This review is mirrored from my website, but I couldn't resist forcing it upon you here on MySpace.  Ha ha ha!!!

I normally avoid British humor, but I've always been partial to the Aardman films. They don't have that stuffy "aren't we smashingly funny" attitude that I feel pervades certain British comedies. After I watched the Wallace and Gromit shorts, I wanted to see The Curse of the Wererabbit. And after I was pleasantly surprised by that one, I had to see Flushed Away. Yes, I know Pixar is also coming out with a rat film, and I don't care who ripped off who.

Flushed Away is a mixed review from me, albeit mostly positive. It has a sturdy plotline. I won't say it's a spectacular plot--it's conventional--but still, few recent films have bothered this much with story. This film was cute. It had a classic hero, a classic heroine, a classic villain, and some adorable slugs. The inciting incident came early, the hero had inner conflict and flaws, and it wrapped up in a classic romantic climax and resolution. If I'm making it sound formulaic, it was, but that isn't necessarily a bad thing. There's something to be said for successful formulas. I think that if this movie had come out after a slew of the same formulas, it would seem tired and cliche, but it's coming out at a good time, when audiences might hunger for something different from the rest of this year's crop of non-linear stories.

If the film suffers from anything, it's uninspired gags. A lot of the humor relies on pain. That gets old, and I suspect that even today's kids are sick of watching guys get smacked in the crotch. Also, some of the gags are repeated too many times.

Another problem is the even pacing. The story hits plot point after plot point, and I could almost see the plot chart. I wish they'd sacrificed an action sequence or two to spend more time on character development. But I'm not sure this criticism applies to a target audience of families.

The hero lives in a golden cage and has every toy he could wish for, but no family or friends. I like that idea. And the heroine is an ass-kicking beauty with some actual character flaws to give her a personality, which is refreshing. So many female characters fall into stereotypes, or they're portrayed as being flawless. The villain and his henchmen are really the funniest parts of the film.

Go see it!

Oh no, another book review.  I'm not going to keep doing these (if I reviewed every book I read, I'd have to blog twice a week)!  So I'm limiting them to books that excited some kind of unusual reaction in me. 

A Great and Terrible Beauty takes place in 1895 England, in a boarding school that trains wealthy girls to be socialites.  The author grew up in 1980s Texas, in (I assume) relatively normal circumstances.

I didn't know a thing about the author until the end of the book.  When I was listening, I knew right away that it was written by someone in the modern era, but I would have guessed British, not Texan.  So the book gets cool points for that.  I'm impressed with how well the author plants us in that setting.  Lovely prose, clear writing, and not overburdened with description.

My big criticism has to do with the characters.  They're stupid.  Not in a deliberate way, like Don Quixote, but in a way that makes you want to put the book down.  For instance, there's a scene where the main character watches a fellow outcast at the school fall for a cruel trick.  The trick is utterly transparent to anyone who's ever attended junior high school, yet Gemma (at age 15) is blind to it.  Okay, maybe this is excusable because she's led a sheltered life apart from other children . . . but later on, she falls for a similar trick herself.  This girl has an inability to learn from other people's mistakes.  She's as gullible as a 5-year-old.  And she's the protagonist.

Why do some authors feel the need to dumb down their characters?  I can't stand that.  It's one of my peeves.  It's not my biggest peeve, so I finished the book, and I would give it a decent score on the Abby rating chart.  Pick it up if you love Harry Potter and those types of books. 

Now I'm listening to The Three Musketeers, by Alexandre Dumas, and loving those characters.  I normally avoid classic authors, but Dumas and H.G. Wells are the two exceptions.  Oh yeah, and Poe, of course.  I won't say they were ahead of their time, but rather that they are modern authors (of the bestseller variety) of a previous era.  Their books have a page-turning quality that I love. 

And I'm reading the nonfiction memoir Running With Scissors, by Augusten Burroughs.  One sitting and I'm already halfway through, which means I like it.  I'm very sympathetic to the author.  His childhood makes mine look normal, which is no easy feat!  This book is now a movie (coming soon), but judging from the trailers, they've had trouble capturing its essence.  I remember what it was like growing up in a small New England town where everyone else seemed "normal".  That's what this book is about.  I don't think the directors understood it, though, because in Hollywood, "normal" doesn't have a concrete definition. 

I just finished listening to an audio book (available from Audible) called Jennifer Government.  Interesting premise.  It's a half-serious, half-humorous tale of corporate warfare and innocence versus greed.  It takes place in a future where American consumerism has replaced old world values, and taxes have been abolished.  People are defined by which corporations fund their schools, land, local malls, and income.  The government of the "USA countries" has shrunk to a vigilante group funded by whomever will pay them.

I think this book could make an excellent movie.  It lends itself to adaptation.  But the very qualities that make it great screenplay material also diminish its value as a novel.  The characters are cliche in many ways.  The dialogue gets cheesy.  My main struggle was finding sympathy for most of the characters.  The good guys are all 100% innocent-and-naive, the bad guys are all 100% greedy-unethical-mass-murders.  There is no gray area with these characters, and for me, that made them bland.  Why should I care about a nice guy who lets himself get sucked into a contract that any child could see is evil?  He's too stupid for me to care about.  Why should I care about a renegade corporate exec who drops out of the rat race to raise her daughter, yet leaves her daughter home alone and in other dangerous situations?  The author tells us that she's a good person, but I don't believe it.  The best character was the main villain, and he was so cool, I found myself rooting for him ... until the end, when he dwindled into bad guy cliche land.

Still, this book is loaded with ideas.  Imagine a world where I would identify myself as "Abby Wayforward" because I work for Wayforward.  Imagine a world where mega-conglomerates hire armies and attack each other using missiles, assassins, and nasty advertising campaigns that have a lot in common with terrorism. Imagine a world where consumer loyalty has gotten so out of hand that gangs of McDonald's supporters will murder gangs of Burger King loyalists.

Honestly, if the characters hadn't been so unbelievable and 2-dimensional, I almost could have found it plausible. 

Happy reading, everyone.

I may actually use this blog from time to time, but then again, I already have a blog on my website, which I update randomly about five times per year.  I guess I don't have much to say in public places.  It would be like shouting in a crowded restaurant.  I'm more than happy to shout about my successes and life facts, but that's about it, and let's face it, my life isn't exactly filled with successes to blab about!  (Yet ... maybe in a few years, right?) 

I could stuff this thing with my opinions, but I try not to stir up trouble, since I do that accidentally all the time.  I could review movies and books, but there's a zillion reviewers on the internet, so I usually hold back unless the book/movie was way above my expectations.  I guess I'm not a natural-born blogger.  But give me fifty years more, when I'm in a retirement villa, and I'll be blogging away with the other grannies, because we'll have an awesome hobby in our old age!