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I’ve been meaning to post these posters for awhile. This is a campaign I did at work for a pro-bono account called The Family Book Project. They collect books and give them to underprivileged children and adults at shelters and rehabilitation centers here in Greenville County. Richard Salais, who was the art director on these, was great to work with. Talented guy. Chris Stanford was the photographer, guy out of Atlanta.

The idea for the campaign came from all these statistics we found about reading proficiency and social ills like teen pregnancy, homelessness, and crime. The posters awards won several local gold ADDY awards as well as a few gold district ADDY awards, including a Special Judges Award in their community service category.

Bill Bryson, in my opinion — for whatever that is worth — is the funniest writer in America. I’ve read several of his books now, and all them keep me laughing, sometimes out loud, which is a rare thing. Few books make me laugh at loud. And it’s over the simplest things, really. I distinctly remember laughing so hard at one point during In a Sunburned Country, Bryson’s travel book of Australila, that I was literally crying. The story was of how Bryson had fallen asleep in a car as a family drove him around some city in Australia, giving him a tour. That doesn’t sound like fertile comic soil, I know, but Bryson had me rolling, let me tell you.

His most recent book, a memoir of his growing up in the fifties in Des Moines, is no less hilarious; although this one is slightly more sentimental since Bryson is talking about personal experiences and those most near and dear to him. Turns out Bryson’s parents were both writers also, journalists for the Des Moines Register, a prominent paper in its day. His father was in fact one of the greatest sports writers of his time, according to Bryson, and I enjoyed those bits of the book in which Bryson recounted great moments in sports history that his father was privileged enough to witness and write about.

I also enjoyed those parts of the book that explained what life was like in the fifties, a time that’s obviously foreign to me. Before listening to this book, all I knew about the fifties was what I had learned by watching the movie A Christmas Story, that narrated, campy film from the eighties. So maybe that’s why, in some places, this book felt like A Christmas Story. The individual stories were different, of course, but in some instances the reader could have replaced Bill Bryson’s name for that of Ralphie, the title character of A Christmas Story. The two seemed almost identical: somewhat nerdy, obsessed with sex and comics, forced to eat gross food. Even the peripheral characters seemed the same. The stern, heartless teacher. The school bully. The scatter-brained mother. The father with eccentric behavior. It all felt very familiar.

But I didn’t mind. It had me fascinated throughout.

Bill Bryson read the book. Some people don’t like his reads, but I do. I’ve listened to several of his books this way, and I think it works very well. Bryson has such a dry wit and teddy bear of a voice that you can’t help but like the guy. He’s completely unintimidating. Like a cool college professor who you bump into at some coffee and who, over cups of hot chocolate, must tell you the all about the funniest thing that happened to him that morning. And because Bryson’s stories are always funny, you’re more than eager to pass the day, sitting at his feet.

And the man can write. He makes language seem so effortless, so breezy. I sit and listen in awe. Some of it, is brilliant. A kind of easy going conversational prose. I’ll try to imitate the best I can for the rest f my life, I assure you.

So get this book. Or better still, get the audiobook. Listening to it is like meeting Bryson in person and becoming the closest of friends. And he, with all those memories and experiences, is an entertaining friend, indeed.

16 Blocks has a brilliant premise, and when I saw the trailer I was so excited by it that I thought I might actually go out and see this movie at the theater. We go to the theater so rarely that this was high praise indeed. Lucky for me, I didn’t pay ten bucks to see it at the local multiplex. If I had, I would’ve have been extremely annoyed and perhaps even demanded a portion of my money returned.

16 Blocks stars Bruce Willis as an aging, creaky-kneed, alcoholic city cop who’s given the routine assignment of taking a criminal witness (Mos Def) from his prison cell to the city courthouse 16 blocks away to testify in a murder case. What neither Willis not Mos Def knows is that hit men have been hired to wax Mos Def in route and prevent him from ever reaching the witness stand. And that’s only beginning. Turns out there are dirty cops involved (naturally), and before we know it, Willis and Mos Def are runninng from the very people who should be protecting them.

With the exception of Mos Def’s nasaly voice, the first hour of this film is excellent. The scene in which the hit men strike while Willis is buying a bottle of booze is classic cop suspense. I loved it. And Lauren did as well.

But then, three quarters into the film, the situation becomes so implausibly stupid, that the entire movie pops like an over-inflated balloon. And what was so annoying about this gaping whole in the plot is that it could have easily been resolved. I mean, the answer was right there in front of us. Why the director and writer insisted on “the bus scene” (and you’ll know what I mean when you see it) still mystifies me. It was so utterly stupid and out of character that I actually laughed. Well, first I got angry; then I laughed.

After that, I couldn’t get back into the film. And the alternate ending, which thankfully wasn’t included in the film, was so headache-inducing stupid that I couldn’t understand why’d they’d even include it as an option on the DVD. It was like saying, Here, look how stupid we almost were.

Maybe they included it so we’d say, “Well at least they didn’t put THAT in the film.”

Which is too bad, really. Bruce Willis was great. This could have been a great movie throughout, but it wasn’t. It was a bummer.

Until now, I had never seen an Oliver Stone film. They’re all rated R and usually filled with violence too graphic for my tastes. The only clip I ever saw of Platoon was about three seconds of a violent rape scene, and it was enough to convince me that Oliver Stone movies are — shall we say? — not for me.

But I had heard and read good things about World Trade Center, Stone’s latest. And since I had already experienced the violence it depicts, having seen all the horror of September 11th as it unfolded on live TV five years ago, I wasn’t worried about being exposed to Platoon level violence. The movie is based on real accounts, after all.

As it turns out, World Trade Center IS violent, very violent, far more than I suspected it to be. Personally, I would have given it an R rating. The depiction of death is too real, too gruesome. Yes, those moments are brief, but so was the rape scene in Platoon, and it haunts me to this day, burned forever in my memory. This simply isn’t the kind of movie a 13 year-old should be admitted to see.

Some of the moments were so harrowing in fact that that Lauren and I had stop to movie, go online, and read the synopsis of the film. We had to know if certain characters were going to survive or not before we could finish watching the film. It was too close to us. September 11 is too fresh a memory. The people depicted in the film were real people with families and loved ones and bright futures ahead of them. I suppose I should have known that watching something like this would cause all the emotions of September 11 to swell up in Lauren and me again, but I wasn’t prepared for that. So we had to go online and find out what happened. We had to know if the characters would pull through or not. It was going to be too painful an expereince to watch them suffer without knowing if a happy ending wasn’t waiting at the end of the tunnel. Whether that happy endiing comes or not, I won’t say. You should experience the film for yourself.

The story revolves around two port-authority police officers (played by Nicholas Cage and Michael Pena) who are trapped twenty feet under the rubble of the World Trade Center. They’re both pinned down, unable to move or call for help. But you can’t set a two-hour movie down in a dark hole where the actors can’t move. That would be a play. Besides, the people affected by September 11 were not only those trapped in the rubble or those who perished in the incident. Families suffered. Loved ones suffered. And so Oliver Stone cuts back and forth between the police officers and their families who fear their hunsbands and fathers may have died. They don’t know. They can’t get word. All they can do is sit and wait. And the performances by Maria Bello and Maggie Gyllenhall as the officers’ wives is both honest and inspiring. While their husbands endured a physical hell, they endured an emotional one.

The website dedicated to the film has far more special features than the DVD did. After the film, Lauren and I spent another half hour at the site watching the video interviews of the people depicted in the film. So yes, some of the characters survive. If you don’t want to know who, don’t go to the website until after you’ve seen the film. But the interviews are great. It was fascinating to meet the real the people so soon after seeing them protrayed in the film.

Should you see this movie? Only you can decide, but I’m glad I did. It reminded me of how important the war on terror is. It reminded me that there are evil people out there who want to destroy our society as we know it. And yet, there are a lot of good people as well. Brave people. Selfless people. People with real guts, real heart. And that is what makes World Trade Center such a wonderful film. My only gripe — and it’s a big one — is the film’s depiction of a former US Marine who’s participation in the rescue efforts was critical and who, for whatever reason, chose not to collaborate with Oliver Stone in the making of the film. As a result, the marine is depicted as a Christian zealot, kind of a half-crazed god-fearing robot. His character is completely unbeleiveable and probably no where close to being accurate. Yes, he was a Christian. But instead of making Christians look like selfless, decent people, Oliver Stone has to make them seem like dumb zombies. Shame on Oliver Stone for this. Lauren and I were so bothered by it, that we did some research online about the guy. Turns out, a writer from Slate magazine had interviewed the real former Marine. And guess what? He’s not crazy. He’s simply a private person. And Oliver Stone’s depiction of him in the film infuriated the journalist who had actually met the guy. So yeah, Oliver Stone has an obvious bias. Too bad he couldn’t have toldl the complete truth as it unfolded. That would have made a good film even better.