Revenge of the Short Reviews, Episode I

What the subject line says. (Except maybe for the “revenge” part.)

Nation by Terry Pratchett (2008). I usually don’t get it when people say a book made them cry, because stories hardly ever make me teary, and books almost never do. But this one came closer than any in a really long time.

Mau, the last survivor of his island people, must work together with Daphne, a scion of pseudo-colonial!Britain, to rebuild a nation. On the surface, there’s lots in this book to make you cry right off the bat: Mau losing all his family and friends; Daphne alone in a strange world with the very real possibility that she’ll never see any of the people she loves again; babies dying of hunger and selfish, murdering mutineers. But to Pratchett’s credit, as usual, he always has you laughing between the tears or even during them. And he deals with the same themes he always has: what is religion and why should we even have it? How does society work? Why do people do the heartbreaking, miserable, sublime things they do? The bitterness is made all the more affecting for being bittersweet instead of straight nastiness.

I read somewhere that readers and critics feel that the only “deep” or “realistic” ending is an unhappy one, and that’s why I love Nation so much. This is a profoundly thoughtful and plausible novel that never insults its readers’ intelligence – and yet, unlike so many other works that profess to hold the mirror up to nature… well, I was going to say it shows both the flaws and the beauty, but that’s not true. Pratchett’s gift lies in showing that the flaws are the beauty and the humour and the wonder, and instead of chivvying you into a Rosencrantz-and-Guildenstern-are-dead despair, he leaves you with hope.

The Broken Bridge by Philip Pullman (1990, revised in 2001) (Yeah, I’m not sure how that “revised” thing works either, but sign me up!) Sixteen-year-old Ginny is already trying to cope with being the only Black teenager in her Welsh town being raised by her single (White) dad, when secrets from her family’s past come surging up.

Philip Pullman always writes well with a quick pace, so this is an engaging read. His characters are realistic to the point of being difficult to understand sometimes, which isn’t always so bad. And there’s definitely something to be said for the way he shows you that every character has multiple facets: Ginny thinks of herself as kind, but every so often we see that she’s not as nice as she thinks she is. She hates a new boy in town (who is more than that, but any explanation would be a spoiler), but in the end, he and she form bonds based on experience and situation. Idols have feet of clay; friends are hiding things; and even the local gangster turns out to have another face.

That said, I’m not into books without a strong fantasy element, so I’m probably not the best judge of this story.

Meteos (Nintendo DS) – This is a falling-blocks puzzle game unique to the DS: as coloured squares known as “meteos” fall from above, you use your stylus to line up three of the same colour. When you do, they turn into rockets and blast the blocks on top of them off your screen. Sometimes, when a set of blocks is in midair, you’ll need to find a way to add more rockets to achieve actual liftoff.

The best part of this game is the ridiculous backstory: basically, you need to save the universe by defeating various planets in a meteos-match. There are dancing aliens, funky music, and the various meteos have different forms on each new world. More interestingly, each world has its own gravity, meteos colour frequencies, etc., so you really have to tailor your strategy accordingly: in some worlds, three meteos in a row will blast off no problem, but in others, you’ll need to add more rockets to boost the darn things offscreen.

For a puzzle game, there are a lot of thoughtful touches. You collect the meteos you blast offscreen; when you have enough, you can fuse them into new planets, power-ups, sounds, and materials that then appear in your game – the perfect motivation for “well… I guess I have time for just one more round before I go finish my term paper”. Also nifty are the multiple endings in story mode, some tragic, some absurd, and all just plain wacky. But my very favourite detail is the way you can still play the game in miniature through the closing credits, and the meteos you blast off still count in your total. Very cool. Play until it gives you a headache!

Green Boy by Susan Cooper (2002). Two brothers who live in the Caribbean, Trey and Lou, get spirited away to a secondary world where Lou is needed to help a band of rebels restore Mother Earth in a technocratic society. Except no one’s really sure what he has to do, or, if they are, they refuse to tell the boys. Meanwhile, back at home, a French developer is trying to take over Trey and Lou’s favourite beach area, ruining the local ecosystem and possibly bilking the locals out of money.

Susan Cooper is always a vivid, evocative writer, and this book is no exception. You can feel the details of Trey and Lou’s home. Despite Lou’s inability to speak, she captures his character brilliantly (although the idea that people with mental illness are all automatically sweet, Jesus-like figures is a little skeevy). The plot is a little out there, and I wound up not really caring about what happened to Mother Earth or the rebels in the secondary world, but I still wanted to find out what happened to Lou and Trey. Susan Cooper is really, really good at sketching out loving familial relationships, so my favourite parts were seeing Trey interact with his grandparents (and the contrast in the way he interacts briefly with his friends).

Chat by Archer Mayor (2007) Here’s the way I roll at the local library: I always have between two and seven books on hold, mostly because despite Toronto having a huge collective library system, it takes forever for your turn to arrive. My nearest branch is really tiny, but whenever something I have on hold arrives, when I pick it up, I “allow” myself to take out one young readers’ book, one adult fantasy or sci-fi book, one mystery book, and one non-fiction book. This is my mystery book.

Chat is apparently the 18th book in Archer Mayor’s Joe Gunther series, which explains a lot, because I figured it was an “aagh! suspense!” novel when I picked it up and started getting the “recurring character” vibes on the fifth or sixth page. At the same time detective Joe Gunther’s family is being threatened, somebody seems to be murdering people by luring them through an online chat room.

I liked it – read it all in one sitting, anyway, when I was supposed to be doing schoolwork instead. It’s a regular police procedural dealie. (Although it did have this one tic where the main character has slept with every woman he’s not related to who’s featured in the story. Does this happen in real life? Because I’m pretty sure it doesn’t, unless you happen to be the protagonist of an 18-book series.) Fun, not nail-biting, but well written, and the murderer isn’t who you think (although it’s pretty close).

Chrono Trigger (Nintendo DS) – An RPG video game recently re-released for the Nintendo DS, ported from the SNES (aka The Last Great Console). Basically, an awesome game, even if it is somewhat pricey. I love how you can actually change the story depending on which choices you make at certain intervals, and I love how the bad guy – well, I won’t spoil it, but let’s just say that I like villains.

You play as Crono, a silent (of course) teenage boy from the year 1000 who just wants to have fun at the Millenial Fair. Unfortunately, in the course of some time-travel mishaps, you and your friends discover that the world is going to end in the year 1999. Naturally, you decide to save it, via wandering around the map, undertaking quests, and fighting turn-based battles.

The time-travel mechanic is pretty nifty: although you don’t have enough control to do everything you’d want to do in real life, you can still usually go back in time and do something that changes the present or the future. (Possibly resulting in a different one of the many endings.) You can beat the game pretty much from the beginning, if you so desire. Also, the game provides faster ways to get around as the map grows so you aren’t stuck navigating your way from city to city in what feels like real-time walking. There’s touch-screen functionality, but who really wants to mess with the classic controls in a game like this? Anyway, there’s a reason this is a classic.

Monsters vs. Aliens (2009) – What the title says. Susan, an ordinary woman accidentally transformed into a giant on her wedding day, teams up with other “monsters” to save the Earth from aliens. This is going to sound really geeky, but the first thing I noticed about this film was the textures. The characters’ clothes, their hair, the furniture, the grass – everything looks like you could reach out and touch it (and I didn’t even see it in Real3D).

*ahem*

The plot is fairly amusing, if somewhat predictable, and there are a few hilarious jokes (mostly having to do with Seth Rogen’s character B.O.B., although each of the others has one or two great moments as well), and several more that just made me shrug, either because they were predictable and tired or because they were trying too hard to be wittily quirky.

I didn’t feel like I’d wasted my money (OK, my parents’ money, since it was a Passover family outing), but I didn’t immediately feel the urge to quote lines or go buy the DVD or discuss the characters. In other words, there are a lot of things this movie does okay, and one or two it does exceptionally (render textures and mock scifi B-movies). If you’re just looking to relax, or if one of those latter two things is something you really enjoy, you might as well grab a ticket.

The Reader (2008) – Another Passover movie outing, this time with a friend who wasn’t as sad I was that popcorn is chametz. The titular reader is a German teenager, Michael, who has an affair with an older woman, Hannah. He reads her works of classic literature. Long after their affair ends, adult Michael discovers Hannah may be guilty of Nazi war crimes – and he might have a piece of evidence that changes everything.

Did that summary sound like the movie might be full of action and mystery? Then I apologize for misleading you. There are two types of scenes in this movie: sexy time and pensive time. Sexy time is pretty explicit, and sometimes one gets the distinct sensation that we’re getting nudity just to make this film seem deeper. Pensive time requires you to imagine really, really hard about what the character might be thinking and to try to draw conclusions from every detail of the actor’s performance. The problem is, if you don’t care about Michael or Hannah, you’re still not going to care about them when they’re staring off into space and remembering their tragic past/pondering the tensions between justice and mercy/wondering if G-d would really mind so much if you just had a kernel or two – whoops, sorry, that last one was just me.

Okay, I don’t mean to be such a downer about this movie. It’s well made and well acted, but it’s just not for me. I don’t mind slow movies, but I still need something to engage me, and I didn’t find it here.

Let the Right One In (2008) – Introduced to this by some of my cool grad-student colleagues. This is also a slow movie, but it involves vampires and explicit, bloody violence. Also, some really creepy children. Oskar is a quiet Swedish boy who dreams of revenge against the bullies in his class. Eli is the mysterious girl who just moved in next door. Exsanguinated corpses are what keep turning up in the area, the victims of a serial killer who’s been spotted at the scene.

Exsanguinated corpses aside, this film is mainly about the slow development of Oskar and Eli’s friendship. To the filmmakers’ credit, they’ve managed to make the murders and bloody stuff background (very relevant background, but still background) to the two children’s budding relationship. Let the Right One In does require a lot of patience on the part of the viewer; sometimes the writers suddenly jump to a brand new group of characters that haven’t appeared before, and you just have to trust that eventually they’ll tell you how these people relate to Oskar and Eli. They usually do, but it can still be frustrating.

I should also warn that this is the sort of movie where, by the end, you’re not really sure whether you want Oskar and Eli to be friends, because that might be more horrible than them being alone. But it’s thoughtful and original, and the one or two moments when details jar are more than made up for by the rest when they don’t.