Go to the Movies Already!

After a couple of long months of nothing in the theaters but the shittiest imaginable movies, in that yearly no-man's land between Oscar season and Summer blockbuster season, there are finally, finally movies worth seeing again. (Seriously Hollywood, get it together.)  And instead of saving them up and making them last, we went and saw all of them at once this weekend. You should see them too, and here's why:

Muppets Most Wanted
Dir. James Bobin (107 mins.)

I feel the exact opposite way about muppet movies that I do about Charlie Brown/Peanuts movies. That is, I wish they had stopped making Peanuts movies/TV specials 30 years go (sorry, not sorry). Do we really need anything more than A Charlie Brown Christmas and It's the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown? NO. We do not. Those two are great, and they're plenty enough. Everyone can live without the other stupid specials where the voices are all wrong and every character but Snoopy seems to be suffering from sever depression.

The Muppets, on the other hand, are. always. perfect. There is nothing not to like about the Muppets. The songs are yes. The celebrity cameos are yes. The jokes are yes. They're silly enough for kids and sarcastic enough for adults. And most sane humans have not one, but at least two or three favorite muppet characters. My favorites are Fozzy Bear, Rolf, the Swedish Chef's chicken back up dancers, and Pepe the shrimp.

The newest Muppet movie is better than the last one, which was good but not muppety enough. It spent a lot of time on Walter and on Jason Segel (though the Jim Parsons cameo was pretty much amazing). This new movie is extremely muppety and, on top of it, has Tina Fey in it and makes fun of Europeans a lot. What's not to love? Bonus: I sort of wish Ty Burrell and Sam the Eagle would have their own "True Detective" style HBO series. I would watch the hell out of that.

Divergent 
Dir. Neil Burger (139 mins.)

The past few years have been amazing for people who love YA fiction and also movies. Apparently there are a lot of us, because the genre of "movies based on YA novels" gets bigger and bigger every year.  And, if you can believe it, not all of those movies have been about dystopias or vampires. (But this one is though. Dystopias. Not vampires.)

Cheater review: If you liked the book, you will almost certainly like the movie. Some things are changed (of course) but it's pretty faithful and fun to watch translated from page to screen.

Real review: Some of the dialogue is cheeeeeeesy and some of the "meaningful pauses" are overdone, but given the genre, that's not really a surprise.  Anyway, you can ignore that because the action is fast paced, the actors are good looking, and there's nothing in the movie that will make you groan in pain (I'm looking at you, Twilight and Beautiful Creatures). Also, the most unexpectedly awesome person in the movie? Ashley Judd. Hands down. Also, Miles Teller, who has sort of a crap part in this movie, but whom I sincerely hope becomes hugely famous soon.

The Grand Budapest Hotel
Dir. Wes Anderson (100 mins.)

I highly recommend listening to this interview from NPR before going to see this movie.  I also recommend seeing this movie in the theater rather than waiting for it to hit Netflix. I feel like this is true of most Wes Anderson movies: they're still good on TV, but they lose a lot of their ambiance and charm.  They deserve to be big. This movie in particular has a handful of scenes that should absolutely been seen on the big screen.

This is, actually, my favorite Wes Anderson movie since The Royal Tenenbaums (in case you're keeping track, I hated The Darjeeling Limited so much I never finished watching it).  It's funny from beginning to end, but also very touching. Every single person in the movie seems like they were absolutely made for the part they play (including some of the cameo spots) and, as is standard for a Wes Anderson movie, the sets, costumes, colors, music, and lighting create a totally unusual and fantastical world. This movies reminds me of one of those books you read that you can't really explain to anyone: you love all of the characters and everything is so fantastically weird that it just fits.

Bathtub Books

I've been way too busy taking naps and playing Candy Crush on every mobile device I own to update my blog. I just realized Tim's flag day ceremony was over three weeks ago. So, in case you missed the news, Surprise! We're going to Ciudad Juarez, Mexico!

In the meantime, I've read about 4000 books. Or three. Whatever.  Anyway, for about two years (coincidentally, about as long as I've been out of grad school), my attention span has been wrecked. I haven't been able to sit through any book more than 350 pages long unless the main character is a teenage girl living in some sort of dystopian future. But I did it, y'all! I actually read The Goldfinch from beginning to end without putting it down to read a shorter book in the middle! That's 771 pages of straight up literary fiction.

Anyway, without further ado:

Things Fall Apart
by Chinua Achebe

The fact that this is one of those books you see at every used bookstore (my copy was $2 in a library sale) anywhere you go speaks for itself. It's hugely and enduringly popular.  It's one of those short, easy reads like Of Mice and Men or The Lord of the Flies, that just begs to be put on a syllabus because it has an easy lesson in it while being a little punchy and more than a little ironic. I get the impression that a lot of people where probably forced to read this book in class and ended up really enjoying it despite themselves.

The story is about a very gruff and manly man who lives in a village in Nigeria at the end of the 19th century, for whom, as you might have guessed from the title, things are falling apart.  The chapters are sometimes more like snapshots than a narrative stream and it works to give you an idea of life for the main characters and the culture they live in. Achebe's style of writing is easy without being simple and moving without being heavy handed. This is the perfect book to read if you want to feel like you're reading something really smart and literary without having to commit to something really intense like Sophie's Choice or Les Miserables.

The Goldfinch
By Donna Tartt

I have a lot of friends who rated this book very highly, and Tartt's The Secret History is one of my all-time favorites. If that were not the case, I would not have picked up this monster book, which took me nearly a month to finish.

Tartt enjoys writing about artistic people who are somehow both deeply entrenched in high society, and totally alienated from it, as though it's a party they've walked into on accident, just before the doors were sealed shut, trapping them inside. Her characters are often lonely and out of their depth, usually because they have one type of smarts but not the other. They're book smart but not street savvy, or they know everything about being alone and nothing about how to deal with other people. They like poetry and art and music and know things like who Aeschylus is and what a sheridan chair looks like. They're charming and infuriating at the same time.

There were many points in this book where I wanted to shake and/or slap the main character, who can be almost insufferably mopey and overly philosophical for many dozens of pages at a time. I think the best description of the book that I can give is this: I felt that is was about 200 pages too long, but I still couldn't put it down. Even when I wanted to give up, I couldn't. It was good, and if it was just a little bit tighter and cleaner, it would have been great.

Cinder
By Marissa Meyer

Yup, this is one of those teenage-girl-in-a-dystopia books. I will admit that I absolutely and 100% only bought this book because of the cover. It's a re-telling of Cinderella in the future, in China ("New Beijing"), and the main character is a cyborg. Done. Sold. Sign me up.

I folded over the corner of the page where I figured out how the book was going to end. It was page 41. STILL, this is a decent milkshake book. The premise is pretty original even if the plot isn't, but you know that going in BECAUSE LOOK AT THE COVER. (There are no zombies or vampires in the entire book! What?)  You know that since it's a fairy tale there's going to be a prince and an evil step mother; and since it's teen fantasy, there's going to be a battle to save the world that hinges entirely on the success of one quirky teenage girl who doesn't know she's attractive (even though she obviously is). Basically, if your expectations are reasonably tempered, you won't be disappointed. Read it in the bathtub or on an airplane.