Jennie Day Blog

If Your Kid Drinks From A Bottle, Don’t Take Them To The X-Men Movie

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On Saturday night of Memorial Day weekend, my friends and I went to the multiplex at the mall to see X-Men: The Days of Future Past which, because it was a holiday weekend and the movie had opened the previous day, was sold out. The kind of sold out where a manager comes in to the theater before the show starts to tell everyone to scoot towards the center of the aisle and leave no empty seats, and groups of latecomers have to split up in order to find seats.

This post is not about the X-Men movie, but I’m starting with this story because the movie going experience was actually awful. There was a group sitting around us with several toddlers who were constantly making noise and wandering around the aisle and kept distracting me from watching the movie.

A week or two ago, I read this post on The Daily Dot, arguing that Hollywood movies aren’t bringing in as much profit as they used to because movies these days are terrible, however, the blame is usually placed on the upsurge of movies being pirated online.

I don’t disagree with this, in fact, I wrote the following to a similar effect in a previous post:

[I]n the summer of 2008 … I saw Iron Man for the third time. That I saw it three times is noteworthy – previous to that, I’d not been to see a movie multiple times in a theater since the days of Titanic, because ticket prices were rising and I did not think the quality of movies was doing the same.

Yes, going to the movies has become expensive and a lot of the movies coming out these days are garbage. But there’s another huge piece of this puzzle that doesn’t get talked about in the article: movie audiences are also terrible.

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Our monthly Netflix and HBO subscriptions are less than the cost of two movie tickets and snacks are cheaper at the grocery store. Better yet, our couch is comfortable, I can wear my PJs, I can pause the movie if I need to get up to use the restroom, and best of all, there aren’t obnoxious audience members having conversations or toddling around the theater.

There’s also the fact that, frankly, our TV at home looks as good or better than most digitally projected movies. Joel has a theory that because movie theaters have to pay a fee to change their projectors between projecting in 3-D and 2-D, most theaters just leave the projectors on the 3-D settings, so 2-D look a little fuzzy. I think that’s pretty likely, and add that the eerie green glow from the exit signs reflected on the screen doesn’t enhance the movie for me.

And on the subject of 3-D movies, this is where I think movie theaters really get it wrong. I’m of the opinion that surcharges for 3-D or “real-D 3-D” and IMAX movies are boosting the box office results even if the number of tickets sold is actually declining.

I should acknowledge that I am a total hypocrite: for all my complaints, I still go see new releases in the theater with some regularity. Also, at one point when we were watching X-Men: Days of Future Past I said “hey, shut up!” to the group with the toddlers which I realize was probably more distracting to other people in the audience than the kids.

I have a whole host of complaints about movies coming out these days, but paying more to sit in an audience that behaves worse is tops. If you can’t turn your phone off, stay home. If you want to talk to your friend, stay home. If your child still drinks from a bottle and you don’t have a babysitter, stay home.

The movie will be on Netflix or Amazon or Hulu or HBO or cable or Redbox in another month, anyway.

Addendum: About a week after I posted this, my friend Meredith and I saw the X-Men movie again at a 21+ theater in Portland. It was a very pleasant experience.

The Problem With Watching Borat in 2014 …

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… is that you start singing “all other countries have inferior potassium” to the tune of US and A’s national anthem, or you stand in the cheese aisle at the grocery store saying “what is a-this?” and people look at you like you’re crazy. Eight year old pop culture references have been long forgotten.

By the way, if it’s been a while since you’ve seen the scene in the cheese aisle or maybe you missed it (it’s a deleted scene, but probably my favorite scene) I implore you to watch it. It’s totally SFW – it’s utterly ridiculous, but not gross out humor or shock value humor.

Here it is:

Anyways, if, like me, you heard that Da Ali G Show is being resurrected on FXX and thought “sweet! New episodes!” and then “it sounds too good to be true,” and then “I wonder how new episodes could be made when Sacha Baron Cohen has officially retired Ali G, Borat, and Bruno.” Well … it is too good to be true. FXX is going to re-air the original episodes, plus a few that had never been aired.

Oh, well. We’ll always have Borat.

My Oscar Predictions

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For the past ten years or so, my dad and sister and I have had a little Oscar prediction competition. (Sometimes my mom and/or Joel will play along, but they aren’t as competitive.)

I can attest that the years I make an effort to see as many of the nominated movies as possible, I do much better than years I don’t. 2008 was the only year I saw every movie nominated in the major categories, and that year, my final score was 20/24 (if memory serves.)

This year, I’m not counting on doing very well, because I’ve seen only one of the movies. As I was tallying up the movies I’d seen, I thought “no way that’s right! We saw a bunch of movies last year!” But we focused or moviegoing dollars on superhero and action movies, and while we saw several “Oscar bait” movies at the end of the year, none of the movies we saw scored any nominations.

A week or two ago, I found this article on Grantland.com that pointed out that the major award nominations this year are dispersed among only 12 movies, the fewest in 30 years. And last year, it was just 14 movies, the second fewest.

The conclusion I came to about this differs from the Grantland article – I just don’t care. I have many fond memories of spending Oscar Sunday on the couch with my family, watching the red carpet, making predictions, enjoying the ceremony. In recent years, it just hasn’t been as exciting.

Even in 2012, when Billy Crystal came back to host, the ceremonies aren’t fun to watch (although, I really enjoyed Seth MacFarlane last year, but I’m in the minority.) The pool of movies is so tiny and there aren’t any that I care about. Not even watching Joan Rivers on the red carpet can get me excited about this year’s Oscars.

Actually, this year, I’m probably not going to watch at all – I’ll be spending Oscar Sunday with my family this year, but at my grandpa’s birthday dinner. I’m not even going to DVR it. I’ll just pull up the results online to see how I did. Probably not very well.

This is an odd mix of who I think will actually win, who I hope to see win although unlikely, and I had no idea but 12 Years a Slave seemed like a safe bet. (I haven’t bothered listing some of the smaller categories here. Want to fill out your own ballot? Download it here.)

Best Picture – 12 Years a Slave
Best Director – Alfonso Cuaron, Gravity
Best Actor – Chiwetel Ejiofor, 12 Years a Slave
Best Actress – Cate Blanchett, Blue Jasmine
Best Supporting Actor – Michael Fassbender, 12 Years a Slave
Best Supporting Actress – Lupita Nyong’o, 12 Years a Slave
Best Animated Film – Frozen
Best Adapted Screenplay – Richard Linklater & Julie Delpy, Before Midnight
Best Original Screenplay – Bob Nelson, Nebraska
Best Song – “Let It Go,” Frozen
Best Score – Thomas Newman, Saving Mr. Banks

Harold Ramis on Authenticity

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A sentence from an interview with Harold Ramis has been getting passed around since he died on Monday, and while it’s a nice sentiment, the entire quote (and in fact the entire interview) is truthful and worth reading. This is regarding his decision to make a sequel to Analyze This.

The interviewer asked “What challenges did you encounter when trying to keep it true to the first one but also make it different and stand out in some way?”

The audience will always say that they want something new, but then if it’s too different, they don’t feel they got the experience they came back for. There was always that tension – how to keep it fresh and familiar at the same time.

For me, I can assure you that no one did it just for the money. I wanted to say something thematically and creatively that was worth saying. I feel a big obligation to the audience, almost in a moral sense, to say something useful. In this case, it took me a while to find what statement I could get behind that would not be too weighty or that would overwhelm the comedy but that would be worth talking about. If I’m going to spend a year of my life on these things, I want something that – you know, I realize the movie was about change and can people change and crime in our society and can people be redeemed. That’s what keeps me going in the big picture.

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And while we’re talking about authenticity and things that are worth saying, a couple of blog updates:

First, I updated my home page, namely doing away with the image slider. This should make the homepage in particular and all of my images in general load faster and look better if you’re reading on a phone or tablet.

Also, if you care, I created a disclosure policy and updated my FAQs.

Philip Seymour Hoffman, the Talent and the Torment

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Last Sunday, I was in the kitchen making snacks for when our friends came over to watch the big Sportsball game, when Joel announced: “Phillip Seymour Hoffman died.”

By the time I sat down at my computer, the hashtag #RIPPSH was already getting some traction … but let’s be honest, the football fans were dominating Twitter that particular afternoon.

But Monday morning, every online news source that I read was splitting the headlines between the game and remembering Hoffman. Many good journalists, who had met the actor personally, have already eulogized him. So that’s not what I’m doing today.

What I am writing about is a line from the New Yorker’s article that stuck out to me. The article suggests that what stays with us, moviegoers who were affected by Hoffman’s performaces, is “the sense that the torment and the talent are inseparable.”

This is something that I’ve thought about often, actually, and something that was discussed in nearly every writing class I took in college. Sylvia Plath is one of my favorite poets — could I write like her without ending up with my head in an oven? Or David Foster Wallace, who committed suicide during the week I was at “poetry camp,” was his writing a symptom of or separate from his depression?

About a year ago, my mom and I went to a reading by Ellen Forney from her graphic memoir Marbles, which is about her bipolar disorder, from the time just before her diagnosis to the present. Something she revisits throughout the memoir is her struggle with how her illness affects her art and whether using medication to manage her symptoms cancels out her creativity.

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Forney is very upfront about the fact that one of her initial thoughts at being diagnosed with bipolar disorder is that she’s now a welcome member of “The Van Gogh Club,” the club for crazy artists revered for both brilliance and madness. Once she’s been welcomed to this club, she’s reluctant to leave.

This happens in chapter one, which is what she read from the night that my mom and I saw her. After the reading, she took questions from the audience and someone asked something like “do you still think being a card carrying member of the Van Gogh Club for crazy artists is conducive to creating great art?” or maybe it was “do you still worry that taking medication is keeping your creativity in check?”

Forney answered no – without keeping her symptoms of bipolar disorder in check, which she does with medication and lifestyle changes, she would not have the mental faculties to create art. She pointed out that Marbles is her biggest accomplishment to date and that she never would have been able to create it if she was still experiencing extreme mania and depression.

I’ve discussed before how important discipline is to writing – and art, at that. Having one’s mental faculties intact is an important part of discipline.

Anyway, Philip Seymour Hoffman’s death is sad — that goes without saying. What’s more sad, to me, is that we continue to proliferate this idea that drug addiction or mental illness or general malaise go hand in hand with great artists and actors and writers and musicians. It’s not the case, so let’s stop equating the two.

I leave you today with what is, in my opinion, Hoffman’s best scene — this is from Almost Famous, and you should also check out Director Cameron Crowe’s tribute to Hoffman about the making of this moment.

(This has swear words in it, but otherwise is SFW.)

Hobbits, and Movies About Hobbits

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As I said in my last post, I was “in Middle Earth,” a.k.a. re-reading The Hobbit and re-watching the Lord of the Rings movies for much of January.

I saw the new Hobbit movie, The Desolation of Smaug after it had already been out in theaters for about a month, because I was determined to finish re-reading the book before I saw it. Joel, on the other hand, purposely avoided refreshing his memory on the events in the book because he wanted to be able to see the movie without comparing it to the book.

But me, I’ve already written about how movies based on books can’t be direct adaptations and good moviemakers (like the ones who made The Hunger Games) will use the format to their advantage. I was going in open-minded. I would never unfairly compare a movie adaptation to its source material.

I’m kind of eating my words because, yes, I was disappointed that the movie adaptation of The Hobbit has strayed from the path Bilbo and the dwarves tread in the book.

In my own defense, my argument in the post I wrote about the Hunger Games movies was that successful movie adaptations are “more interested in capturing the tone of the book than recreating every scene and piece of dialogue in the text.”

This is not so much the case in the Hobbit movies*. (So far, anyway.)

Let’s talk for a minute about The Hobbit. (The book, that is.) If I were to ask you to tell me what it’s about, you’d probably say “it’s about a hobbit named Bilbo Baggins” or maybe “it’s about taking a journey” or “it’s about a hobbit who goes on an adventure.”

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This isn’t to say that I didn’t enjoy the most recent Hobbit movie. I did. But the movies aren’t telling the story of a hobbit and his adventure. In fact, I’d say they’ve strayed so far from the source material that it’s hardly fair to say the movie is based on Tolkein’s novel. “Inspired by” would probably be a more accurate statement.

It seems to me, the intention of Director Peter Jackson isn’t to visually recreate the events of the book – it’s self serving, setting up the events in the Lord of the Rings movies.

In a piece in Forbes, video game critic says exactly my thoughts more succinctly than I ever could: “… with both trilogies, I can’t help but think that Jackson has missed the forest for the trees, turning Tolkien’s story of courage and friendship and the horrors of war into something else entirely. Not something bad, really, just something else.”

The most obvious example is (what else?) the ring. Since the book is fresh in my head, I can say this with some certainty — innumerable times, Bilbo “slips on the ring and steals away.” In the movie, Bilbo instead contemplates the ring, gulps, and then puts it on and stays completely still while a giant spider or dragon or weapon-brandishing elf takes aim at him.

Oh, and what’s Gandalf up to in the book? Tolkein spends exactly one sentence explaining his whereabouts. In the movie, it’s a major plot line as it leads directly to the events in the movie version of The Fellowship of the Ring.

And this is where the people who made the Hobbit have gone too far (I think) from the tone of the source material. They’re following multiple story lines: Gandalf’s quest to find the necromancer; the elves involvement in preparing for the battle that’s coming in the third movie; what the bad guys are up to, especially in relation to events that are coming in The Lord of the Rings.

The movie is barely even about the hobbit!

And this is especially disappointing, because Martin Freeman is so good in these movies. It’s sad how little screen time he gets — even as the titular character. There’s a scene in The Desolation of Smaug when he’s on screen, alone (presumably acting in front of a green screen) for two solid minutes with no lines, and it’s riveting and fun to watch.

So I’ve kind of written myself into a corner. I don’t want to be too dismissive of the Hobbit movies. They are, indubitably, well made and fun to watch, and I’ve made it clear that I’m not concerned with 100% accurate adaptations from page to screen. But I was a bit let down by The Desolation of Smaug. I guess it all comes down to how movie #3 turns out.

*I should note that I’m only talking about The Hobbit and its movie adaptations as I have not ever made it past the first chapter in the first book of the Lord of the Rings trilogy.

These Stakes Are Too Low

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With the end of 2013 approaching, I’ve decided to spend this week talking about the year in review. My first thought was to create a list of my top ten list favorite movies, but then I realized that I have only only seen thirteen 2013 movies, so my list would not be at all relevant or helpful. Instead, I’m just going to do what I do best and talk about what I like. Or, in this case, something I do not like.

This was kind of a weird year in moviegoing for me. Remember how excited I was to see The Way, Way Back? Still haven’t seen it. This time last year, I was rereading The Great Gatsby in anticipation of the new movie. Still haven’t seen it, either.

I’m trying to think of a nice way to say this, but I don’t really have one, so I’m just going to say it: this was the year I stopped being so stubborn and started letting Joel pick more of the movies that we went to. Yeesh, that makes me sound awful. But I had very strong opinions about movies and would really only see the quirky indie comedies and serious Oscar-bait dramas.

So I was surprised to find myself seeing pretty much every blockbuster action/superhero movie that came out this year, and damned if I didn’t enjoy myself.

That being said … there is one thing rampant in action and superhero movies that makes me crazy: the stakes are too low.

Last week, I talked through the plot arc of a good superhero movie and why I think Iron Man is the perfect example. What makes it the perfect example is that the stakes have been set appropriately high.

I’m going to say this, even though it really could go without saying – no one’s walking into a superhero movies expecting to see real life circumstances on the big screen. The stakes in movies are different than the stakes in real life, that’s a given.

But we have to believe those stakes. If the hero has to save the world from certain doom, we have to believe that the world really could succumb to certain doom. This was not always the case in this year’s movies.

Let’s talk about a specific example: Pacific Rim. If you didn’t see it, the premise is that space alien monsters have found a way to invade earth through a portal in the Pacific Ocean (I don’t think I’m explaining it right, but the plot isn’t really the point of this movie.) Mankind, of course, doesn’t want Earth being invaded by monster space aliens, so they build giant metal robots to fight off the aliens. Pretty soon, the aliens are stronger and faster and coming two or three at a time.

I know I just said the plot isn’t the point, but there is some semblance of a plot in Pacific Rim. The problem is, the plot doesn’t matter. There’s supposed to be a conflict – it looks for a while like the aliens are going to win. But there’s never any reasonable doubt that they won’t. The movie steps on its own feet by making it a little too obvious that the good guys are going to win in the end, but expecting us to care. Problem is, I didn’t care, because I already knew the outcome.

I realize that I’m bringing high expectations to an action movie, and in fact, when I tried to have this conversation with my friends, they all shot me down, saying that having plot or making the audience care wasn’t the point of this movie. Who needs plot when you have explosions and aliens and robots and giant swords! But if I don’t care about the characters or why they’re trying to save the world from certain doom, why bother watching?

There has to be reasonable cause to doubt that everything will turn out okay in the end – if there isn’t, then the stakes aren’t high enough. If the stakes aren’t high enough, I don’t care about the characters or the world they live in.

There are two classic, hard-to-screw-up ways to raise the stakes:

First, kill off one of the good guys. This can be extremely effective when used right. Like I said in last week’s post, it has to come at the right moment, usually towards the end of the second act. If the character dies during the final battle, then the audience doesn’t feel the full weight of their death and might not even notice it because of the action.

Kick Ass 2 had the best stakes-raising death scene in a movie I saw this year, and not because it was gruesome and bloody, but because it set the stakes for the final battle. There was revenge to be had.

Second, have the hero hang up their cape/suit/hammer. If a superhero gets more than one movie, then we’ve seen them throw in the towel and vow to stop trying to save the world. They feel under appreciated or inadequate or maybe they’re trapped in the villain’s lair where it looks like they’ll have to sit and watch the baddies take over the world.

For whatever reason, there’s a moment of doubt for us in the audience. We know the hero is going to save the day, but we can’t see how he’s going to get from where he is (physically or mentally) to where he needs to be.

It’s that moment of doubt that raises the stakes, and the stakes being high enough validates a movie’s existence. We need to believe that the hero and the world he lives in are actually fallible.

This is why I think Superman is inherently a less interesting superhero than Batman – no one on Earth can rival his powers – he has X-ray vision and super strength and can fly! It’s just not interesting to see Superman take on Earthly rivals.

The people who made Man of Steel recognized this, and did what they could to raise the stakes by appealing to our emotions. They went for a couple of different angles, like death in the family and testing Superman’s morality, and pitted him against a Kryptonian adversary.

I’m not totally sold that the emotional angle is the right one to raise the stakes, but at least they tried.

And that’s my issue – it seems to me like movies aren’t trying anymore. They’re lazy. Characters “die” and then magically reappear at the moment when it’s convenient to an inconsequential plot.

I think this is a case where superhero movies need to be more in line with real life. There have to be real life stakes or the movie doesn’t matter.

Anatomy of a Superhero Movie

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I’m concocting a post that you’ll get to read next week about the movies I saw in 2013, but before I can write anything coherent, I need to lay a little groundwork.

The content of this post started brewing in my head in the summer of 2008 when I saw Iron Man for the third time. That I saw it three times is noteworthy – previous to that, I’d not been to see a movie multiple times in a theater since the days of Titanic, because ticket prices were rising and I did not think the quality of movies was doing the same. (To be fair, I paid full ticket price to see Iron Man only once: I also saw it at the drive ins, which cost $6 for two movies, and then at the second run theater for $3.) Of course, in the years since, ticket prices have continued to rise, and now we pay even more for 3-D and/or IMAX movies, but I’m going down a tangent that might just need its own separate post.

The thing about the first Iron Man movie that so impressed me and got me out to the theater multiple times was the movie’s arc: five years ago, I had limited experience reading comic books or seeing superhero movies, but I recognized that Iron Man was following a well-tread plot arc and using it to tell a good story.

The plot arc is important: there’s a reason that pretty much every superhero movie uses this same formula. To stray from the formula is confusing. The audience comes to the theater expecting this, and when the movie follows it, we can relax and appreciate the story.

Act I – The Opening Battle, The Stakes Are Set

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The opening battle is always a hard one to watch, because the bad guys have to get ahead. Otherwise there wouldn’t be much of a movie, right? The opening battle in Iron Man (or any origin story, really) also has to explain how a regular dude became a super hero, so in this case, how the suit was built.

But that isn’t the most important thing that happens in the opening battle – the most important thing is that we learn what’s at stake. Usually, the fate of the world and whether our hero lives or dies. But since that’s such a commonplace plot device, there has to be something that makes us care. In Iron Man it’s twofold, and the movie makers borrowed from real life, which kind of forced everyone watching to care. First was that the opening battle is set in Afghanistan, and in 2008, that hit close to home. Two, Robert Downey, Jr. was still making his post-rehab comeback, and billionaire-playboy-philanthropist Tony Stark was close enough to his real life story that we rooted for the guy in the iron suit the way we rooted for the actor in the Tony Stark suit.

Act II – The Plot Thickens, Characters Developed

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What Iron Man did (and few movies are brave enough to do) was stick Tony Stark in his workshop for most of the second act. As someone who, in 2008 when I saw Iron Man, was not super into superheroes (or action movies at that) I really appreciated that act two brought the intensity way down and focused on character building.

The movie makers recognized that what’s important at this point in the movie, especially if it’s the first movie in what’s expected to be a three movie arc, is not to keep the action coming, but to focus on the characters. They want the audience to be rooting for the hero in the movie’s final act, and in order to do that, we have to like him (or her, but let’s be honest – usually him.) If there is an action sequence, its intention must be to keep the plot moving and set up the final battle (see Iron Man‘s 2008 summer superhero movie rival The Dark Knight.)

This is the moment when the stakes have been established, and we feel the plot building toward the Battle Royale – once we get there, we have to understand what the hero is up against and have a shred of doubt that our hero isn’t up to it. Iron Man establishes this in act two, when the intensity is lower, so that it isn’t lost in the action.

(That’s the part that I really wanted to say as set up for my next post, but it didn’t really make sense out of context. Just keep it in mind for next week, okay?)

Act III – The Epic Battle, Resolution, and (usually) Kiss

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Obviously, a superhero movie or action movie of any kind has to end with our hero bringing down the bad guy. If the movie makers did their job establishing the stakes and creating a sympathetic but fallible hero, this part doesn’t need much explanation. If there’s a love interest (which, let’s face it, there usually is) she’s probably going to end up in harm’s way, and the hero swoops in at the last possible moment and saves her. In more recent movies, the lady love gets to have a more important role in the movie’s resolution, but in 2008, that wasn’t the case.

And while we usually get resolution of the movie’s individual storyline, superhero movies pretty much always end with a teaser for the sequel.

Which is exactly what I’m doing to end this post … be sure to come back next week because there’s more to tell.

When A Good Book Becomes A Good Movie

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I never watch a movie adapted from a book before I’ve read the book unless I’m 100% sure that I’m never going to read the book. When I saw the first Hunger Games movie, I was 100% sure that I wasn’t going to read the books. (I was also pretty sure that it had something to do with those Twilight books and I had no interest in those. Did you catch this article from slate.com on the textual differences between the Hunger Games, Twilight, and Harry Potter books? Just goes to show how wrong I was.)

ANYway, after I saw the movie, I couldn’t wait to read the books. Go figure. I couldn’t stop thinking about the characters and the story. I’m a sucker for a good dystopian novel, but that’s a subject for another post.

I remember talking about the movie with one of my friends who had read the books, and saying how much I enjoyed the movie, and she said “eh, the book is so much better.”

That’s usually the case, isn’t it?

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I’m writing this because I’m going to see The Hunger Games: Catching Fire on Tuesday night (so by the time you read this, I’ll have seen the movie, but probably won’t have a chance to update this post before it’s published.) In between the release of the two movies, I positively devoured the books, and Catching Fire is my favorite. I’m going in to the theater with high expectations, but I have a feeling I won’t be let down.

A couple of reasons for this: first, my sister, my favorite online movie reviewer, and one of my favorite bloggers all gave Catching Fire rave reviews. Second, I WANT to like the movie; I don’t want to be disappointed. Most importantly, like pretty much everyone else on the internet, I think Jennifer Lawrence can do no wrong.

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I searched for “Jennifer Lawrence being awesome” which was actually a suggested search on Google. These are what came up.

In my excitement for the latest Hunger Games movie, I’ve been thinking about movie adaptations and why some are so good and some are kind of a let down.

A couple stick out to me as good books that became good movies: To Kill A Mockingbird and The Unbearable Lightness of Being – both were more interested in capturing the tone of the book than recreating every scene and piece of dialogue in the text, and in my movie watching experience, that’s the difference between good movie adaptations and “meh” ones.

Think of the first two Harry Potter movies – in my opinion, the movie makers were trying so hard to cram in every detail from the books that they sacrificed depth for breadth. Those two movies are cute and whimsical, but it wasn’t until Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban that the people making the movie braved up enough to sacrifice a few elements of the book to make the movie better.

What the later Harry Potter movies exemplified was that a book or series of books can be good, and a movie or series of movies based on a book can be good. But to compare the two puts them on uneven ground. Honestly, it makes me mad that devotees of certain books like or dislike the movie adaption based on whether or not the movie is faithful to the book. It can’t be! At the end of the day, the book is probably better – but that doesn’t mean the movie is bad.

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I’m writing the rest of this post late Tuesday night after seeing The Hunger Games: Catching Fire. And – I loved it! I thought it was a little slow to get going, but there was quite a bit of exposition to cover (much of it foreshadowing for what’s to come) and once it got going, the movie was really well paced and exciting. Jennifer Lawrence, of course, was great, but my favorite was Peeta.

Entertainment Weekly detailed the biggest changes that happened between the book and the movie, and most of them are relatively inconsequential. I think that the tactic the movie makers have chosen to show President Snow plotting with Plutarch Heavensbee in this movie (and Seneca Crane in the first) is a big advantage the movies have over the books.

To end on a lighter note – someone devised a system for coming up with your Hunger Games name. Mine is Bellmet R. Climbfern. What’s yours?

Everything I Need to Know about Adverbs I Learned from Watching Movies

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Daniel Handler (better known by his nom de plume Lemony Snickett) wrote a book of short stories called Adverbs, which I read circa 2008 as a student of creative writing. I was into adverbs at the time. I thought they made me sound smart.

I was also into Films Noir, which led me to the 2005 Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang. It’s a Val Kilmer/Robert Downey, Jr. movie which was kind of meant to relaunch their respective careers post-Batman/rehab.

So picture 21-year-old me, sitting in my apartment with the lights all the way up, when we come to this scene: (uh, swear words ahead)

(If you don’t want to watch, here’s the gist of the dialogue)
Harry (Robert Downey, Jr.): Umm, clearly I’m interrupting. I feel badly.
Harmony (Michelle Monaghan): Bad. You feel bad.
Harry: Bad?
Harmony: Badly is an adverb. So to say you feel badly would be saying that the mechanism which allows you to feel is broken.

And I realized that I’d been using adverbs wrong my whole life. A life changing moment, I think you’ll agree.

So here is a little grammar lesson. When you want to use an adverb, first make sure you don’t sound like a dunce. Try twisting the sentence around like so:

“I need to go to the bathroom so badly.”

“I am bad at needing to go to the bathroom.”

WRONG.

“Frankly, my dear, I don’t give a damn.”

“To be frank, my dear, I don’t give a damn.”

Correct.