you get more popular than that? Everyone read it. You couldn’t walk down the street without tripping a copy. It was a cultural phenomenon. (You know you’ve hit it big as an author when people start writing books about your book. And it didn’t stop there either; there were probably books written ABOUT the books written.) The world was Da Vinci crazy. Mr. Brown must have made a fortune to rival that of J. K. Rowling, author of the Harry Potter series.

The biggest criticism of the movie was that it was too slow. Not enough action. (We movie goers get fidgety, apparently, if something doesn’t blow up every few minutes or so.) Tom Hanks got his share of criticism of well. His Robert Langdon was too passe, they said, too flat, too uninteresting. And on and on.

Oh well, Tom. You can’t win ’em all.

As for me, I enjoyed the film. Richie Cunningham from Happy Days (aka director Ron Howard) did a fine job, I thought. The Da Vinci Code was a difficult book to adapt, and Howard and Akiva Goldsmith, who wrote the screenplay, found a way to present all the historical data and theories of the novel without intruding too heavily on the story line. In other words, it didn’t feel slow to me. History had to be explained. Ideas had to be presented, complex and century old ideas: the Priory of Sion, the theory of the grail, the Templars, the pagan religions which toppled under Christianity, symbols, architecture, and of course Da Vinci himself, a suspected Grand Master of the secret society devoted to protecting the grail.

The DVD also included a teaser trailer for Angels and Demons, the novel written by Brown before The Da Vinci Code and featuring the same hero, the Harvard symbologist Robert Langdon. The trailer showed no footage because none has yet been shot. Principle photography is set to begin soon. When it hits theaters, you can bet your bottom dollar this will rake in the money as well. I found Angels and Demons a much more cinematic story. It has the Hollywood “chase pace” that critics thought Code lacked. Tom Hanks is set to star again, but we’ll have to wait until 2008 to see if critics will be any kinder the second time around.

I tried reading this book awhile ago, but I couldn’t get past the first half, in which King recounts his rise to super stardom. It’s not that I found King vain, which is the fault of many writers’ memoirs (see Nicholas Spark’s Three Weeks with My Brother, or the more appropriate title Why I’m Such a Genius. The segment on how he “cured” his son of autism was particularly galling). It’s just that there are a lot of books out there that I want to read, and a book filled with stories of Stephen King’s childhood just isn’t one of them. So I put the book aside.

Turns out I threw in the towel just before it got good.

A friend of mine at work keeps this book at his desk. I noticed it on the shelf in his cubicle, and so decided to give King another try. This time, however, I’d go with the audiobook. Perhaps another reader could bring life to what I didn’t find terribly compelling before.

That turned out to be the case. The reader was King himself, and I was surprised to find that King can be charming and funny and a pleasant companion, someone you could sit down in your living room with and listen to for hours. The only other authors I’ve found who can pull this off are Orson Scott Card and Bill Bryson.

In any event, I relistened to the first half of the book and found it slightly more interesting, though even King couldn’t charm me through some of the bits. What I did enjoy hearing was how determined King was as a high schooler to write stories and get them published. It’s the best motivational speech anyone could give on the subject. The man was rejected into oblivion. And yet his love of the craft and story creation kept him on course, never deterred. You got to give props to the guy for that.

And I also enjoyed the bit about him selling CARRIE, his first novel. A fairy tale story if there ever was one. Pretty neat.

The latter half of the memoir is the book’s real treat, however. King discusses the ins and outs of a career in writing, answering those questions everyone asks (Where do your stories come from? How do I get an agent?) as well as those questions no one asks but should (What can you teach us about the language, the mechanics of style, dialogue and story construction?).

Like any writer, King has his pet peeves: passive voice and most adverbs, to name two–novice writers like me will find these nuggets of wisdom particularly helpful. He emphasizes grammar, endorsing The Elements of Style as the tell-all textbook on the subject. He lets slip his opinion of literary critics and those who turn their noses up at writers like him whose work must be trash because it’s popular. He discusses plotting, and I found it fascinating to learn that he does little of it. King lets his characters dictate the story, which is how it should be of course, but were I to go without at least a rough outline, I think I’d quickly find myself way off in the bushes. Frankly, I suspect King does a great deal of plotting, just unconsciously. Writing solid stories is second nature to him. He doesn’t even notice himself plotting. It just happens naturally. Like riding a bike.

If only everyone could be so lucky.

He concludes the book telling the story of the terrible accident that befell him during the writing of it. Back in 1999, some crazed man nearly killed King when he ran over him with his van. It’s a pretty gory tale. The man’s lucky to be alive.

And I’m glad he is. Because at the time of his accident, he was still not finished with either this book or his Dark Tower series, which I’m reading vigorously right now.

If anything, On Writing motivated me to get off my tush and get writing. I’ve been doing my best to do just that, but my schedule at work, coupled with my desire to spend every remaining waking hour with my kids and Lauren, makes finding time for writing difficult. Were King to speak to me directly he’d say, “Shut up your whining and get writing! You either love the process enough to make sacrifices or you don’t.” Sadly for me, the only part of my life that I CAN sacrifice is sleep. I can’t quit my job, and I certainly won’t write at the expense of missing my kids’ childhood. So if anything goes, it’s sleep.

Thanks a lot, Mr. King. Less sleep. Wonderful.

George Clooney is a pretty classy guy, the Cary Grant of our generation, if you ignore the fact that he’s an outspoken liberal quick to take a jab at the current administration. As an actor, he’s top notch; I thought he was hilarious in O Brother Where Art Thou, and as a director, he’s just as skilled. I may not agree with his political mind set, but I can’t deny the man has talent.

I haven’t seen most movies he’s in, however.Syrianna, for example, the movie for which he won the Oscar, was written by the guy who wrote Traffic, and I found that script so disturbing and corrosive that I couldn’t muster the courage to sit through Syrianna for fear of experiencing the same haunting yuckiness.

In any event, Clooney is quite the director. Good Night and Good Luck, which chronicles the Ed Murrow/Joseph McCarthy standoff in the sixties, is done seemingly honestly with a nice mix of cinema verite, documentary-esque camera work and real footage of McCarthy at his worst. David Strathairn, who’ve I’ve admired ever since Sneakers was fabulous as Murrows, even though I have no idea how Murrows REALLY spoke or acted; he was long before my time. I just get the sense that Strathairn was right on, from the pattern and music of his voice to that cocked, cigarette-in-finger expression. You can’t make that up. It had to come from somewhere. The fact that he was nominated for Oscar didn’t hurt my analysis either.

I suppose Clooney considers himself an Ed Murrows of sorts. A buck-the-system truth seeker of our time. Maybe this film was nothing more than a vanity project. (Clooney has done the rounds many times in Washington asking questions and making statements before Congress. His campaigning for action in Darfur, for instance, seems both sensible and good.) But I doubt Clooney is being narcissistic. I think Clooney simply respects Murrows and believes that there are similarities between McCarthy and Bush, which frankly I don’t see. But, hey, this is America. We’re allowed to say what we want.

What is clear is that McCarthy was a very naughty dude. If everything I learned about him in this film is true, Clooney is right to put Murrows on a pedestal. Those were dark times, and Murrows had the guts and gumption to draw a line in the sand and say enough is enough.

As for the screenplay, I thought it snappy, well paced and smoothly written. I liked how it included the intriguing people in Murrows immediate circle — from his producer to a fellow and fragile CBS anchor to a man and woman working at CBS who were secretly married to the real McCarthy himself.

Using the footage of McCarthy was a stroke of genius. Nothing is more disturbing than the truth, sometimes, and to watch McCarthy throw false accusations as if they were stainless steel fact was a frightening look into our recent history. The man was a power hungry zealot, and Clooney was smart to let us see McCarthy in the raw. Had an actor portrayed him, I wouldn’t have believed such things were true. I would have assumed that Clooney was being unfair to McCarthy and dictating a biased performance. Not so. McCarthy was a snake. That he could evoke such a following for awhile is unsettling indeed.

All in all I thought the movie wonderful, though the Truman (or was that Eisenhower?) quote at the end was an annoying poke at Bush. It bothered me not because it was obviously a stab at Bush but because it came from out of nowhere. It didn’t belong with the story. It was clearly Clooney making a political statement. And as such, it felt like a departure from the world the film had created, a breaking of the fourth wall. Tsk tsk, Mr. Clooney. You stood atop your soap box for two beats too long. Otherwise, a wonderful flick.