Archive for the ‘Insights’ Category
May 24th, 2010
Once you start learning about story, you can never read a book or watch a movie simply for entertainment anymore. You know too much. At least that’s been my experience.
My husband rented 2012 last weekend. Bummed, I said, “This is going to be just like that stupid Tom Cruise movie with no hero.” (I can’t remember the name; the doomsday one where aliens invade the earth…okay, I Googled it: War of the Worlds, as in HG Wells but not really.)
So, we watched 2012 while waiting for our daughter to come home from a dance and yep, I was right. The main characters consisted of a dysfunctional family intent only on saving themselves. The secondary characters consisted of sleazy politicians intent only on saving themselves. The whole rest of the world (i.e., me and you) could die as long as they survived. I don’t know about you, but I have a hard time connecting emotionally with that type of person (fictional or not). If they don’t care about us, why should we care about them? The goal of successful, satisfying books and movies is usually to “save the world,” not “forget the world, save ourselves!” What if Lord of the Rings had been about Frodo trying to escape Sauron, and to heck with what he might do to Middle Earth?
Hello? Maybe it’s a sign of our selfish times, I don’t know. But I need a hero: someone willing to fight and sacrifice and do the right thing, like Frodo and Sam and Aragorn.
Aside from this glaring fault, the characters were stereotypes: divorced parents; Mom living with a boyfriend; Dad trying to maintain a relationship with the kids; bratty teenage son; cute little daughter; bizarre, psycho, convenient source-of-information guy reminiscent of the mad scientist Doc in Back to the Future; obnoxious, arrogant government bureaucrat that of course, no one can gag and throw in the brig; noble president who stays behind to die and leaves us stuck with the obnoxious, arrogant bureaucrat. To make matters worse, the movie was predictable and boring, and dragged on to the point that you almost wanted them to hurry up and die so it could finally be over. And then there was the inevitable “ticking clock” with the computerized female voice counting down to impending doom and destruction, with salvation coming at the last second. Other than that, I don’t know what happened because I kept falling asleep.
Stories like this leave me wondering, “Where have all the heroes gone?”
August 16th, 2009
Dolores Umbridge, soon to be the first ever “High Inquisitor” at Hogwarts, speaking to students in her class:
“As I was saying, you have been informed that a certain Dark wizard is at large once again. This is a lie…. The Ministry of Magic guarantees that you are not in danger from any Dark wizard. If you are still worried, by all means come and see me outside class hours. If someone is alarming you with fibs about reborn Dark wizards, I would like to hear about it. I am here to help. I am your friend…” (p. 245, Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix by J.K. Rowling)
Barack Obama, President of the United States of America, elected on a platform of “change,” speaking to American citizens at a New Hampshire town hall meeting:
“Where we do disagree, let’s disagree over things that are real, not these wild misrepresentations that bear no resemblance to anything that’s actually been proposed. Because the way politics works sometimes is that people who want to keep things the way they are will try to scare the heck out of folks and they’ll create boogeymen out there that just aren’t real.” (NYTimes.com)
Obama’s White House posted a blog stating, “There is a lot of disinformation about health insurance reform out there…. Since we can’t keep track of all of them here at the White House, we’re asking for your help. If you get an email or see something on the web about health insurance reform that seems fishy, send it to [us].” (WhiteHouse.gov)
Wow.
August 6th, 2009
When Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows came out in the summer of 2007, I pre-ordered two copies to be delivered to my mom’s home in Arizona, where my daughter and I would be vacationing. We happily read and read and read together, taking breaks to eat, swim, and sleep. It was an idyllic setting in which to share and savor the long-awaited conclusion to the series.
So, last month I decided to take the book along with me to re-read on our latest trek to AZ. After two years, I had forgotten quite a bit, making the deja vu experience even more fun. I can see why Deathly Hallows is J.K. Rowling’s favorite installment. She masterfully weaves the story to a close. Compulsive editor that I am, though, I can’t resist pointing out something that bugged me. It started as one little punctuation mark on p. 2: “There was a rustle somewhere to their right: Yaxley drew his wand again…” Hmmm. The editor in me thought the colon should have been a plain old everday period, but the reader in me didn’t care…until there was another…and then another…as many as half a dozen on a single page! This flurry of colons became annoying and distracting, jerking me out of the story, the author presumably trying to expound on the thought to the left of the colon with the thought on the right.
Kate DiCamillo used colons similarly in The Tale of Desperaux, but not in such excess. I’m guessing there are probably upwards of 2,000 colons in Deathly Hallows. That’s way too many for one novel. It’s like a snowflake that grew into a flurry that became a snowball that got out of control and buried the book and reader in a veritable avalanche of colons.
Maybe nobody else noticed…Rowling’s editor certainly didn’t. Maybe I’m the only one bothered by punctuation quirks? I doubt it, considering how much attention is given to exclamation points in writing workshops. Maybe Rowling overused the colon subconsciously. The editor should have caught it, though. But then again, perhaps s/he was too carried away with the story to notice.
That would be understandable.