Jorb: Zack and Miri Make A Porno

How You Like Them Pineapples, Apatow?

Dustin gave me the reins on this one, and I could never be prouder.  The big man himself may very well read this review.  I was worried that it would be some sort of derivative project, or that it would be trying too hard to be like Apatow.  It was fantastic.

I went to the midnight screening last night, and then stayed up all night writing the review.  I swear to God I busted into a delirium.  Thank God my lovely assistant, Lady Clevername, was able to wake and shred the living hell out of this bad boy.  To think, we spend the sunrise trying to figure out the best wording for a tit joke.  I love my job.

Go see this movie.  You’ll like it.  If you don’t, you’re a fucking communist.

Book 22. A Certain Chemistry by Mil Millington

Recommended by Julie, I expected this to be filthy and dirty and raunchy and hilarious, and I was not let down.  Just kidding, kiddo.  

This felt very British/Scottish.  Perhaps that’s a bit jingoistic of me, and it’s not a complaint necessarily, because I adore Brit Lit, but it just oozed that lingo from every pore.  The slang, the feel, the banter, it all just fair reeked for tea and krumpets and fags and whisky.  I don’t know why I feel the need to point out the Britishness of the book, and it’s a strange feeling.  It’s like when you are describing a friend of yours to someone, and you feel the need to throw in, “That’s Tony.  He’s black.”  Or gay.  Or crippled.  It’s not as if it alters the story, or puts it in a certain context.  It’s just a designator I feel like I have to throw out there in case other people have reservations about the book.  Or Tony.  That black, gay cripple. 

This book reminded me simultaneously of anything Hugh Grant has ever done — again, not a complaint — and the essence of the film A Life Less Ordinary.  Because it’s a strange story from the get-go, and the chapters are framed by a conversation with God.  God defends himself and his creation of humans and attraction to one another using scientific principles to explain why we’re fucked up and it’s not his fault. 

The story God chooses to let us follow involves Tom, a ghostwriter of popular biographies, as he’s given a new assignment: to pen the life of Georgina Nye, a huge soap opera star and also a perennial favorite of Tom’s long time girlfriend, Sara.  Sara is Scottish to the bone, speaking in Och’s and Aye’s and Tch’s.  She works in a freezer store (have no idea what this is, though I picture an entire store filled with freezers selling frozen foods), and is delightfully chipper, crude, and adorable.  But Georgina is instantly charismatic, alluring, and appetizing.  So naturally, Tom wants to start an affair, finding himself drawn to her.  He tries to balance having a wild sex romp with George, while still trying to maintain some sort of loving relationship with Sara.  

The entire story is told from the perspective of Tom, and he’s got an outstanding inner monologue banter that’s instantaneously hilarious and fumbling.  I loved reading this book, but only because Tom is such a shifty, cock-following wanker, and I desperately wanted to see him get destroyed by his machinations.  It’s kind of the opposite of Lolita — where you find yourself charmed by what’s essentially a child molester, and find it difficult to loathe him.  In this, I wanted Tom to suffer.  I wanted to see him get destroyed.  And you live in the head of an unapologetic, and shamefully narcissistic prick. It’s a fascinating study in the mind of a cheater, or at least this cheater.  Both female characters are written delightfully, and it’s easy to understand why Tom would desire both.  Which is a difficult task to pull off without getting sentimental or cartoony.  And this in a book where one the female protagonists headbutts a drunken slag at a company party.  

I could have done without the God monologues, though essentially, the book wouldn’t have a title without them.  God is the worst character, at times coming off like a cowboy, or a brash New York cabbie, or just a jerk.  It’s a poorly written gimmick, and completely distracting to the plot.  There’s no payoff for having God narrate, and that’s the part where I find it like A Life Less Ordinary.  You have a not so bad guy (sort of) doing terrible things, and there’s this weird religious dichotomy being throw in there.  Now, Danny Boyle used his angels well in A Life Less Ordinary, but not so much for Mr. Millington.  If I were writing a movie, I’d cast out God, or rewrite his part with better lines and a cool narrator.  Iggy Pop, or Sting, or Anthony Stewart Head or someone.

The ending is a bit of a letdown after such a rollicking build up.  The book kind of had to end the way it did, and I’m not faulting the author for the choices, just the actual methodology.  It can end happy or sad or realistically without getting as goony and awkward and fumbled as it felt.  And it’s a shame, because as I said, Tom’s a great narrator, he’s just a dickwad.  

I’m just thankful I’ve yet to have to execute anyone for a recommendation.  That’s two for two on Miss Julie.  I owe her a beer. Or a pint and crisps.  Oh, fuck.  I’ve caught the lingo.

Jorb: Synecdoche, New York

We Are Your Beautiful Mistake

Oh, Charlie Kaufman.  Why you make me say bad things about you?  Why you do this to me?

NaNoWriMo: A Well-Oiled Machine

Against my better judgment, and despite the fact that I’m in a mad dash to complete 100 books in a year, I will once again be participating in the National Novel Writing Month for November.  50,000 words in 30 days.  I’m going to finish the novel that I started last year.  I’m really excited about the prospect, because if it turns out to be any good, I think I might self-publish and use the money for no good purpose whatsoever.  

My novel is a horror-thriller, if it has to be categorized.  A struggling writer discovers a flood of stories within him when he starts using a pawn-shop typewriter.  But everything has its price.  

That’s suitably lame sounding, right?  I hope so.  It’s a little bit Little Shop of Horrors, and a little bit Bag of Bones.  I’m pretty psyched about it.  I don’t know if I’ll post the chapters as I completed them like I did last year.  We’ll see.  

Anyway, if anyone else is jumping in, my user name is CharlesDickensCider, because I’m a wiener.  Friend me or die!

Book 21. The Shadow Rising by Robert Jordan

Hallelujah!  I’m finally finished!  Holy shit and shove me in it!  

I’ve been reading this 1000+ page behemoth for about six or seven other novels now — it was originally book 13.  It’s not that it was an arduous or painful novel, it’s just that it’s so. fucking. long.  

Everyone’s been pissing on Jordan, but I’m going to have to call a respect your elders on this one.  While fanboys love to laud Tolkien as unparalleled father of fantasy — much as I do with Romero and zombies — let us not forget that much of the Lord of the Rings trilogy is characters with a thousand names walking around for many, many pages.  But as far as I’m concerned, fantasy has advanced well since the hallowed days of Tolkien.  It’s gone from the Shire, to Eddings’ Belgariad and Mallorean and Jordan’s Wheel of Time, to Martin’s Song of Ice and Fire.  While I’m willing to accept that the Martin series is tits out the bomb, I’m not going to discount my enjoyment of Rand al’Thor and his quest to fulfill the prophecy of the Dragon Reborn.  

Not to say, it’s not getting a little waining. 

The books are getting bigger, and more unwieldy, and slightly repetitive.  If the Lord of the Rings trilogy was walk, walk, throw the ring, a formula has started showing in Wheel of Time.  People scatter around, men are woolbrained, women are impossible to understand, the characters speak the same general lines over and over.  Then there is a giant war against the Trollocs, and Rand does some sort of insane magic war against one of the Forsaken.  It’s getting like a video game, only instead of a level boss, I’m fighting against a 800+ page narrative.  But I’m not going to stop.

I am however going to try to space them out.  I want to read the final book when it comes out next year, but I don’t want to have to slog through all of these books to remember them.  This is no Harry Potter re-read.  This is big.  So I’m trying to time it so that by the time book 12 comes out in 2009, I’ll be done with the rest.  So there’s gonna be Books 5 and 6 on the list for the Cannonball Read, but I think I might stop with those.  Maybe 7, we’ll see.  I’ve started replacing some of my long in the series novels with some novels.  Just because I’m getting glutted with massive fantasy tomes.  

Still Shadow Rising advanced the story, and I look forward to the further adventures.  But for now, I’m probably putting about 10 more between me and Fires of Heaven.

Book 20. The Broken Window by Jeffery Deaver

Lincoln Rhyme is probably the Baja Fresh to the Taco Bell of Alex Cross, but it’s still damn tasty reading.  By starting with James Patterson as a base, I was able to branch out and introduce people to even greater authors, and even better novels.  Harlen Coben’s Myron Bolitar, PJ Tracy’s Monkeewrench team, Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child’s Agent Pendergast, JA Konrath’s Jack Daniels and Michael Connelly’s Harry Bosch.  But I really enjoy Lincoln Rhyme, a crippled criminologist confined to a wheelchair, who uses CSI methodology to solve serial killer crimes.  

It’s got all the hallmarks of cheese: a forced love story, an Arkham assortment of mad maniacs butchering the city and speaking in occasional first person narrative chapters, and by the numbers procedurals.  However, Deaver’s really good at throwing red herrings at you, and then suddenly switching it up.  I’ve been fooled by the killer’s identity before, and I like that I can still be fooled.  They’ve got a nice tendency to suddenly throw a twist in the middle of the story, and then go back and show how they got there.  It makes for some nice surprises.  And the pacing towards the end of the novel comes flying at you, casting aside red herrings until the final showdown.  And while the showdowns are often anti-climactic — you know everyone’s probably going to live — they aren’t beneath killing off tertiary characters carried from the beginning of the series. 

The Broken Window is a pretty intensely interesting concept.  A serial killer is using data mining software to frame innocent people for rapes and murders he commits.  He’ll find out the brand of shampoo they use, the shoes sizes, the snack chips; and then he kills his victims and plants evidence at the crime scene and in the patsy’s homes, pretty much setting up an iron clad case.  

The data mining is the frightening part, where essentially through club card, credit card chips, EZ Passes, and the like, companies know all your secrets.  Homeland Security uses these to trend terrorist activities.  They know what websites you visit, they know what stores you shop at and what you buy, they know what clothes you wear.  Worse yet, they anticipate data and curb it to your needs.  Say a family member takes gravely ill.  Suddenly, you’re on the mailing lists for mortuary services, assisted living homes, suicide prevention counseling.  It’s disturbing that every aspect of your life is out there — and worse, can be modified — to destroy you.  

It makes for a neat twist when coupled with the criminology aspect of Lincoln Rhyme.  He works from a state of the art computer unit set up in his home, with the assistance of Amelia Sachs — super hot detective and his girlfriend.  Sachs wears a camera and walks the crime scenes for Rhyme, gathering evidence, and then they go over the research in his Chicago loft.  (I’ve noted that most awesome detective novels tend to be set in the Windy City.  Go fig.)

While that can be a bit of a stretch, the Rhyme novels are strong reads, real quick and fast and fun, and they’re about two notches up on the belt from the kindergarten cop levels of the Patterson ouevre.

Book 19. The World Without Us by Alan Weisman

I don’t often read non-fiction, which is a shame, because when I do, I really enjoy it.  I adore Erik Larsen’s books, especially anything that manages to take facts and couch them in an intriguing historical or cultural aspect.  However, I find most non-fiction, even biographies, have an agenda.  It’s like documentary filmmaking, in that no matter how objective you think you are about your subject, you’re going to end up editing your opinion into the layout.  

Alam Weisman makes no bones about it in his fascinating study of the effects of humanity on the world around us.  He hates mankind.  He considers humanity to be a scourge that is ravaging the planet, and destroying everything around us like the most virulent plague.  He cites studies back thousands of years, blaming humanity for extinction, pollution, and the fact that the world is decaying because we got our sticky paws on it.  And he’s right.  But it’s still not pleasant to hear it. 

Essentially, Weisman’s book is a big old green thumb in the bum of Homo Sapiens.  We are ruining the world faster and faster each day.  And there’s little we can do to stop it.  So he focuses the book on what would happen if some sort of mythical plague/rapture occurred and mankind was gone from the earth.  A practice he admits is a bit of an improbability, but nonetheless really interesting.

When Weisman is focusing on what would happen to the world without us, the book is at it’s most riveting.  How everything from nuclear power plants to basic building would decay or fall apart.  He describes to the minutest particle how a typical suburban sprawl would disintegrate into a forest again. Or how the decomposition of a human works out in relation to burial practices and the like.  How integration of species would effect the return of certain species and how it would mete out.  Domesticated animals and livestock versus wilderness.  It the kind of thing you wish they’d make an IMAX movie about. 

The rest of the book is peppered with biological and anthropologic slaps to the face with the white glove of environmental conservation.  While it’s still neat to read about how garbage is collecting in giant cesspools the size of New Jersey in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, and the breakdown of plastics in water, I don’t need all the extra information about the red cranes in the DMZ of Korea, or the detailed and frequent descriptions of nuclear fallout.  I know what bad things we did, I would rather hear the effects of it.  

Plus, he blames the extinction of most species on hunters migrating and then being gluttonous.  Frankly, while I would be willing to skeptically accept this as true, I still find it to be a little annoyingly finger-pointy.  So what if we were successful hunters?  Species deteriorate, and die out.  We won out.  Suck it, woolly mammoth.  

It’s not so much preaching to the choir as yelling at the kids who aren’t the problem.  We’re reading your book, and you’re wandering all over the fucking place, describing the way scientists look.  Just talk about how New York will fall into the sea because of the subway system.  That’s what we wants! 

I would recommend this book, with the caveat that it does get a little preachy and militant — it’s advocating population control and vaguely admiring the societies like the Church of Euthanasia, which preaches the four pillars of abortion, sodomy, suicide, and cannibalism.   Anyone who’s seen Idiocracy knows how this argument’ll end up.

Jorb: What Just Happened?

Nothing Really Matters, Anyone Can See

I reviewed What Just Happened.  It was a movie.  The end.

Book 18. Cross Country by James Patterson

Sometimes you need a little fast food.  Nothing is more McDonald’s Super Value Meal than James Patterson.  He writes books with hundreds of chapters, each about three pages long.  It was the perfect breakroom book for when I was working at Barnes and Noble, and you can pick it up and put it down at will.  You don’t have to concentrate hard at all.  You just let your brain get assualted by the slurry as it churns into your head. 

I love the Alex Cross novels, and like the Women’s Murder Club material.   I think the latter has turned into a veiled attempt to capture the Sex and the City crowd, and involves more incidents where the girls sit around talking about relationships and drinking margaritas than them going out and actually capturing killers.  The former took a bit of a nosedive for a while, not sure how to reinvent itself.  So Patterson abandoned the nursery rhyme titles and started calling the novels “Cross”.  The last two were Cross and Double Cross.  And they’ve been getting mildly better, mostly I feel because it’s one of the few series that Patterson writes himself without his brand name sidekicks.   

Usually they involve one or two maniac serial killers sweeping around butchering people in the DC Metro area where Cross lives with his children and grandmother, Nana.  It gets a little precious at times, and the dialogue and internal paragraphing get downright Rollinsish (though to be fair, Patterson was the original).  He loves italics and exclamation points, but then again, he’s not writing for high literature, he’s writing popcorns books for the hoi polloi. 

Cross Country was balls out.  Patterson got his groove back and he is not fucking around anymore.  This was back to what made the series great: unrelenting violence and non-stop action.  It was a brutal read, and I stayed up to the wee hours of the morning to make sure I finished all of it.  I blasted through it in about 5 hours. 

Cross Country is about The Tiger, a Nigerian mercenary, who leads a gang of young boys — children who can barely call themselves teenagers — on missions of thrill-kill butchery.  They murder entire families, shooting wildly, vandalizing houses, chopping up the corpses and leaving fingerprints because they do not fear death.  The Tiger isn’t one of the best villians Cross has encountered, but his sheer indifference to capture is frightening.  Nobody is afraid of dying or coming to justice.  Their lives are hell, and so they embrace chaos.  Cross loses an old friend and former lover, and in an act of vengenance/justice, pursues the killer to Nigeria, and then around Africa, hitting Sierra Leone and Darfur. 

It’s not a substantive study of the atrocities in Africa, and it’s not trying to be.  It’s little more than Patterson capitalizing on buzzwords, and wearing a red T-shirt to show he cares.  But it’s doesn’t minimize the grueling way he captures the atrocities and brutality of the continent.  It’s gonna get people who don’t know what they’re talking about riled up, and good on them.   And it really adds to the story.  Cross undergoes some massive punishment, and I’m impressed that Patterson threw down like this.  Alex Cross is back.  And despite it feeling slightly formulaic, it’s formulaic in the sense of Law and Order.  It’s not meant to be Pulitzer, just a bestseller.

Cross Country doesn’t come out until next month, and I was able to obtain an advanced copy through the niceties of a woman who works for Hachette, who was inspired by AlabamaPink and myself and all of us Cannonball Readers.  If that’s not a great sideeffect of doing this thing, I don’t know what is.

Book 17. On Chesil Beach by Ian McEwan

I’ve never read any Ian McEwan, though I’ve been meaning to.  There are so many authors like that for me.  And all of his books sound promising and lyrical, but I’ve never been able to muster up any sort of excitement to pick them up off the shelf.  So when this was thrown out as a suggestion, by Ben, and it was available at my dinky little local library, well, I assumed it was kismet, and leapt upon it.

This is an unbelievably well-crafted love story that’s as dense and rich as double chocolate layer cake (I’m fat — deal with my food metaphors).   It hinges on a young couple’s wedding night, but it ripples outward from their, adding layers and layers until the fateful moment of consummation.  Poignancy is a term that casually gets flung out to any sort of melodrama, but in the truest sense this novel captures that. 

Edward and Florence are two young people in their twenties who are spending their wedding night in a hotel overlooking Chesil Beach.  Except for a few contextual comments, and the book jacket, I would never have known this takes place in 1962, because it feels almost victorian.  Their behaviors, their sexual proclivities, their mannerisms and speech.  It’s as if it sort of drifts timelessly, which helps to add to the circumstances, and adds such thickness to the story. 

What haunts me about this brief little story (it barely cleared the hurdle for qualification by 3 scant pages), is it’s incredible maturity.  It explores how frightening it can be to open yourself to another person in the name of love.  It studies the absolute fear that you bring to a relationship – whether you’re good enough, whether you’ve got the romantic skills, true feeling about your partner.  It’s an study in the parts of relationships that often get soap operaed or played for comic relief.  

In David Foster Wallace’s “The Broom of the System”, he writes the dialogue between characters so that at some points there are pauses in the conversation, and he expresses it as such: “….”  I wanted to get this tattooed on my shoulder blades.  It represents deep meditative thought, or things left unsaid, or listening.  It’s something that’s not expressed when couples fight in literature or film.  Here, we live in these characters heads, rolling back and forth and taking both sides in the fight.

My lady love and I have a promise that keeps us through our turbulent times: “Nothing matters but I love you.”  And that’s so important here, in this novel.  It’s about those moments.  And how fragile a relationship can be.  And about things being left unsaid.  It’s about doing nothing, and the consequences of that action.  I couldn’t believe how much McEwan packed into such a small story, but it was powerful.  I will definitely be reading him again, if only to see how he dances with a full novel.