Indiana Jones and the Ark of the Short Reviews

Yes, it’s that time again. The time when I’ve been reading and watching lots of things but none of them have inspired me to a rant. So I’ve written short reviews instead.

In retrospect, I think this is closely related to my decision to put off watching the rest of this season of House…

Dull Boy by Sarah Cross (2009) – Look at me, all up-to-date and reading books published less than a year ago! Hooray, I’m finally figuring out how to navigate the Toronto Public Library system!

Dull Boy is the story of Avery, a teenage boy with Superman-like powers and the even more formidable gift of a funny, believable, and gripping narrative voice, who struggles to hide his abilities as he tries to make himself a force for good in the world. Along the way, he meets up with other hilarious superpowered teens and encounters sinister adults who may be trying to help him and his friends… or use them for their own nefarious ends.

I finished this book the day I picked it up from the library, which tells you something right off the bat: it’s engaging and fast-paced, with no small part of that due to Avery’s aforementioned awesome voice. It was so well done that I ignored the fact that the plot of this book wasn’t quite as super-powered as the characters who inhabit it – I didn’t really care about who was good or evil (it seemed clear) as much as I did about watching these wacky characters interact. And I loved that there were a lot of characters I wasn’t used to seeing in this genre of story – a Hello Kitty fan, a girl who is an actual biznatch (not just a for-teen-books biznatch) but not evil, an adorably weird female robot-scientist-genius. By making the important part of the story about friends and identity (while keeping it low on the Smallville-style wangst), Cross keeps the pages turning and sets a high bar with her fantastic style.

Catching Fire by Suzanne Collins (2009) –  This is the second book of the Hunger Games trilogy, and that means you already know how it ends. Han Solo is frozen in carbonite, Frodo’s been captured by the enemy, and Jack Sparrow’s lost to the Kraken. But you won’t know quite how bad it is until the final pages, which is testament to Collins’s amazing writing.

The star of the trilogy is Katniss, a teenage girl who gets sent to the Hunger Games, a televised death match run by the imperial Capitol to assert its dominance over the twelve impoverished districts it rules. When we meet up with Katniss at the beginning of Catching Fire, she’s in the middle of plots galore – her actions at the Hunger Games in the first novel have stirred up rebellion against the Capitol, and she and her family are stuck in the middle; she’s caught between two guys while at the same time not being ready for a relationship; and the Capitol has tricks up its sleeve waiting for her.

The story is fast-paced and poses hard questions about how far it’s okay to go to protect other people and at what point you have to stop worrying about the welfare of those you love in order to do what’s right. There are a couple places where a quick reader will cotton on to things Katniss doesn’t seem to understand, and the lack of power she has over the ending is a bit of a let-down. But there are great moments where Katniss has to make moral decisions on a scale she’s never before encountered, even at the Hunger Games, and better ones when she witnesses the various virtues of both her suitors. All in all, you’ll definitely be wishing the third book was out already by the time you’re done Catching Fire – and, if you’re a writer, you’ll also be supremely envious of Collins’s skill and imagination.

The Great Escape (1963) – I’ll make up for my spate of recent books with a definitely-not-so-recent movie. Even if you’ve never heard of this film, you’d probably recognize the theme song, if I could hum it through the computer (hit up about 0:21 for the familiar part). The whole thing’s been parodied dozens of times in everything from The Simpsons to Chicken Run. In a nutshell, it’s the story of a bunch of Allied prisoners during the Second World War who’ve been placed in a special high-security Nazi POW camp on account of them always trying to escape. Naturally, they make a plan to work together and break free.

When you watch this movie, you can’t help but feel that if it were made today, there would be a lot more bada$$ killing and guns and grittiness, and that the movie would end as soon as even a single prisoner escaped. Instead, everything feels low-key and careful, and the story follows not only the escape but what happens to the runaways as they strive to make it home. And it’s not always happy.

But the laid-back-ness somehow distills the plot and the characters. It holds them at just the right arm’s length – enough so the audience sympathizes them, not so much that the audience fails to see that the important part of their efforts isn’t their individual escapes but their duties to their countries to defy the Nazis.

The Girl Who Leapt Through Time (2006) – I picked this one up while I was in Singapore, because, hey, it was cheap, and I’d never seen it. It’s a Japanese film about Makoto, a teenage girl who discovers she has the power to leap (literally – she has to take a run and jump off a cliff or staircase) through time. With this gift, she can go back and change events or conversations that didn’t turn out quite the way she wanted them to –  or so she thinks. Some things, she discovers, can only be avoided, not changed, and any tampering with the past has consequences for the present. Someone always loses out.

The movie is well put together, and the social politics of Makoto’s high school are easy to follow despite the language (and possibly cultural) barrier. It’s easy to believe that anyone who had the power to go back in time would use it the way she does – for silly little things like avoiding an embarassing incident in cooking class or trying to match up two of her friends. The story also strikes just the right note of seriousness: the audience can believe in time travel, but we’re never left trying to pick out the physics or logical ramifications of it. In fact, the eventual explanation of how and why Makoto can travel through time is a little confusing, and so are some of the consequences of what she does. But for most of the movie, because Makoto’s not one to look a gift horse in the mouth, she doesn’t worry about it, and so neither do we.

Jesus Christ Superstar (2000) – This version was apparently made for TV, and most of the reviews I’ve encountered complain that it’s nowhere near as good as the seventies version with Ted Neeley as the titular character. They may be right – it’s hard to say because this is the first time I’ve encountered this musical.

I don’t expect too much deep intellectual stuff from Andrew Lloyd Webber, but I do expect a couple memorable songs, and the score definitely delivers those – the title number (“Superstar”), Mary Magdalene’s solo “I Don’t Know How to Love Him”, and Herod’s showstopper all remain on the brain after a viewing, and various other songs provide earworms to torment and/or entertain long after the credits have rolled. I’m not sure I quite got or bought the plot, which seems to have a lot of sections left out in the assumption that the audience will be able to fill in the blanks from the Gospels.

Part of the reason I had trouble getting behind this particular production of the show (at least, I’ll be charitable and assume it was just this production) was its portrayal of Jesus. The guy playing him was pretty, blond, and blue-eyed (a little odd, but OK), and he came across like a spoiled kid for most of the musical, arrogant and petulant and “nobody understands me!!!!”. Wah wah wah, get a Livejournal. Judas stole the show acting-wise, but a lot of the songs were out of his range, and though he compensated for that by concentrating on the emotion, the scratchiness sometimes made him unpleasant to listen to.

I’m intrigued enough that I might seek out the older movie, just to hear the music again and see if my problem really is with the production rather than the script. Otherwise, this is a fun movie, but ultimately unsatisfying, for me at least. It tries to touch on so many deep issues but winds up glossing over them instead.