Dark Places

So here's Gillian Flynn's second novel - her third being Gone Girl, which I read and liked a lot six months ago. There are plenty of similarities between this book and that one. Both are murder mysteries, both take place in Flynn's native Missouri, both rely heavily on alternating points of view and unreliable narrators in order to pull off big twists, and both feature some pretty gruesome killings. But as dark and deranged as Gone Girl was, Dark Places was just so much bleaker.

The story revolves around a woman whose mother and two sisters were brutally murdered one night when she was nine years old. Her older brother is found guilty of the crime and sentenced to life without parole. Twenty-four years later, the girl - technically a full-grown woman, but understandably carrying all sorts of emotional baggage - lives with terrible depression, no friends, and no source of income. For twenty-four years, she's been living off of a generous pile of donations from all over the country, but the book begins with that particular well drying out. Forced to make her own money, she quickly finds a group of people whose shared hobby is solving decades-old murder mysteries. They're collectively convinced that her brother is innocent, and they'd love for her to reconnect with him and recant her testimony. She's happy to do this for a lofty price - and happy to reconnect with plenty of other suspects in the case for more of the same.

What follows, of course, is a lengthy ordeal in which our sad, sad heroine begins to reexamine her own understanding of her family's tragedy. Every other chapter flashes back to the day of the murders and is told from either her mother's or brother's viewpoint, and collectively the three narratives all end up revealing the full story. In my mind, the ending was a bit of a cheap trick, but I can't complain; the book was enticing and thrilling throughout, even though I'm not sure the author earned the particular conclusion she arrived at, which was kind of disappointing since she absolutely did so in Gone Girl. I mean, all in all, Gone Girl was a much better book.

But again, man, Dark Places was so much darker. The unhappiness in Gone Girl stems from an unhappy marriage. The unhappiness in Dark Places stems from a triple homicide. The main characters in Gone Girl are disappointed when their financial situation forces them to "trade down" from New York to suburban Missouri. The characters in Dark Places are deeply, deeply impoverished. Gone Girl takes place in McMansions and coffee shops and penthouses and conference halls. Dark Places takes place in sober living homes and prisons and strip clubs and run-down farms. Gone Girl is a murder mystery about rich and pretty people. Dark Places features elements of drug abuse, Satanic worship, and pedophilia.

Lastly, a film adaptation is due out in just a couple of weeks, starring Charlize Theron, Christina Hendricks, and Chloe Grace Moretz. Early reviews? Not great! I'll probably see it at some point, all the same.

Stan's Movie Dump: June/July 2015

It's time for another installment of Stan's movie dump! It's summertime, which means I've seen some of the year's biggest blockbusters in theaters and also plenty of last year's most acclaimed movies as I look for things to watch during the big TV hiatus. Anyway, check out this mixed bag.

The Babadook

Hailed by plenty as one of the scariest movies in recent memory, The Babadook is an Australian film about a single mother raising a terribly behaved little shit. She reads him a gruesome scary story one night, and all of a sudden she and her son are both plagued by a nightmarish entity known only as the Babadook. I thought the movie was legitimately terrifying right up until about the halfway point; the final confrontation with the monster was dark and twisted, but also just a little bit boring. Worth a shot if you're into horror flicks, but otherwise it's easily skippable.

Jurassic World

Does it live up to the original 1993 classic? Of course not - and neither did that movie's previous two sequels. Is Jurassic World still an easy low-stakes summertime movie to enjoy while chowing down on popcorn? Absolutely. It's got all kinds of problems, like virtually every big-budget PG-13 movie from the last twenty years, but most of them are forgivable in the long run or ignorable in the short term. If you want a scientifically plausible monster movie with impeccable character development, I mean, first of all, maybe lower your expectations, but go find something else. This right here is a barrel of squeaky clean dinosaur fun and plenty of explosions - nothing more, and nothing less.

American Sniper

Good God, the hype around this one! And the backlash! And the partisan back-and-forth! Let me get this out of the way - I think this movie kind of sucked, and it has nothing to do with my political compass or the overblown expectations. It was just a slow and pretty boring movie - which would have been fine, except that this one also didn't try for much thematic depth or atmosphere or anything. This was just a too-long and too-simple story about a guy who served his country and suffered for it. The Hurt Locker was better. Zero Dark Thirty was better. Even Jarhead was better. Bradley Cooper was pretty great, though.

Fury

Just when you think you've seen every type of World War II movie, something like Fury comes along and reminds you that you haven't. This one just felt dark and cold and angry. It was gritty and it felt uncompromised, which I appreciated, but it also dragged on a bit too long and ended with one of the least realistic firefights I've seen in any movie ostensibly rooted in historical reality. Decent, but not great.

Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs

Trevor threw this on during an evening lull on our big friends Cape Cod getaway weekend, and wouldn't you know it, despite some initial groans we all made it all the way through. I thought it was a cute movie. Easy, silly, funny. Short, above all else, really. I just may see the sequel on my own accord one day!

Nightcrawler

This was awesome. Jake Gyllenhaal stars as a nightcrawler - a freelance video footage collector who trolls the streets of LA looking for accidents and robberies and tragedies so he can point his camera at them for a few minutes and then sell the footage to the highest bidding news station. It shouldn't be much of a spoiler to say that he eventually gets in way over his head and begins to affect the news rather than just recording it - where else would this kind of movie go? - but Gyllenhaal's easygoing and completely steady performance is absolutely amazing. Nightcrawler is easily one of the best movies I saw all year and it reminded me a great deal of 2011's excellent LA noir caper, Drive.

Europa Report

At this point, low-budget found footage movies are a dime a dozen. But Europa Report was, I promise you, a good low-budget found footage movie. A crew of six astronauts heads for Europa, the ice moon of Jupiter, to do all kinds of science experiments, and chiefly to find out if life exists in its liquid oceans. While you can probably surmise how that goes for them based on the fact that this is a found footage movie, I stand by my assertion that this is worth seeing for yourself. It's only 90 minutes long and it's available on Netflix.

Ant-Man

I liked Ant-Man more than I expected to like it, and more than I've liked any Marvel movie since The Avengers a few years ago. It was refreshingly (and appropriately) small in scale, and I appreciated how low the stakes were in this particular narrative. Paul Rudd was cast more or less perfectly here, like the older and more smart-alecky Chris Pratt that he is. And hey, Evangeline Lilly! This is literally the first time I've seen or heard of her since Lost ended five years ago. Glad to see she can still find work. But no, really, this was fun.

And just like that, there are only five months left in the year. I'm at 48 movies. Can I ramp things up and hit 100 by the end of 2015? Ha! Fat chance.

Yoshi's New Island

This was, all things considered, one of the most disappointing games I've beaten in the Back-Blogged era. It's hard to explain why. It wasn't a bad game on any technical level, nor did it take up much of my time, clocking in at less than six hours long. I didn't even pay any real money for it. (Thanks, Club Nintendo, and rest in peace.)

No, this game wasn't broken or relentlessly difficult or glitch-prone or anything like that. It was just so profoundly lazy. And boring. At no point in the six hours I spent on this game did I ever feel challenged or impressed in any way. I ended the game with 91 lives and lost maybe ten over the course of the game. It was just this strange reboot of a Super Nintendo classic that nobody ever asked for.

In all seriousness, aside from an overused giant egg mechanic, this game added no new gameplay whatsoever from 1995's Super Mario World 2: Yoshi's Island. It had no charm and it didn't even look prettier. It was somehow much shorter. Worst of all, it took a big old shit directly on its predecessor's happy ending. The 1995 game ends with Baby Mario and Baby Luigi being safely delivered to their parents thanks to the tireless work of eight different Yoshis. As this game begins, it turns out that the stork fucked up and delivered them to the wrong house. And then on the stork's way to the real house, the babies are stolen once again by Kamek, and once again it's up to eight different Yoshis to save the day. (Are these the same eight Yoshis? You'd think so, but then, this is all taking place on a new island. Fuck it. Nintendo doesn't care. Why do you?)

I've gotten this far into my post without even mentioning Yoshi's Island DS, a 2006 title that served as a spin-off of sorts to the first game. It wasn't nearly as good as that first game, but at least it tried a whole bunch of new things instead of stripping down the 1995 game and polishing up the graphics a little bit. The 2006 DS game introduced Baby Peach and Baby Donkey Kong and Baby Wario. It utilized both screens on the DS. It wasn't a great game by any stretch, but at least it was something new and different. This 2013 3DS game didn't make any effort whatsoever to be anything new whatsoever. Its very existence was such a shamelessly no-risk move by Nintendo.

Almost every time I beat a video game, something stirs somewhere in my emotional recesses. Satisfaction, usually. Relief, sometimes. Sadness, rarely. But Yoshi's New Island didn't make me feel anything other than tired. My favorite memory from the game was the moment I learned that there were six worlds and not eight. I gave the game an honest chance at first, and it was stale and repetitious by the third of its forty-eight levels. By the second or third time I picked the game up, I just kind of felt like, "Am I done yet? Can I be done yet?" And even while I was fighting Baby Bowser - and then later regular Bowser, from a time warp, apropos of nothing whatsoever - I just kept thinking, "Can I be done yet? Will this be over please?" One of the most bittersweet things about living a very long and very happy life is that sometimes, by the end, the person is just tired, and just ready. Not depressed or suicidal, but completely melancholy. At peace. Simply no longer interested in any aspect of living. And I bring this up because Yoshi's New Island kind of made me feel that way about video games. "Are we done here? Is this really all there is?" What a soul-crushing disappointment.

Look at the Birdie

It’s time to take a break from my recently adopted five-paragraph format.

This is the third straight summer in which I’ve read a Kurt Vonnegut short story compilation. Like While Mortals Sleep - which I wasn’t big on - Look at the Birdie contains around 250 pages of previously unpublished material. But Look at the Birdie had the benefit of coming out in 2009, two years before While Mortals Sleep, and as a result it’s noticeably better. This makes sense; the well of unpublished Vonnegut short stories only runs so deep, and every time you take a dozen or more acceptable ones it dries up a little more. After two or three collections of twenty stories each, you’re left with a situation where stories that didn’t crack the top fifty at the time of Vonnegut’s death are now some of your best available options.

Anyway, I mostly enjoyed Look at the Birdie, and since there were only fourteen stories in this one, I think I can touch on each one of them.

“Confido”

A man invents an earpiece that amplifies internal thoughts into actual voices, audible only to the people wearing the earpiece. He thinks he’ll strike it rich - who, after all, doesn’t want a little voice reassuring them that every opinion they have is correct? It goes about as well as you’d expect, amplifying dark thoughts and generally causing jealousy, paranoia, and depression - a classic Vonnegut take on the nature of man, right down to a sort-of optimistic ending.

“F U B A R”

There wasn’t much to this one. A man with an isolated and terrible office job gets a young and lively assistant assigned to him, and everything immediately changes for the better. No twist, no punchline. A happy little story, but completely inconsequential.

“Shout About It from the Housetops”

One thing Vonnegut has always done very well with his whackier characters is toe the line between believable quirkiness and completely absurd insanity. I liked this story about a couple with a rocky marriage and the traveling salesman who saves it, and the highlight for me was the way the wife was introduced: violently pumping water out of a well in the backyard and screaming at the top of her lungs.

“Ed Luby’s Key Club”

By far the longest story in the collection, this one clocks in at 52 pages and is broken into two parts. I loved it. It starts when a modest man takes his wife out for an anniversary dinner and ends after a couple of murders, a jailbreak, and a statewide manhunt. It was gripping and tense in ways that Vonnegut has never really been before and I absolutely loved it. It also ends in a completely satisfying manner, which is no small feat.

“A Song for Selma”

This one featured a recurring Vonnegut short fiction character: George Helmholtz, high school music teacher. I’ve never really enjoyed that particular anthology, but this one was alright. One of George’s most promising students has dropped out of his music class unexpectedly, while another completely oafish student is suddenly showing great interest in the class. The explanation, once revealed, is pretty funny and satisfying, and the story manages to find a nice ending.

“Hall of Mirrors”

I loved this one. Two detectives visit an eccentric old hypnotist on a missing person investigation. The hypnotist slowly pulls them under his control in order to escape from the pickle he’s in. Or does he? The policemen seem to think they’re duping the hypnotist into believing they’re under his control in order to draw a confession from him. After a few layers of “gotcha!” play out, there’s a well-earned concluding twist.

“The Nice Little People”

A man discovers six quarter-inch-sized people while waiting for his wife to come home from work on their anniversary. He plays around with them for a little while, but the climax of the story has nothing to do with the little people whatsoever, and instead deals entirely with the man’s marriage.

“Hello, Red”

This was the first true dud in the collection for me. A soldier - or maybe a sailor? - returns from spending nearly a decade overseas only to find that the woman he loved has moved on to another man. There was just nothing profound or entirely interesting here for me, even if the idea was fruitfully melancholy.

“Little Drops of Water”

A second straight stinker, unfortunately, and this one’s got even less to say. A man ill-suited for relationships gets married, I think, but if he does it doesn’t happen until the end. Honestly, this and “Hello, Red” sort of blur together for me. I remember nothing about this one with any level of certainty.

“The Petrified Ants”

Two Russian ant scientists discover that prehistoric ants were actually incredibly complex creatures who built great societies with houses and wheels and literature. And then some ants evolved to have giant pincers, and in short time they killed all of the other ants, and today all ants are just savage and mindless and slavish to a central power. This was an enjoyable but fairly flat and blatant metaphor for the arms race, and it appropriately ends with the two scientists doing time in a Siberian labor camp.

“The Honor of a Newsboy”

A murder investigation hinges on whether or not a newsboy delivered the newspaper to a prime suspect on Wednesday night. The newsboy swears he did; the suspect swears he didn’t. And for the investigator, defending the honor of a ten-year-old kid suddenly becomes more important than the issue of whether or not the suspect committed the murder. An enjoyable but largely forgettable tale.

“Look at the Birdie”

Very unsettling, and also the only tale in the collection told from a first-person perspective. The narrator meets a hitman at a bar, and the hitman takes his picture. The implications are dark as hell, and it's kind of weird to me that the publisher chose to use this story to represent the collection as a whole. I'd have gone with "Hall of Mirrors" personally, but what do I know?

“King and Queen of the Universe”

Two rich and naive teenagers spend a night seeing how shitty life can be for those without money or privilege, and they end up much better off for it. It would have been easy to make the rich kids terrible little brats, but Vonnegut instead manages to find all kinds of sympathy in their growth arcs.

“The Good Explainer”

The collection ends on a real gut punch, and while I won't spoil it, I'll say that it involves a man and woman at a fertility clinic and a secret burden from years gone by.

All in all, a great collection, and with its completion I've got just one Vonnegut book left in the backlog - his famous 1968 collection of short stories called Welcome to the Monkey House.

The Killer Angels

1. This was probably the oldest book in my backlog. It's a very lightly fictionalized account of the Battle of Gettysburg, written by Michael Shaara in 1974. It's beloved by plenty of people and it won the Pulitzer Prize. I acquired it either early in high school or late in middle school from my father, who said it was one of his own favorite books. It took me more than ten years to get around to reading it (sorry, Dad!) because I've never been much of a Civil War buff. I like history and I'm fascinated by military tactics and strategies and the like, but I've just never been that interested in the Civil War. But I've been meaning to get around to it for a while now, and with all the rekindled nationwide debate about the confederate flag and the true reason for secession, why not now?

2. The Battle of Gettysburg took place across three days, and The Killer Angels is appropriately divided into three parts. Each part is divided into five to seven chapters told from alternating viewpoints, not unlike the way George R. R. Martin writes his Song of Ice and Fire series. Interestingly, the book spends more time on the confederate side than the union side - and in particular on Robert E. Lee and his second-in-command, James Longstreet. Most of the union chapters were told form the perspective of Joshua Chamberlain, merely a colonel. Plenty of other historical figures appear, as they did in the true battle: J.E.B. Stuart, Abner Doubleday, Pickett, Pettigrew, Armistead, Meade, Custer. It's no wonder history buffs love Gettysburg.

3. The book contained about twenty different maps that showed the evolving situation on the battlefield. These were incredibly useful. I had always known the basics of Gettysburg - three days, highest casualty count of any battle ever on American soil, Pickett's Charge, turning point in the war - but the maps really helped me understand why the different sides acted and reacted the way they did. Even more helpful for my understanding of the battle was seeing it from the perspective of the men responsible for planning it. So kudos to Shaara for distilling such a sprawling and complicated battle down into an easily digestible history lesson of sorts.

4. Having said that, the book was at its best when it took a break from the battles and the tactics; between the moments of carnage and bloodshed, the characters would pontificate on the philosophical and moral differences that made men take up arms. Some union troops come across a runaway slave at one point, and are reminded that this is why the confederates are fighting - to preserve the institution of slavery. At the same time, an English soldier who's just hanging out with Lee and Longstreet takes note of how distinctly European the South seems to be, with its adherence to traditions and its overwhelming uniformity (everyone is white, Anglo-Saxon, and protestant). He contrasts this to the North - full of diversity and new social practices and urban boom. Shaara himself points out that the army fighting to preserve federal unity was itself quite disparate and jumbled, while the army fighting for states' independence was extraordinarily unified and cohesive. Ironic!

5. I probably could have learned as much or more about the Battle of Gettysburg by spending twenty solid minutes on Wikipedia. (In fact, I did.) But the way the characters were fleshed out by Shaara - likely fictionalized to some extent, I'm sure - adds context to why the battle unfolded the way it did. All in all this was a very interesting read, but I'd stop short of blindly recommending this to everyone. Shaara more or less drops the reader into the mid-nineteenth century without explaining any of the political context and just tells the story of the Battle of Gettysburg. If richly detailed historical semi-fiction is your bag, then by all means, give this one your time. It was only 360 pages or so.

Little Children

1. Little Children is the fourth novel from Tom Perrotta and the third one I've posted on the blog(*). Everything I've read of his so far has featured an array of principle characters interacting in a distinct setting, and this book was no exception.

(*) I've previously read both Election and The Leftovers.

2. The book takes place in a fictional Massachusetts suburb at the turn of the millennium. There's an ensemble of characters here all overwhelmed by varying levels of suburban ennui. They've all got bad marriages and more than a few regrets. One is a convicted child predator, and he's actually one of the more sympathetic characters in the story. Everyone is flawed here and no one is a hero.

3. In fact, the book's very title is a bit deceptive. Early on, the story focuses on various parents in the town and how exhausted they are trying to keep up with their toddlers. But it's these adults themselves who spend the bulk of the book acting like little children, what with all of their fights and flirtatious crushes and bullying. Hell, the book ends with a physical confrontation on a playground and an accident in a skate park. The oldest major character makes what's arguably the least defensible and most immature decision in the novel. The actual children are barely seen or heard from once the book hits its second of four parts. Indeed, the little children in Little Children are all of the terrible adults.

4. The book takes place in the summer of 2001, and I kept waiting for the 9/11 shoe to drop. It just seemed like a natural conclusion for a book about overzealous neighborhood watchmen and summer trysts. Like, even if the book had just ended with a reference to 9/11 occurring two weeks later, that would have lent extra thematic depth to the story for me - commentary, perhaps, on what an idyllic time it was to be an American, blissfully ignorant of any real problems in the world. Alas, no 9/11 reference ever came, which makes me wonder why Perrotta set the story in the summer of 2001. It struck me as an intentional decision since the book wasn't published until 2004.

5. Ultimately, I enjoyed this. It was an absurdly light and quick read, perfect for summer vacation. All three Perrotta novels I've read now have left me feeling similarly satisfied, even if none of them have truly amazed me. He's not quite profound, but he's an enjoyable author and I wouldn't hesitate to dig deeper into this particular bibliography. This book was adapted into a movie at one point, and I bet I'll circle back around to check that out at some point. It's got Kate Winslet, after all, and when has she been any less than stellar?