This has sort of been done before, of course. But unlike in, say, My Best Friend’s Wedding, Mavis is actually a thoroughly terrible human being. She manipulates everyone around her, has zero compassion, is basically the high school queen of popularity who never figured out that in order to be successful in the adult world you have to at some point give a crap about someone other than yourself. Because Charlize Theron is a fantastic actress, though, she was never a caricature. Awkward as hell to watch, yes. But believable. I appreciate a movie in which the protagonist is unlikeable in every way, but you still can’t help but feel compassion for her.

From a YA perspective (because let’s be honest, why do you think I saw this movie?): I loved that Mavis’s character, Kendall, is exactly as vapid and in love with herself as Mavis is, in a way that perfectly nails that genre of YA. Mavis hasn’t grown up much since high school, and the books she writes are the kind of YA that are in no way about personal growth. (Fortunately this genre seems to be on the wane.) My main objection is the covers, which look like Scholastic reprints of middle grade Boxcar Children novels or something. How about some headless photos of girls in stylish prep school uniforms? Come on, I could design you some covers for this shiz in about 20 minutes.

This was a third-life crisis movie, which is my current favorite topic. I am, in particular, working on a theory that if I read more books written for grown-ups about grown-up lives, I might be able to make a more coherent, mature story of my own life. This movie possibly supports that theory, but I can’t quite decide whether it made me feel better or worse about my life.

Oh wow, this was beautiful. A heartbreaking near-perfect jewel of a book, which handles tough subjects while holding on to 13-year-old boy humor. It deals honestly with some of the toughest questions: why do bad things happen, and how do we deal with them without losing ourselves? Anybody who thinks of middle grade literature as facile or black-and-white should take a look at this book.

It reminded me of David Almond’s Clay and Pete Hautman‘s books: young boys in pain, with believable boy voices, and a touch of supernatural/unreliable narrator.

A friend asked me for suggestions about books that should be made into movies just as I started reading this, and I couldn’t stop thinking of it as a Where the Wild Things Are-esque film. I think it would be gorgeous.

Also reviewed by: Phoebe North, Becky’s Book Reviews, and Wandering Librarians.

ARC acquired by Arianna of Wandering Librarians at ALA

I was prepared to hate it.

Now, I can probably count the number of movies I’ve seen that were made before my birth on two hands. I know, I know, but really, I’m okay with that. So I was pleasantly surprised to find how contemporary this felt. Yes, the recent economic crisis had a lot to do with that, but I also found it genuinely funny in a modern-enough way.

So of course, I have to comment on the few things that did feel like ancient history:

• What’s Jimmy Stewart’s wife doing in the world in which he was never born? “You won’t like it… She’s an old maid. Right about now, she’s closing up the library.” GASP!
• Most of the characters were familiar-looking small-town residents. Sure, their clothes were from the ’40s, but they had cars and phones and jobs that aren’t totally out of place today. And then I saw the Italian families that Jimmy’s savings-and-loan is helping out, and they have goats living in their homes. They’re like Dorothea Lange photographs getting into those trucks. Oh right, that’s who the disenfranchised were in 1946.
• Those rows and rows of nice little houses Jimmy built for the Italian families and their goats? Those are the start of suburban sprawl. I wanted to cheer for Jimmy, but at the same time I couldn’t help thinking that it was the start of so much of what I hate about how America looks now. It was a good reminder for me that the development that caused so many problems later was at the time housing people who might not have been living in such nice places otherwise.

I don’t know that I need to make it annual holiday viewing, but I admit that I enjoyed it tremendously. (I’m sure it didn’t hurt that I saw it on the big screen at the Brattle. Apparently this is an annual tradition.) Thanks for including me, Alison and Gareth!

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E and I agreed: Garden State? Waaay overrated. Zach Braff does “earnest” very well, but he was so earnest (“Dad, how about we just try being who we are?”) that I think I sprained a muscle rolling my eyes.

Also, I am so over the “lonely guy with boring life is saved by adorably quirky girl” genre. (I think I’m the only person I know who wanted to smack Eternal Sunshine of the Pretentious Title upside the head.) Are there any movies that go in the other direction? Where a lonely woman with a boring life is saved by a quirky guy — and the woman is the focus of the movie, the movie isn’t about making fun of what a frigid bitch she is, and both characters are (at least meant to be) charming and not dicks?

We did love some of the visual gags, though — the wallpaper shirt that’s in the trailer, for instance, or the doctor who runs out of room for diplomas on his walls and has to attach one to the ceiling, or the hamster-tube palace that takes up Natalie Portman’s entire house. As E said, “There was a lot of good stuff in that movie, but none of it had anything to do with the movie.”