A Brief Hiatus

Not that I post all that regularly anyway, or that there's that many people reading this thing, but I thought I'd let you know that there most definitely won't be any posts until probably July, because I am going on a much anticipated trip. I'm keeping all my extra wittiness here for a while:



Don't steal it while I'm gone! I don't have that much to begin with.

In no particular order...

...here are some reasons you should not waste your time with this movie.Which, of course, begs the question as to why I'm posting a "BUY ME!" link to it, but, well, to each his own. On to the list!

1. It stars Hayden Christensen. If you don't remember, he's the guy that played Anakin Skywalker. And---spoiler---he turns into Darth Vader! And oh yeah, he's a crummy actor.

2. It's based "100%" off a young adult novel. Which would be fine, except by "100%" the director actually means ".001%." An understandable mistake, really: decimal points and percentages are hard!

3. It's very low on a precious little commodity that some people like to call "plot."

4. Samuel L. Jackson's hair looks really stupid.

5. There's nobody to like in this movie. Nobody to root for. Everybody is a scuzzbucket, even though the main character claims that he's "different." He's, um, not.

6. It's only 83 minutes long, which could definitely be a plus. Some movies are too overgrown for their own good (yes, Narnia 1, I'm talking about you). But this movie coulda used about an extra half hour to, say, develop the characters or the storyline or something. Anything.

7. According to one of the special features, the creative team (I'm tempted to use quotation marks around both of those words) created an entire mythology for these characters and the world, which they feel informed the work. In the same feature, an actor playing one of the lead roles said, "I'd really like to know my character's story." Which leads to the conclusion that the aforementioned mythology did not, in fact, inform anyone of anything. (Least of all the audience.)

And the last reason that comes to mind as to why you should not bother with this film:

8. It sucks.

I kind of feel...guilty.

You know those things you're supposed to like? Or respect? Or find interesting, or whatever? Because they deal with Very Important things? And then you feel guilty if you don't, I dunno, appreciate them? Like, for example, say you read The Diary of Anne Frank and you don't think it was all that amazing. Or you see the original canvas of Van Gogh's Starry Night in a museum, and you are unmoved. You don't necessarily not like these things, you just...aren't that impressed.

That's how I feel about Ishmael Beah's A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier. I really feel like I should be incredibly moved by it. After all, it's about a horrific event (the civil war in Sierra Leone), and its author was a boy soldier who witnessed and participated in terrifying activities, and the author is the same age as me, so you'd think I'd compare my life to his and be a little bit awed and a little bit scared and a whole lot grateful.

And I'd be lying if I said I wasn't a little bit of all of those things. There were times in this book that I stopped and thought, "I could never do that," followed by, "...could I?" Followed by, "I hope I never have to find out." So yeah, there's definitely some visceral response going on there. But, I dunno. The book's just not that great.

I feel really guilty saying that. I feel like I should be praising this book from the rooftops just because of the topic. I feel like I'm somehow less of a human being because I wasn't deeply moved by Beah's experiences. I wanted to like this book a lot. I really did. I just...didn't. Mostly it's because of the writing itself. My dad is fond of saying, "His English is much better than my [enter language of choice here]," when hearing people speak for whom English is a second language. And certainly, Beah's English is quite good. But it's just so...accurate. It doesn't sparkle. It has no life. To use a tried and true English Nerd phrase, it doesn't show, it tells. It's extremely dull to read because there's no interesting language use. Sometimes you might as well be reading a textbook.

I'm not completely un-recommending this book (is that a word? It is now), because the events it describes are certainly worth learning about, and the opportunity to do so from someone who lived through them is, for lack of a better word, important. But I can't wholeheartedly recommend it because, frankly, it's just not well-written.

Okay, I feel guilty. I'm going to go crawl under a rock now.