Okay, I know what you're thinking.  There are lots of reasons to hate someone.  Like they killed your favorite cousin, or grew up to become a genocidal dictator who killed your favorite cousin, or maybe they bought the same dress you did for prom (can't tell you how many times that happened to me).  Maybe (worst of all) the person is a mime.

So why?  What is it with this "Dashner Dude," as his friends (and the "Wanted: D.o.A." posters) call him?

Well, it's like this.  The guy (as you'd already know if you'd read my other posts) is a writer.

But wait!  There's more than just that.  Writers don't, as a rule, make me want to kill them.  Give them a paper cut, or an occasional maiming, perhaps, but not actively whack them.

But Dashner...he's on The Whack List.  Along with that one girl who wouldn't date me in high school.

Okay, he's on the list with, like, a bunch of girls who wouldn't date me in high school.

Okay, fine!  No girl would date me in high school!  There!  You made me say it!  Are you happy?

Sheesh.  Now I have to go cry.

[Pause for tears]

Okay, I'm back.  Where was I?

Ah, yes.  Burning hatred.  For that Dashner Dude.

Because he did it again.  He wrote a book.  A really good, fun book with a twist at the end that I did not see coming, but that nevertheless clarified and made more interesting some of the events of the past book in the series.  The series in question is The 13th Reality, and the second book, The Hunt for Dark Infinity, rocked.  And rolled.  Baby.

Yeah, I'm using the hep-cat lingo to increase my street cred.  Later I have plans in my daytimer to do some cap-busting with my homeez.

So I don't want to spend too much time on the story.  Suffice to say I read the whole thick book in about three sittings (and one standing...I walk while I read...don't ask...).  The plot rocked.

But the thing I do want to talk about is the bad guy.  Or rather, bad girl.   No, she wasn't one of the ones who wouldn't date me.  She's fictional.  Duh.

So this fictional bad girl had an amazing, unusual trait for a villain: she was believably evil.  By that I mean that she wasn't just a cut-out character, snipped from the back of a cereal box and with all the character dimension of a toadstool.  No, Dashner painted a portrait of the very worst kind of evil: someone  who had a sincere belief that the horrible things she was doing were actually in everyone's best interests.

Is she a nutter?  No doubt about it.

But was she a real nutter?  Yes.  In spite of being fictional, she was real.

I'm reading that last sentence again.  It doesn't seem to make much sense on its face.  I'm going with it anyways.

So the nutter - the fake/real one - is someone whose primary goal is to remake the world in her own twisted image; to take the universe and re-form it according to her own vision of "what should be."  There is no room for original thought in her vision, only for her thought.  Her servants are on constant edge around her, knowing that if they walk out of line with her beliefs, they'll probably be killed.

And they follow her anyway.  Because they've bought into the idea that she can make the universe a better place.  In spite of - or maybe because of - her madness.

Look, it's all very complicated and I don't want to ruin the book for you.  And believe me, I can ruin a book if I want.  Just read Billy: Messenger of Powers.  Or RUN.  Or...

Sorry, got carried away.  Again.

Actually, go read The 13th Reality: The Hunt for Dark Infinity.  You'll be glad you did.

 

 

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I also spell "Viscosity" like this: "thickness."

I'm spiffy like that.

So after a whole bunch of reviews of movies which boil down to "I thought they were fun because let's face it I'm a lowest-common-denominator-kind-of-guy and let's face it if it has some cool explosions I'm IN, man!" at last I have a review which boils down to "Holy cow, holy COW, HOLY COW, HOLY FREAKIN' COW!"

The movie I'm making all this beef over (get it?!  Ha, I crack my behind up...and there's another joke for you other lowest common denominator types!) is, of course, Kung Pow, Enter the Fist!

Okay, just kidding.  Though I do think KPEtF is going to go down right behind Casablanca as one of the cinematic greats.  History will bear me out on this one.

But where was I?

Oh, yeah.  Inception.

I'm going to say this slowly and clearly, so there is no hope of misunderstanding.

GO.  SEE.  THIS.  MOVIE.

RIGHT.  NOW.

AND.  BRING.  A.  NOTEPAD.

IF.  YOU.  REFUSE.  TO.  COMPLY.  I.  WILL.  WRITE.  IN.  THIS.  ANNOYING.  FASHION.  FOREVER.

I'll also hold my breath until I turn blue and pass out.  I might even wet myself.  That's how much this movie rocked: "spontaneous urination" rockage.

So what was so cool about it?  Well, in a list of no particular order:

1)  Leo didn't suck.  I know he's supposed to be a great actor, and I can actually see that.  I mean, I get that he's good.  Just he's never "gelled" for me.  But in this, he gelled.  A lot.  I actually re-did my hairstyle while in the theater, using said gel.

2)  Michael Caine.  I don't really have to say much more than that.  It's like saying "Morgan Freeman" or "Anthony Hopkins."  Certain people you just stick up on the screen with a phone book and let them read it and then you gladly write a check for umpty-billion dollars (or whatever their salary is these days).

3)  Zero-g fighting.  I can't say any more about this because it's integrally tied into the plot, and I don't want to ruin it for you.  Suffice it to say, when Joseph Gordon-Levitt rolls up his sleeves, prepare to have your bum handed to you (metaphorically speaking...unless you're dating a canibal, in which case GET OUT WHILE YOU STILL CAN).  And yes, this is the same JG-L who was the kid on Third Rock From the Sun.  And while I feel I could have killed young alien JG-L with little or no difficulty using only a kite string and my strong middle finger, after seeing this movie I would not tangle with this dude armed with anything less than a howitzer that shot man-eating sharks.

4)  The plot.  Remember how I mentioned you might want to bring a notepad?  Seriously, this was one of the most complicated plots I've seen in "mainstream theater."  Which means implicitly that not only was it incredibly complex, but it also had to be UNDERSTANDABLE.  And it was.  Holy cow, it was.  But you had to pay attention.  Word to the wise: PEE BEFORE YOU SEE THIS MOVIE.  There are ZERO opportunities to go visit the potty without missing something critical.  And if you miss one critical thing, you WILL NOT UNDERSTAND THE REST OF WHAT'S GOING ON.

That's why they call such things "critical."  Duh.

5)  Jaw dropping.  I can't remember the last time I spent at a theater where my mouth fell open around minute 4 and didn't close until the end credits had stopped rolling.  I didn't even have to worry about refreshments: my wife just lobbed Junior Mints into my open mouth and I swallowed 'em whole.  I think one of them may have been a bug, too, but I was too engaged on the awesomey-radicalness of the movie to care.  I probably needed the extra protein to save my strength for the aforementioned strenuous jaw-openiness of the movie.

Okay, now you'll notice that I haven't given much too you in the way of plot details.  And I won't, neither.   Because this plot is just too much fun to spoil at all.  It is brilliant, it is air-tight, it has no real plot-holes (okay, I spotted one or two, but they are minor to the purposes of the story and emminently forgiveable in the context of the aforementioned awesomey goodness of this flick), and above all it made me FEEL STUFF.

And, news flash, that's why we go to the movies.  Contrary to many of the critics, movies aren't just a chance for us to go sit down and make urbane, witty (i.e., mean and degrading) comments about them during and after.  Movies are where we go when we don't have time or money for a roller coaster park.  We go there to have experiences we could never have in this life.  To be scared, thrilled, enthralled, terrified, appalled, joyous, relieved...and all from the safety of the theater.  Which can actually be dangerous if you have one of those really sticky-floored theaters.  But still.  Mostly it's safe.  Mostly.

At any rate, before I meander too far off the mark (too late!), let me close with this: GO SEE INCEPTION.

GO.  SEE.  IT.  NOW.

I'm holding my breath!

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I'm going to start this post in an unusual way: with a personal injury.

See, almost three years ago my sweet, kind-hearted, good, beautiful, wonderful daughter climbed up on my lap, looked at me with a depth of love and affection I cannot describe...and then cruelly and with malice aforethought (I'm sure of this) put her sweet, kind-hearted, good, beautiful, wonderful, and with-a-nail-as-sharp-as-a-razor-blade finger in my eye.  This was followed by my immediately saying "Ow," which itself was immediately followed by "OW!" which was in turn succeeded by a number of words that I won't say here.

I spent two days in a dark room on serious pain meds.  Turned out she had basically shredded the crap out of my cornea.  The good eye doctor took care of my injury with something called "micropunctures."  What's that? you ask.  Well, you know how if you a piece of paper on top of another piece of paper, then stab through both of them with a pencil, they'll kinda sorta stick together?  It turns out that if you stab someone's mangled cornea with a tiny (by "tiny" I mean gi-normous) diamond-tipped pencil thingy, it will have more or less the same effect and (hopefully) re-attach your cornea to the rest of your eye, where it should have stayed in the first place.  So enter me, getting stabbed by the aforementioned diamond-tipped thingy about three dozen times.

You have not lived until you've had your eye stabbed.  Even though he numbs you up, just the fact that you can actually see your vision distort as the doc pokes you in the eyeball with his gargantuan diamond pencil is nauseating enough to make a Navy SEAL go a bit woozy.

So now, two years later, after much adventuring in the martial arts and other death-defying activities, my most long-lasting injury is this stupid eye, which still hits me with an intense shot of pain every few weeks.

Flash forward to yesterday.  I'm helping my daughter get her pants on.  She needs this sort of help from time to time, and I don't usually begrudge her.  Besides, she's older, her nails are trimmed, she hasn't tried anything in the eye-stabby vein for quite some time, and (most important) I have glasses on.

I underestimated her skill.  I felt like Vader getting his arm chopped off by that Skywalker whippersnapper (who was also his offspring) as the dear fruit of my OWN loins managed to insert her finger up under my glasses and with surgical accuracy swipe said digit across my eyeball again.

Me back at doctor.  Me with eye patch on.  Me in fairly severe pain.

And here's where the part about hating James Dashner comes in.

For those who don't know, the guy's a writer.  He has written a number of novels, and through one of those friend-of-a-friend things, he was kind enough to review and provide a very nice cover blurb for my own novel, Billy: Messenger of Powers (get yours today!).  So I figured I should at least read one of his books in return.  Actually I wasn't really trying to be nice; he came highly recommended so it was purely out of a selfish desire for good reading stuff that I picked up a copy of one of his books.

Enter The 13th Reality: The Journal of Curious Letters.  Which I have.  And which is so goll-darn-flippidy-jibbety good that I am reading it WITH A TORN UP CORNEA.  It is like I am addicted to crack which comes in the form of an incredibly charming novel and which I have to inject through my one remaining eyeball.  That one remaining eyeball is already all angry about having to do double duty (the eye doctor patched up the other one), and keeps going on strike by turning off for a minute or two every couple of hours.  And the covered-up and twice-mangled eye is still moving under the bandages meaning if I do something that requires eye tracking, like, say, I don't know, READ A BOOK, it KILLS ME.

Look, I don't want to get all weak in the knees, but this was a seriously great book!  For those of you who like LOST, remember how you felt during the first season?  Like you couldn't stop yourself?  Like seven days was far too long to wait between installments?  And then at the season's end you were satisfied that you'd just seen something amazing but incredibly peeved because now you had to wait for the next season before getting more answers?

That's how I felt reading The 13th Reality: The Journal of Curious Letters.  It was a GREAT book.  I don't want to give too much away, but I will say a few things that I especially loved.  First and foremost was that every name in the book was wonderful.  I hate coming up with names.  Come on, MY most famous protagonist is "Billy Jones."  Blah.  Granted, it was a purposeful blah to set up some situational irony that someone so unimportant-sounding is actually the key to saving the world.  But still.

Contrast that to the hero of 13th Reality: Atticus "Tick" Higgenbottom.  Jaw-droppingly awesome.

Which brings me to the next thing I loved: Tick, unlike EVERY OTHER YA (that's Young Adult for those who aren't in The Know) HERO IN HISTORY, ACTUALLY BRINGS HIS DAD INTO THE SITUATION.  I mean, here's a kid who receives a strange letter in the mail that says either he can a) burn it and have a normal life or b) hang onto it and have the chance to save others' lives...at the cost of his own safety.  And the kid ACTUALLY BRINGS A GROWN-UP INTO THE ACTION.  And the grown-up (the dad) doesn't discount his kid's concerns or go "Well, we'll just shut you up under the stairs until you come to your senses" (you know who I'm talking about).  No, the dad actually HELPS THE KID OUT.  A real family, whose members really believe in each other and who really help one another in a pinch.  No evil step-parents or abusive uncles or aunts, just good-hearted folks.  I love that (I also love that about the also loads of fun Fablehaven series by another neat-o guy, Brandon Mull, but that's another story for another time).

And, lest I forget, the plot, the characters, the dialogue, the settings, and everything else (did I leave anything out?) is all wonderful.  I loved this book.  I am lucky because at least I don't have to wait several months to start the next one: it's already out and I'm on my way to my local bookstore asap to pick up the next installment of this series.

So why do I hate James Dashner?  Because, on top of the fact that I spent about six hours yesterday reading in incredible pain because I couldn't tear my eye away from the great book, now I have yet another thing on my already overfull plate of things to do: purchase and read everything this Dashner guy has ever written.

Because if the rest of it is half as good as The 13th Reality: The Journal of Curious Letters, I will have to spend the next few days hooked up to an IV, a catheter, and a steady drip of pain meds for my eye while I read it all...and I won't feel overburdened at all.

Rarely do I enjoy a book as much as I enjoyed this one.  If you don't have it, I recommend you fix that problem immediately.  You'll be glad you did.

 

 

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I watched The A-Team this weekend.

For those who missed out on the original, it was (for me at least) cool for the following reasons:

1)  No one ever died.  EVER.  There were (I kid you not) helicopter chases where the bad guys' chopper hits a mountain, explodes, falls 200 feet to the ground...and then the bad guys stumble out of it with really bad boo-boos that will take at least six hours to shake off.

2)  The A-Team helped underdogs.  Call me old fashioned, but I have always secretly wished that I could hire someone (someone who would later refuse payment) to sweep in and solve all my problems.  In the series this usually involved thugs with sawed-off shotguns.  In my case, I guess the A-Team would go after that telemarketer who keeps calling during dinner.  I pity THAT fool.

3)  The A-Team always made a cool invention to stop the bad guys, using whatever items they had at hand.  And unlike McGuyver (another 80s icon), they made no attempt whatever to create "feasible" inventions.  As often as not The A-Team could be seen cutting apart a soda machine to create a (non-deadly) soda machine GUN which it would use to knock down the bad guys with spews of Orange Fanta and Tab.

These were cool guys.

So what about the movie?

Well, as measured against the TV show, it failed on all counts.

1)  People died.  Numerous.  Several of them even specifically died in helicopter chases.

2)  The A-Team did NOT help underdogs, it mostly just helped itself (you could argue they were helping Uncle Sam, but really this was a revenge movie).

3)  The A-Team's inventions in the movie were not really so much inventions as just invenTIVE ways of whacking bad guys.

So, the movie stank, right?

Wellllll....

Look, it wasn't The A-Team.  Not really.  BUT if the movie had been called Four Guys With Lots of Testosterone who Need (and get) a Reason to Blow Stuff up Real Good, then this could probably be counted as a success.

Exhibit 1: steering a tank.  In mid-air.  By using the tank cannon to shoot shells off that send the tank (which is more or less in free-fall) zooming in the opposite way.  Said tank then lands in a river and later drives OUT of the river.  This is both cool and shows that our tax dollars are in fact being spent to make some high quality stuff.

Exhibit 2: Murdoch (the crazy one) sets fire to Face's (Bradley Cooper's) arm.  This just struck me as funny.  I don't know why.

Exhibit 3: Face is sent to a super-max prison...and within 6 months has the whole thing so wired his "cell" looks more like a suite from the Ritz.

Silly.  Dumb.  Fun.  The guys were all about lots of back-and-forth dialogue, delivered in a machine-gun rattle reminiscent of His Girl Friday (speedwise, not intelligencewise...I ain't crazy).  There were lots of cool explosions.  Bradley Cooper got some funny lines (reason for sleeping with El General's wife: "Well, she's smoking hot, plus we both really hate you, so sparks just flew.").  Rampage was a fine substitute for Mr. T.

Was this the best movie ever?  No.  Was it as cool as other recent TV-to-silver-screen-remakes?  No.  For instance, it was not as cool as the GI Joe movie.  Why?  Because there was no Snake Eyes in the A-Team, and Snake Eyes could kill the whole A-Team faster than Face could seduce a gal.  It wasn't as cool as Transformers 2.  Why?  Because there was no giant robot with visible genitalia made of wrecking balls (I'm still in awe of that one, lo these many months later).

But was it a fun movie?  Yeah.  Did the guys have fun?  Yeah.  Did stuff blow up real good?  Yeah.

Did Hannibal get to say "I love it when a plan comes together"?  Yeah.

I'm just not sure what plan he was talking about.

But that's okay.  Something blew up real good right when he said it, so I was satisfied.

 

 

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I'm smiling.

I'm listening to Fireflies by Owl City. And smiling.

Not because I want to make you laugh, not this time.

Because I am inspired.  And I want, in turn, to be inspiring.

When was the last time you saw something that made you smile?

When was the last time you heard a song that made you simply glad to be alive?

When was the last time YOU were the source of that kind of inspiration?

I always know when I'm in the presence of something great: whenever I am, I want to do that great thing myself.  When I listen to great music, it makes me want to sing, to break out my guitar and start callusing up my fingers again so that I can make that kind of music and touch people in that way.  When I read a great book, it makes me want to sit down in front of my computer and write the sequel, or write another story set in the same universe that I have just found such joy in inhabiting.

When I sit in the presence of a great human being, it makes me want to be great for others.

It's almost childish, this yearning to emulate, to be, to become what makes me glad.  A child will tell a joke and, if it gets a laugh, will tell it a thousand times, and then a thousand times more.  As long as the laughs keep coming, the child is happy.  The child has the same kind of glee that I find myself feeling while listening to Fireflies.

This is an unusual blog entry for me.  There is no attempt on my part to make you laugh.  Not this time.  I just want you to think of something that gives you happiness.  A cup of cocoa on a winter day, with the blizzard outside pounding on the windows.  A perfect red autumn leaf that has fallen to the sidewalk in a way that makes you believe that God did it Himself, just so you would have something beautiful to see today.  The smell of new-mown grass on a summer weekend morning, the kind of smell that bears the promise of a single perfect day with it like some kind of inhalable prophecy.

Think of those things.  Think of fireflies, dancing in a cool spring evening, lighting up the night and using the light to attract mates: to attract what will result in union, in creation.

I listen to some music and I smile.  I believe, for a moment, that I could write music like that.

I watch some movies and I laugh.  I sit down and try to write a movie that will make someone else laugh the way I just did.

I see some people and they seem to glow.  Like fireflies.  And the glow is contagious.  It makes me glow, too, in a chain of light and happiness that could stretch around the globe, if only...

If only we could find the people...

Fireflies flash in the darkness to find one another.  The glow is a way to attract friends in the night.

I know people who glow like that.  And I thank God for them.  For those fireflies who light up the evenings of my life, who create out of darkness a beautiful dance of light that attracts others to it and shows them where they can find peace, safety, sanctuary, friendship.

We all dance in the dark, you know.  It's just the way we're made.  The darkness comes from all sides, and we dance.  Sometimes we manage to glow.

And sometimes, if we are very lucky - or very blessed - the glow we cast will help someone else find their own illumination.  To find their own light.  To find their own way in the darkness.

We of all creatures are truly blessed.  Not fireflies, but people, lighting the way for each other.

And I am inspired.

 

 

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