I received a rejection from Hayden’s Ferry Review, a form, but please send more rejection for an essay I wrote about my first year as a college professor. Alas. I’m not going to dwell on this because we have a LOT to talk about.

I finished all three books in the Hunger Games trilogy, and then I read them twice more as a whole, and have been reading from the 2nd and 3rd books repeatedly over the past couple days. Best. Books. Ever. Team Peeta 4 LYF! If you don’t like Peeta, I’m sorry for you, I just am, because maybe your soul is damaged.

I loved this series and it’s one of the few cultural products SO many people LOVE where I FINALLY get the “fuss.” These are the literary equivalent of uncut cocaine from the heart of wherever the purest cocaine is made. The high of reading this trilogy is pure, unadulterated. It is so, so good. I basically want to swallow these books so I can keep them inside me forever. After I write this, I’m going to go read them again.

These books have several things going for them. I will try not to spoil anything for the first time in the history of this blog because these books are basically sacred texts. Respect.

First, they tell an interesting story that is compelling and fairly consistent across all three books. And the titles! So good! What an arc.

The society we know collapsed and a new society rose out of the ashes, divided into districts that have different responsibilities (farming, fishing, coal production, weapons, etc). Each year, the capital holds the Hunger Games to remind humanity of their failings and two tributes from each district (twelve in all), one boy and one girl under the age of eighteen, are sent to the games. Only one will survive. It’s a dark but endlessly interesting premise. This book also has interesting characters. The heroine, Katniss, is a sixteen year old and she is written like a sixteen year old. Yes, at times, she is wise and strong beyond her years, but that wisdom and strength is written believably given the circumstances Katniss faces in the books. This book also has really strong secondary characters like Peeta, the boy who loves Katniss to the end of time, and her best friend Gale. There is a love triangle between the three that’s at times a bit silly but largely adorable. The tributes each have mentors who help prepare them for the games, men and women who were once victors. Katniss’s mentor is Haymitch, an alcoholic who is clearly trying to deal with dark demons. There are other awesome secondary characters like Cinna. I love everything about these books. They’re also well written for popular fiction. I really can’t hate on the writing at all though, in the second and third books, some of the melodrama was a bit much. Like, okay, we get it, the girl is going through some things.

And Katniss. She is proud and strong and impetuous and immature and mature and unsure of herself and eminently confident in herself and I love the various contradictions as well as her innate goodness and fierceness. I never wanted to stop reading these books. I am so ready for the movie now. Are the other two books going to be made into movies? Could Hollywood hurry with that, plz?

I really just don’t care for Gale at all. I don’t know why but I basically hate his face.

I made you a venn diagram about Peeta, my main man. When he turns eighteen, it is on.

Yeah. Peeta. That’s what’s up.

I thought the second and third books were as strong as the first. I loved the ending which was complex but satisfying.

I’m fascinated by the naked violence and horror in these books which is fairly mild in the first book, but pretty intense in the second and third books. I’m fascinated because the book is so prude about sex. The Hunger Games trilogy reminds me that our culture is far more comfortable with violence than sex. Children murdering each other for sport? No problem. Teenage sex, NO WAY! Now, I know these are teenagers but they spend an excessive amount of time kissing, cuddling and JUST SLEEPING TOGETHER OKAY NOTHING ELSE HAPPENED!!!, to the point where I invented a drinking game. They were kissing because the writer wouldn’t let them bone. And look, if death is imminent and you’ve got a bunch of teenagers who are hot and physically fit hanging around each other, are you seriously telling me they aren’t having any sex? Please.

This also got me thinking about my novel. There is nothing in my novel that is darker or more violent than what takes place in these books. The violence just happens to be sexual in nature so somehow that is like… a thing. I have more thoughts on this but they’re still percolating.

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Have I seen movies?

Yes.

I did see Dragon Tattoo but need to see it again before we talk about it. Hang tight for that. I have mixed feelings about the movie but the opening credits are fucking unreal and on the whole, the movie is quite good minus the irresponsible depictions of sexual violence, the inherent misogyny of the story, etc. The casting is… mostly perfection though I don’t know that Daniel Craig was… ideal. Also, Robin Wright can rock a Swedish accent like nobody’s business. I give Buttercup mad props.

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On the drive to my parents, I watched Abduction, a “movie” that could charitably be described as “should have gone straight to video in the Walmart $5 DVD bin.”  The first problem with this movie is that it stars Teen Wolf, Taylor Lautner who, as we have discussed at length, cannot act, and is particularly unattractive. His looks are not his fault. Much of the problem involves the bones of his face and that’s genetic so his parents are to blame. At least in the Twilight movies, he occasionally removes his shirt and runs through the woods warmly bare-chested with his wolf heat and reminds us why we tolerate his presence on the screen. He does not reveal much of his physical charm in Abduction, save for a brief scene at the beginning of the movie that is so fleeting you don’t have enough time to really imagine doing things to his abdominal situation. It’s a crying shame.

When the movie opens, in a scene straight ouf of Death Proof, Teen Wolf is inexplicably sitting on the hood of a truck screeching like he’s having fun, urging his friend, who is driving to go faster, faster, faster. He lives on the edge, you see. He is a risk taker. They pull up to a party, you know, a typical movie teenage party, young pretty people milling about on the lawn, and Teen Wolf is ejected from the hood of the car onto the lawn. He and his two friends seem to be rather unpopular and unable to communicate effectively. They simply take a seat at a table in the middle of the party, and drink beer and talk nonsensically in a scene so pointless it really makes you think that crack must be freely available on the streets of Hollywood. Only a healthy crack addiction can explain why this movie exists.

At the end of the party, and really, we’ve seen this sad high school party a million times, only better, Teen Wolf gets into a scuffle with some guy and it’s certainly over a girl. Who knows what her name is? Who cares? This is a movie where there are like three recognizable people and they spend very little time on screen. The girl drags her boyfriend away and then we cut to the morning when a shirtless Teen Wolf is passed out on the lawn of the girl who threw the party. She tells him to get moving before her parents show up and he starts helping pick up trash until his dad picks him up.

Back at his house, Teen Wolf and his dad start sparring by their pool. There is no subtlety in the foreshadowing. The dad basically says, if you’re man enough to drink, you’re man enough to fight and as they spar, he randomly shouts idiotic motivationally masculine bullshit. The mother, the exquisite Maria Bello, stands by the window, watching her men fight, thinking, “I was in History of Violence, for fuck’s sake.” Then she breaks them up.

Stupid things happen. Teen Wolf goes to therapy and talks about some dream he keeps having and how out of place he feels in his life. Foreshadowing. HIs therapist is… please sit down for this, Sigourney Weaver. She is totally just collecting a paycheck here in that she recites her lines at the appropriate times but does so without even feigning a performance of any kind. It’s all good. Roles are scarce for women over 22.

Teen Wolf and the girl are paired together to work on a project for sociology class (???) so she comes over to his bedroom to “work.” We’re never quite sure what their topic is or the purpose of their paper but they do a lot of research on missing children. It’s at this point that I began laughing from deep in my soul because it was so absurd and I could totally see how the writer(s) of this movie tried to write their way out of the ridiculousness of desperately needing to make a movie, any movie, to capitalize on the fame of Taylor Lautner. While doing their “research” the girl (who is execrable in her role)  finds a website that shows how kids might look x number of years from the day they disappeared. Convenient. She and Teen Wolf start looking through the pictures saying that the updated images look like hybrids of famous people like Lady GaGa and Spiderman. Whatever, I can’t remember the pairings but they were fucking stupid. Suddenly, they look at a picture and it looks exactly like Teen Wolf! OMG!

His Spidey sense is tingling. All of a sudden, he starts having this fucking existential crisis. There’s a chat function on the website and he starts talking to someone pretending to be “Mallory,” but really it’s a bad guy with great computer equipment. Teen Wolf, though rather dim, manages to sense that they’re watching him through the camera on the APPLE COMPUTER OH HAI PRODUKT PLACEMENT so he shuts the computer and goes somewhere to brood. The next day or so, he is unwilling to let this go. He takes his sadly assembled evidence to the girl and explains how he just knows he’s the missing kid. Later, he confronts his mother who tearfully explains that yes, he is her son even if she isn’t his mother. He’s so confused! Poor wolf boy! He calls the girl and smugly informs her that he was right and she’s like, NO WAY, and he’s all WAY and she says, I AM COMING RIGHT OVER. As if she could do anything other than blow him.

Downstairs, there’s a knock on the door. Two authoritative looking fellows are at the door, looking for Teen Wolf. Maria Bello says he’s not around, etc. There’s a bit of gunfightery and fighting. Turns out, she’s kick ass but she dies. The father, who has been working in the garage, hears the scuffling, stumbles upon his dead wife, springs into action and starts getting in on the fight. Taylor comes downstairs and sees all hell, broken completely loose, and his father says, “Dude, get out of here,” so Teen Wolf gets on his motorcycle and speeds away. Suddenly, he remembers that his girl is waiting for him so he goes back to get her. One of the bad guys says there’s a bomb in the oven. Teen Wolf, wanting to be thorough, checks to see if he’s telling the truth. HE IS DUH! They run out of the house and into the pool as the house explodes.

The girl gets a tiny little cut on her arm but proceeds to act like she has a gangrenous limb and then totally underplays the moment by saying, “It hurts.” Teen Wolf, ever the hero, takes the girl to the hospital on his motorcycle. While she’s getting fixed up, he calls 911 only the CIA answers and Alfred Molina tells Teen Wolf two agents are coming to get him. The kid’s Spidey sense tingles again and he thinks, “Fuck this,” so he grabs the girl and is trying to find a way out of the hospital when suddenly, his therapist, Sigourney, RIPLEY, shows up, with a bouquet of balloons that she uses LOLOLOL as camoflauge to get them out of the hospital.

As they speed away, she starts talking really fast but saying nothing at all. The best line she offers basically goes, “You’ve known something was different about you for years. You just didn’t know what questions to ask.” She leaves him writhing in confusion, then tells him that in 15 seconds, he’s going to have to jump out of the speeding car, and down a ravine. She gives him an address and the names of the only two people he can trust, one of whom is the father he has never met, some guy named Martin.  She also says the only sane thing said in the movie–ditch the girl but no, Teen Wolf has to be a hero so they jump out of the car and head straight into a mind numbing hour of nonsense.

Blah blah blah chase shoot information dastardly cell phone stupidity sniper hamburger villain reveal blah blah blah Hollywood hates you.

At the end of the movie there’s a show down and for like the fifteenth time this year, a major sporting event is used as cover for shit to go down. We saw this in Drive and The Next Three Days among other movies. This plot device is officially tired. I won’t bore you with the end of the movie. It’s just ridiculous. I’m ashamed I watched this movie (maybe twice even) and spent a lot of time thinking about it.

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I also saw Warrior. If you like the sound of man flesh beating sweatily against man flesh, this is totally the movie for you. I was gleeful. I could not get enough of this movie, especially the end with all the fight scenes. I think those ultimate fighter shorts are so sexy. Tom Hardy’s neck is massive and bulging it is not to be believed. He deserves kudos for whatever he did to make his neck like that. The strangest, most enjoyable part of this movie is that they set it up to seem like it is based on a true story but it’s totally not. I spent like an hour trying to Wikipedia the characters in the movie before I realized, DUMBASS IT IS A MOViE.

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Young Adult is as good as the critics say if not better. I am impressed that Diablo Cody has such range. I have yet to see a project she’s involved with I don’t enjoy. What I loved most about Young Adult is that there is no character arc. Mavis doesn’t really learn anything. There is a moment when she is on the cusp of revelation but she pulls away from it and chooses to stay on the path of her deeply uncomfortable downward spiral. Charlize Theron really brings it to this movie and nearly every scene is so uncomfortable you will cringe. I spent a good portion of the movie, which I saw yesterday with my cousin, watching through my fingers, gasping, and holding my breath. So did my cousin. From one moment to the next I had no idea how much worse it could get for Mavis, but worse it did get. She was completely lacking in virtue and I love that. Sometimes people are terrible and really flawed and they don’t get better. They don’t learn the moral of the story or they don’t give a damn about the moral of the story. Also, Patton Oswalt was just wonderful. He consistently impresses me with his movie roles. Young Adult is a movie that speaks to the importance of good acting, good direction, good production, and most importantly an excellent script. I hope this movie gets some award recognition in coming months. It will be richly deserved.

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Tom Cruise’s hair is doing very well these days. It is richly feathered, lustrous even, and of a nice length. I know this because I saw Mission Impossible 99: Ghost Protocol.  Cruise is such a curious little man. I find him most amusing when he’s in a star vehicle he is involved with at every level because these movies are such fine showcases for his vanity. It’s always great when a major movie star is open about how much he’d like his ego indulged.

Let’s take a look at Tom’s hair throughout the movie. In this first image, he has just escaped trouble but the front part of his hair is still nicely feathered and the hair over his left ear is a bit insouciant. Bravo, hair person. Bravo.

Tom is also not afraid to apply product and use a comb for special occasions. Look how his hair is angled with just a little body and enough gel to hold that shit in place debonairly. Exquisite. Again, are there hair Oscars? There should be.

Sometimes, though, Tom wants to protect his hair. He suggests a hoodie for such occasions. And still, you can see just enough bang to remind you that his hair is glorious.

Real talk though? Hail Xenu. This motherfucker does not age.

When this movie, which was enjoyable in the way stupid glossy explosion-y movies are enjoyable, opens, the gorgeous asshole from Lost, sexy ass Sawyer, is doing some spy stuff involving an exchange. As he makes his way down an alley with his briefcase, he is shot by a gamine young woman who looks French because she has bangs and that stunning French lady who drinks wine without staining her teeth look about her.

Meanwhile, Tom is hanging out in a Hungarian gulag, just chilling, throwing a rock against a wall at just the right angle and velocity such that the rock comes back to him. We don’t see his face but we do see his pale, delicately chiseled little arm and at this point, we’d know that arm anywhere, wouldn’t we? In some underground tunnel, his team is doing high tech spy super secret agent things and engaging in witty banter. Long story short, they break Tom out of the jail with one of the prisoners, an informant. The team, which is comprised of Simon Pegg (always funny) and Paula Patton (gorgeous, but goddamn, the woman cannot act), is then dispatched with Tom and his hair to Moscow. They have to break in to the Kremlin.

It’s so delightful when these movies rely on the silliness from previous installments. Tom dresses up (and my does he love to play dress up) as a Russian military person as does Simon Pegg and they use gadgetry and break into the Kremlin, OF COURSE, only to find that another criminal is there too. Zounds! As they escape the Kremlin, it blows up. OF COURSE!

Even though the Cold War is over, it is not really over. The IMF is disbanded and Tom and his little team are in trouble. Tom meets up with the head honcho and Jeremy Renner, an analyst, and they drive through some city and Tom learns about how he and his team are all that is left of the IMF. Tom gets a new mission, to go to Dubai and do something I can hardly remember because it’s just so silly. It involves nuclear weapons because that’s all these movies can think of as a credible global threat that requires drastic measures immediately. Conveniently enough, there’s also a train car filled with all the gadgetry and weaponry Tom will need to save the day. The head honcho is shot but Tom and Jeremy get away. They reconvene with Simon and Paula in the ultra modern, luxurious train car. They are TOTALLY going to Dubai for a little spy vacay. Banter, banter, gather weapons, banter.

Movie rule: any time a movie has scenes in the Middle East, and especially Dubai or Abu Dhabi you will see GENERIC SOUK SCENE where there’s some kind of fucking ancient bazaar in the middle of some of the most modern places in the world. Also, there will be dust because it’s the desert and nothing reminds us of the desert like dust. Got it? Good. There’s a souk in Dubai.

The team gathers at a gorgeous, gleaming tower that rises above the skyline of Dubai. They formulate a plan to get some codes. They start to make those fake face masks they seem to use in every Mission Impossible movie, or at least that last travesty only the machine breaks HA HA TWIST OKAY? Tom and his hair have to improvise.

Now, this is a little known fact but it is written into Tom’s contracts that he must be able to engage in mountain climbing whenever he acts in a Mission Impossible movie. As there are no mountains in downtown Dubai, Tom totally does the next best thing–mountain climb up a glass tower from like the 1 millionth floor to the 2 millionth floor, using magic sticky gloves. Swear to God. Before he can climb, though, they have to cut out the glass of the window, and defy physics when the wind doesn’t automatically suck all the people and contents of the room out. Tom changes into his climbing uniform–SPANDEX BABY! Then Tom daintily steps out onto a ledge and sticks himself to the building to begin his climb, while also displaying his little arm muscles.

PROOF THAT I SPEAK THE TRUTH:

They try to make this exceedingly drawn out scene dramatic by having the gloves malfunction, etc. He reaches his destination, then returns to the hotel room with whatever he was looking for. I’ll be honest. I mentally glossed over a great deal of this movie because it was a. long and b. dumb.

Paula Patton, hell bent on revenge because the hot French assassin with bangs killed her man sexy ass Sawyer, pretends to be the assassin and she meets with an arms dealer while Tom and Jeremy meet with the French assassin to buy information with diamonds. It’s all very convoluted. Things go awry. In fact, things go awry so often during this movie you can’t help but think, “These are the shittiest spies in the world.” The arms dealer gets away with nuclear codes. Tom goes on one of the more ridiculous chases you will ever see. It starts in cars and ends on foot. See, while Tom was mountain climbing the building (LOL WUT?), he donned a pair of goggles. On his way into the meeting, Jeremy elbows him because the goggles are like draped around his neck. Tom nestles them into his jacket pocket. (At the time, he is wearing a shiny suit that really highlights his ass.)

On the chase, there comes a time when Tom needs to run and his little legs move him at impressive speed. He pumps his arms like he’s in a track meet. He wants a baton in his hand. As he chases the bad guy, a dust storm comes upon them OF COURSE LOL OMFG! Suddenly, Tom remembers he has his goggles so he puts them on and then he’s all, fuck this dust storm. This dust storm is my bitch! He doesn’t catch the bad guy, though. The goggles do not contain magical properties and somehow, Tom does not learn to fly.

Paula Patton and Jeremy fight the French assassin later and eventually kick her out of the window from the 41st story and the assassin flies away like a bird until she doesn’t. Assassin fall go boom. Paula tries to act extra hard but fails.

Sidebar: I was going to write about Paula Patton and her acting after seeing Jumping the Broom because she was so tragic ((dry ass delivery, inability to emote, excessive face acting, no understanding of her body in scenes) but then I felt like, you know, cut the sister a break. She’s just trying to get her hustle on in Hollywood. I even had a moment as I thought about her “acting” in MI: 99 because hell, it’s wonderful for a black woman to have a role in a big budget movie like this. I also think that one of the reasons she’s so bad is that she has so few opportunities to really practice her craft. Still. Wow. The woman is fine as hell but her acting is terrible, black pass or not. (This is also why I did not write about Jumping the Broom which I saw, twice even. There were some great moments but holy hell, there were so many bad moments. We can do better! At some point, we’ll need to talk about the weaves in that movie. Honestly.)

I assembled the range of Patton’s face acting for you:

Back to the movie.

During all this excitement, a Russian cop is hell bent on catching Tom because he is convinced Tom is the devil. He’s probably not alone in that, but within the context of this movie, the cop is largely incorrect and plays the role of the irrationally obsessed and uber focused public servant. It’s a stupid subplot. Another stupid subplot is that Jeremy Renner was on the protection detail for Tom and his wife in Bosnia or something and she was murdered and he feels responsible. We’ll come back to this nonsense.

In the next stop on their world tour, the team goes to Mumbai by way of a sketchy arms dealer who is a friend of the guy Tom broke out of the Russian gulag. While in Mumbai, they take a fancy future car to some rich Indian guy’s party. It’s Paula’s job to serve as bait, of course, because she’s an attractive woman and the only thing an attractive woman can really do in an action movie is serve as bait, make herself vulnerable and always appear sexual. This is a movie rule. Do not try to contradict it unless you are like Angelina Jolie or Lara Croft. Yes, I’m mixing realities there. Anyway. The Indian guy is the game show host from Slumdog Millionaire, Anil Kapoor. He’s creepy and sleazy and starts liking Paula after Tom kisses her and she gets rough with Anil. They go to his room and blah blah blah, she overpowers him and gets whatever she wanted, something involving satellites.

The last real action scene in the movie takes place in one of those futuristic parking garages where the cars are delivered on like, car trays. It’s all very exciting watching a major battle take place in this futuristic scary garage.

One of my bucket list items, by the way, is to visit one of these garages in person and move some cars around. That seems like it will be fun. If you can make that happen, do let me know.

So. Tom and the bad guy fight fight fight, and the fight goes from ludicrous to preposterous to insane. At one point, Tom jumps from one level to another and I totally said, “Wheeee!”

Look:

Right? Right. Whee!

And of course, there’s a nuclear weapon hurtling through the sky toward the United States OMG CRISIS. As always. This also happens in every action movie. Tom saves the day and the rocket falls, dead, into the water. Again, like in every action movie.

The team reconvenes in Seattle or, what I can assure you is the fakest looking Seattle ever. Ving Rhames is there and you think, OH THERE HE IS! They’re at some fish market or something and Tom hands out iPhones and inspirational quotations for the team, sending them on their way.

As an aside, I don’t know that there has ever been a telephone more conducive to the movies than the iPhone 4. It just looks so goddamned good on screen. No matter how terrible the movie, you can trust that the iPhone 4 will look sleek and futuristic and sexy. That’s good design. Also, Apple’s marketing team is working overtime. Their products are in all the movies.

He and Jeremy have a heart to heart where Tom tells him, HA HA MY WIFE IS RLY ALIVE SUCKA! Then Jeremy goes on his way. At the end of the movie, Tom and his lustrous hair are leaning against a pole as his wife, chatting with friends, is about to head into a coffee shop (Seattle, obvi). Just before she enters, she senses his hair, being gently ruffled by the breeze, and turns. They make eye contact and stare at each other with love and closure and that’s… basically it.