MOVIE: The Alphabet Killer (2008)

I was bored the other day and in the mood for a lightweight murder mystery sort of thing, so I plopped down on the couch and started flipping through Netflix’s “Watch Now” options on my Roku box until I came across this one.  Though it sounded like a completely standard “cops hunt elusive serial killer” story, I was intrigued by the cast, which included both Tom Noonan AND Bill Moseley.  Since that’s a combination that seems much more suited to a scary horror movie than a murder mystery (those are two creepy-ass mo-fos, if you ask me), it kind of gave me hope this film might be spookier and more entertaining than it sounded.

Right away I had a major beef with the picture, though, and that beef was the casting of Eliza Dushku as a homicide detective.  Setting aside the fact she’s a terrible actress, the more pressing issue for me was this:  Since when do cops get promoted to homicide detectives in their mid-20’s?  But you know what, I said to myself, whatever.  Maybe she was the Doogie Howser of her department, what do I know?  Let’s just suspend that disbelief thing, go along for the ride, and hope that Noonan and Mosely come along soon to save us from the silly.

Dushku stars as Detective Megan Paige and is, as the story opens, the chief investigator in the case of a murdered little girl (incidentally, this movie is loosely based on an actual series of crimes in Rochester, NY in the 1970’s).  The girl’s first and last names both started with the letter “C” and so did the town where her body was found, and Megan soon becomes convinced the three Cs are no mere coincidence.  She begins spending hours and hours in the attic of her house, going over every crime scene photo and file repeatedly until, eventually, she just cracks.  It begins with hallucinations of the ghost of the dead girl and progresses from there very quickly to an attempt at suicide, all while her boyfriend, a fellow detective named Kenneth (Elwes), watches on helplessly.

Cut to two years later and Megan is back on the force after spending many months in treatment for what was eventually diagnosed as schizophrenia.  To avoid a lawsuit, the force agreed to take her back on, though only in limited capacity as a records clerk.  But when another little girl’s murdered body is found — another girl with double initials found dead in a town that starts with the same letter — Kenneth, now her ex-boyfriend and also her boss, reluctantly lets Megan consult on the case, recognizing that she has insights into the original murder none of the other cops share.

(Annnd there’s where I rolled my eyes again, by the way.  Because, really?  You’re going to let the woman on thorazine for schizophrenia interview witnesses and handle evidence?  Good luck in court, fellas!)

BUT ANYWAY,this flick did keep me relatively entertained and it was almost exactly the kind of movie I was in the mood for.  And really, if  they’d cast a better actress in the lead role, it could have been a fairly intriguing examination of the conundrum that comes when the very thing that makes a person excel at their job (the intuition, insights, and focus Megan gains as part of her mental illness) is the same thing that ultimately is their undoing.  Dushku, though, overacts so ridiculously that she made the scenes that would’ve been pivotal to this theme just look silly.   Kind of too bad, because the supporting actors all did a fairly decent job, including Noonan and Moseley, as well as Timothy Hutton as Megan’s support group buddy and Carl Lumbly as her doctor.

It’s not a great movie, obviously.  It’s not even really a good one.  Nevertheless it’s decent, and perhaps most importantly, also FREE.  You could do a lot worse.  Trust me — I do a lot worse on a regular basis.

[Netflix me (including Watch Now!) | Buy me]

Genre:  Mystery
Cast:  Eliza Dushku, Cary Elwes, Tom Noonan, Bill Moseley, Carl Lumbly, Michael Ironside

MOVIE: Zombieland (2009)

I realize this is going to sound weird applied to a film that features as many scenes of zombies snacking on human entrails as Zombieland does, but you know what my first thought was when I left the theater after finally getting my lame butt in to see this movie?  My first thought was, “I’ll be damned if that wasn’t the feel-good movie of the year.”

And it’s true — it’s totally and completely true!

Aside from that, though, I’m not going to tell you anything else about this movie.  Because everything else I could say (about, for example, the “double-tap,” Bill Murray, or Twinkies) is just going to ruin some of the fun of the discovery for you.  And the discovery was at LEAST half the fun of this one for me.  I had no idea most of  that stuff was coming, and I can’t remember the last time I laughed so ridiculously hard.

I will say this much, though:   I’m a little worried about Jesse Eisenberg, because this movie is essentially just Adventureland all over again, except with zombies and shotguns.

I’m also a little worried about Abigail Breslin, because this movie is essentially just Signs all over again, except with more shotguns and fewer anti-Semites (I assume).

And I’m definitely a little worried about Woody Harrelson, because this movie was essentially just Natural Born Killers all over again, except with more. . . less. . . I don’t know — something or other.

Bill Murray, on the other hand, is going to be juuuuuust fine.

So, hey!  Go see this movie, even if you are squeamish and you usually hate watching dead humans munch on other dead humans (note to my gore-hating husband:  sorry about that, sweetie).  When it’s over, you’ll be amazed at how good you feel about yourself and the world in general.  Because you know what?  Bring on the zombie invasion, just bring it on — bring it.  Now that I know the rules, I have no doubt I’m going to be JUST FINE (as long as I remember to buckle my seat belt and keep an eye out for falling pianos.  Also, thanks to a friend who recently bought me a set of THESE, my aim is improving, which can only help with the double-tap down the line.  . .).

Watch and learn, my peeps.  Watch and LEARN.

[Prequeue me at Netflix | Watch the trailer]

Genre:  Horror, Comedy, Zombies
Cast:  Jesse Eisenberg, Woody Harrelson, Abigail Breslin, Emma Stone, Bill Murray, Amber Heard

BOOK: The Keepsake by Tess Gerritsen (2008)

After reading Moby Dick last month, I decided it was time for something frivolous.  Luckily, I had this Tess Gerritsen paperback handy.  I’ve read several other of her thrillers featuring medical examiner Maura Isles and police detective Jane Rizzoli and have enjoyed all of them.  Great mysteries, fairly decent science, and occasional bits of sarcastic humor from Rizzoli = good combo for a rainy day, plane trip, or the week after you’ve just waded through 900 pages about how to decapitate and gut a sperm whale.

In this one, Dr. Isles is called in to help a local museum examine a mummy they’ve just discovered in storage in their basement.  She’s pretty excited to be involved in something so big — “Madam X,” as the mummy is being called, is about to be the museum’s biggest draw ever.  But as she begins her examination, she’s startled to discover bits of metal in the mummy’s jaw — bits of metal that look suspiciously like dental fillings.  While the Egyptians WERE pretty medically advanced for their time, none of the museum curators remember ever having seen evidence of dental work like that before.

Then the good doctor begins to look a little lower in the body, only to find a bullet embedded in the victim’s lower leg.  While it’s possible the bullet could’ve gotten into the mummy later (a stray shooting, e.g.), it’s definitely not possible that the mummy’s bone would then have started to mend itself around it.  Obviously, this mummy is no mummy — it’s a modern-day homicide victim that’s been disguised as a mummy and hidden in the museum basement where the killer figured nobody would notice it.

Soon after Dr. Isles has gotten the cops involved, including Det. Jane Rizzoli, one of the museum’s curators vanishes and the plot thickens.  Where it goes from there, I’ll leave it to you to discover.  All in all, a great little thriller that kept me turning pages long past my bedtime and left me with the urge to stock up on a few more of Gerritsen’s books for the next time I need something fun.  Like tomorrow.

[MYSTERY]

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MOVIE: The Fourth Kind (2009)

I didn’t know much about this movie when a friend of mine asked if I wanted to go see it with her last Saturday.  All I knew was that it was set in Nome, Alaska and had something to do with a psychologist doing a study on a group of patients all claiming to have been abducted by aliens.  Snowy Alaskan backdrop, extraterrestrials — sign me right up!

As it turns out, this movie is quite a bit more complicated than that (“convoluted” might be a better term), and quite a bit less entertaining than I’d hoped.

The story opens with actress Mila Jovovich as herself, telling us the film we’re about to see is a true story that will feature video and audio footage of the real Dr. Abbey Tyler and her patients interspersed with a series of dramatizations based on the doctor’s notes, starring Mila as Abbey.

I was sort of intrigued at that point, not because I believed anything Jovovich had just said, but because I thought the gimmick of combining a standard movie with a documentary-style one was kind of cool.  This interest did not last long, I’m afraid.

The story itself is pretty hokey — I know as soon as I say that, someone is going to harangue me for it in the comments (see thread from my Paranormal Activity review for an example), but, I’m sorry, I’m stickin’ to my guns on this one.  I do believe there’s intelligent life elsewhere in the universe.  In fact, I believe this so strongly I cannot understand how anyone could NOT believe it.  (And on that note, by the way, happy birthday, Carl Sagan!)

But I do not — repeat, not! — believe that if intelligent life comes to visit us on our planet, things are going to go down the way they always seem to in these kinds of movies.  For one thing, aliens in these movies always try to wipe out their victims’ memories so that the victims won’t remember anything that’s happened, right?  And, of course, this never works because the physical trauma is always so violent the victims’ brains end up giving them flashbacks that eventually trigger the reinstatement of the entire memory, right?  But here’s the thing — if the aliens are smart enough to fly here, beam us up, torture us, and then erase our memories, why aren’t they smart enough to make it so that our brains never record the trauma to begin with?  It’s not really that hard.  I mean, we can already do this right now on our planet, and we don’t even know how to achieve warp speed yet.  One word:  flunitrazepam.

But that’s just a minor dig, all things considered.  At heart, I simply have a lot of problems with the concept that life that is SMARTER than we are would also be MEANER than we are.  It seems to be a fairly universal concept that you can catch more flies with honey than with anal probes, and I think any intelligent alien civilization would probably also recognize this, even though we dumb humans don’t seem to put it into practice all that often.  Plus, there are plenty of crazy people on this planet who would willingly participate in alien medical studies.  Just put an ad in Craig’s List, fellas.  You’ll be all set.

The silliness of the plot, though, was not, in fact, this movie’s biggest problem.  Instead, its biggest problem was the very thing that intrigued me about it in the first place — the attempt to combine “dramatizations” with “actual footage” and sustain a sense of realism and suspense at the same time.  It just didn’t work for me.  Every shift was a jolt that took me back out of the story, and not only that, but the actors and actresses playing the “real” characters were absolutely awful, overacting to an almost laughable extreme (especially the woman playing the real Abbey Tyler and the guy playing her interviewer).   I never for a moment believed that the “real” footage was real; it had no sense of reality to it whatsoever.

Note to directors:  just because you shoot the crappy actors in grainy black and white video doesn’t mean we’re all suddenly going to believe what we’re seeing is an authentic home movie.  You have to do more than just lo-fi your camera equipment, I’m sorry.  (Though I do thank you for not even making an attempt to show us what the aliens looked like — props.)

Speaking of crappy actors, Will Patton must have had a terrible stomach ache after two hours of chewing all this movie’s scenery.  But Mila Jovovich wasn’t terrible — in fact, she and Elias Koteas (who is aging quite nicely, my friend and I agreed) were the only two decent performers in the entire film.  Unfortunately, they were given such an abysmal story to work with there was really nothing they could do to save the picture from its own inanity and cliché (oh, alien abduction genre — will no one ever try anything new with you?  You deserve so much better).

About halfway through the film, I looked at my watch, groaned upon realizing I still had at least an hour to go, and started thinking about all the laundry I needed to do once I got home.

That’s right — halfway into this movie, I started thinking about LAUNDRY.

I believe I need say no mo’.

[Prequeue me at Netflix | Watch the trailer]

Genre:  Horror, Crap
Cast:  Mila Jovovich, Will Patton, Elias Koteas.

MOVIE: The Eyes of Laura Mars (1978)

In my continued quest to see all the movies John Carpenter has ever written or directed (see my recent review of Someone’s Watching Me for more on the plan), I picked this one up recently and plopped it into the machine this afternoon.  Rainy days are great for scary movies, and I was hoping this one would fill that role nicely.

And it did, sort of.  That is, this is not really a “scary movie” so much as it’s a psychological thriller.  But, as with Someone’s Watching Me, it’s pretty effective at what it’s trying to do, which is put you on the edge of your seat.  Plus,  it’s got a lot of really cool camera effects, some seriously fun 70’s hair and clothes, and, added bonus!  A REALLY young Tommy Lee Jones.  Complete with dashing 70’s (pre-”Manscaping”) unibrow action!  Mrrrowl!

Laura Mars (an also very-young Faye Dunaway) is a rich-and-famous photographer, whose photos are both compelling and extremely controversial.  Her subjects tend to be scantily clad young women posed in horrifying scenes of violence:  being beaten, being attacked by animals, looking like they’re dead, stuff like that.  Some of her critics say she’s glorifying violence against women, death, and even murder.  But Mars contends her aim is actually the opposite: to make people stop thinking of violence as anything worthy of “glory” to begin with.

For some reason, and I wasn’t clear on just why (though it’s probably better not to ask, I suppose), Laura suddenly starts getting psychic visions.  It begins with the vision of a young woman being viciously murdered, one of her models.  At first, she doesn’t trust what she’s seeing and assumes it was a hallucination of some kind.  But when it happens again — again she sees a murder through what appear to be the eyes of the killer himself — she goes to the police.  Detective John Neville (Jones and his brow) is assigned to her case and initially believes her to be a complete crackpot.  But when the serial killer continues, knocking off people progressively closer and closer to Mars herself, Mars continues to witness every single attack while it is taking place.  She has details she clearly could only have gotten one of two ways:  she’s either the murderer herself, or she’s having the psychic visions she says she’s having.

Eventually, Neville starts to believe her, and the two become close (and then fall in love) while they struggle to find the killer and stop him before he gets to Laura herself.  Now, the ending of this film had a twist I confess I found pretty hokey, in part because I’ve seen that same twist done at least a half-dozen times over the years and so I saw it coming and wasn’t too pleased when it actually arrived.   But I would imagine that in 1978, it was a fairly startling surprise to most movie-goers.  And the thing is, it was filmed with grace and acted well by both Dunaway and Jones, which went a long way towards making it swallow-able for me.

In fact, there are a lot of scenes in this movie that I felt were both filmed and acted beautifully.  The scene in which Laura and John first become intimate, for example, I found extremely moving and absolutely gorgeous.  Wonderful angles, lots of authentic tenderness for each other, etc.  The only problem was that it went on about five minutes too long, as did several semi-sluggish scenes in the middle of the film.   However, when the movie is “on,” it’s extremely suspenseful and entertaining.  A lot of it may feel somewhat cheesy to modern viewers, as would a lot of the scenes and acting in Someone’s Watching Me, I’m sure.  But, overall, I thought this was a very satisfying psychological thriller.  And dazam if Tommy Lee Jones wasn’t just sexy as hell in 1978.  Hottie McYummerson.

Definitely recommended, especially for viewers who like thrillers that aren’t crazy with the gory violence.  The murders are pretty tame compared to what we’re used to seeing these days.  And the best part?  You can actually watch this movie for free online — legally!  The full movie is available on the IMDb page (via a link to Crackle.com), and it’s also available for streaming on Watch Now for Netflix subscribers.  If you are in the mood for a good thriller this weekend, look no further!  (And then come back here and let me know what you thought!)

[Netflix me | Watch me online | Buy me]

Genre:  Thriller
Cast:  Faye Dunaway, Tommy Lee Jones, Brad Dourif, Rene Auberjonois, Raul Julia

New Boyfriend is Up!

I really wanted to get this one posted before Halloween but failed miserably.  The good news, though, is that it tastes really good with leftover Halloween candy.  So, go grab a “fun-sized” something or other, plunk yourself somewhere comfy, and hit the Boyfriend of the Week site to see who the new fellow is.  You might want to finish eating before you get to the first mention of that knife-in-the-Achilles scene, though.  If you’re squeamish.

Don’t forget to come back here for comments and conversation when you’re done!

http://megwood.com

MOVIE: Coraline (2009)

I’m not generally a big fan of animated films — I’m not sure just why, since I almost always end up loving them when I do sit down and watch them.  But I’m rarely drawn to them intentionally.  Usually when I see an animated film, it’s because somebody else wanted to see it and I went along.  And so was the case with Coraline last weekend.  (The Case with Coraline — sounds like a Nancy Drew mystery. . .  I digress.)

While looking for a movie at the video store Friday night with my husband — one we might both want to see (no easy feat since we have dramatically different tastes in film; by which I mean, he actually likes GOOD movies) — he picked this one up, read over the back of the box, and gave it a little wave in my direction.  I looked up from the box I was looking at, The Thaw starring Val Kilmer and a whole bunch of disgusting insects (more on this in a future post), squinted, and then said, “Go for it,” in part because the only other movie he’d picked up was some kind of rock music documentary, also not typically my go-to genre, and I didn’t want to be there all night trying to find something mutually agreeable.  Besides, at least Coraline looked kinda spooky.  Good pre-Halloween mood setter?  Even if it IS a dorky cartoon?

As it turned out, not five minutes into this totally-not-at-all-dorky movie, I was COMPLETELY  IN LOVE.  The visuals in this film are fantastic — the colors, the shapes, the backgrounds, the characters.  And the story is absolutely great.  And John Hodgman!  JOHN HODGMAN, my friends!  Sigh.  Sigh of dreaminess.  Dreamy sigh.

It tells the story of a little girl, Coraline (not “Caroline”!), who has just moved into a big old house with her parents (Teri Hatcher and The Hodge), gardening writers who apparently hate gardening.  Go figure.  Coraline’s parents are hard at work on their latest book and so have little time for their daughter, who is a smart, creative girl with a lot of energy and interests.  Frustrated by her parents’ seeming neglect and missing her old friends tremendously, Coraline is the perfect target for an evil villain (not sure just what kind of entity she was — not really a ghost; more like  a cross between Beetlejuice and Edward Scissorhands) who desperately wants a daughter of her own.

The villain takes the form of Coraline’s mother — looking and sounding just like her except for the fact she has black buttons for eyes (like a doll).  She woos Coraline into her alternate reality, complete with “Other” versions of her father and her new friend Wybie, by lavishing her with attention and home-cooked meals, making her beautiful new clothing, and in general feeding right into every need or desire Coraline has ever had.

It’s not long before Coraline begins to realize the true nature of what’s going on, though — not just that the “Other Mother” is a bad entity who wants to steal Coraline (and replace her eyes with buttons too, eep!), but that she’s tried this before on other children and killed them when they did not conform to her wishes.  Eep, again!

Desperate to escape, Coraline finally finds her way back through the little door into her real life, only to find the “Other Mother” has taken her parents and locked them away.  Now, with the help of Wybie’s cat, who is able to travel easily between the two worlds himself, Coraline must craft a plan to rescue her parents, free the spirits of the dead children, and get her life back to the way it was.

Of course, a lot of elements of this story are familiar — it’s not really that different, if you think about it, from It’s a Wonderful Life:   Be careful what you wish for, e.g.  But here, the story is told with such great visuals and characters that it felt completely fresh and exciting to watch.  The animation is stop-motion and super-cool, and though we had the option of watching it in 3-D on the DVD, we went with 2-D instead, in part because my first (and last) 3-D cartoon experience was with last summer’s Up, and I felt that the 3-D had really muted the sharpness of the lines and colors of that film — two of the things I love the most about the look of an animated film.  I think it was the right choice here as well.    Not to keep repeating myself, but the way this film LOOKS is just wonderful.  It uses strange shapes — the bodies of the characters are strange, the shape of the cat, the tilt on the buildings, etc. — and bold, simple colors, and the combination was extremely effective.  The look of the movie gives it a creepy weight that I think the story alone might not have been able to attain.

Overall, I was incredibly impressed with this one!  If you have been putting off seeing it because you’re not that into animated films yourself, I definitely think you should give it a shot.  Recommended, in other words!  Also:  JOHN HODGMAN!!  I’m pretty sure for many of you, I need say no mo’.

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Genre:  Animation
Cast:  Dakota Fanning, John Hodgman, Teri Hatcher, Keith David

Kill Some More Time! I’m Running Late on the Write-Up!

A reader just sent me a link to a feature on her site that ranks the 20 hottest vampires of all time.  Guess who’s number one?  Uh huh:  James Marsters!  Yum.

So, go read her piece, which is hilarious and sharp, and pretend you didn’t notice I didn’t get that Boyfriend write-up posted today like I said I would.  Go on now, shoo!  I’ll try for tomorrow, I swear!

http://www.guidetobeautyschools.com/hottest-twilight-vampires

TV Timekilling Post (New Boyfriend in the Works This Week!)

Just to let you know, things will be somewhat quiet here this week, as I’m scrambling around like pan o’ breakfast trying to get the new Boyfriend of the Week write-up posted before October expires.  (Not just because I’m trying to get at least one lame write-up posted every month (although, that too), but because he needs to make it up BY HALLOWEEN, or else there goes all the fun.  That’s the only hint yer gettin’, so don’t try for more, my peoples.)

While we’re waiting, though, let’s have some conversation.  Everybody tell me in comments which of the new Fall TV shows you are still watching and enjoying?  Here’s what’s still on my list:

Glee – I’m behind by three episodes, but I WAS behind by six until this past weekend and then I started to get caught up and got all sucked in again.  That said, I confess nothing gets my dander up like a subplot involving a faked pregnancy being used to trick an unhappy husband into staying in an awful marriage.  Newsflash to men everywhere:  Most women would never, ever consider doing something like that.  I promise, we wouldn’t.  We. Would. Not.  In any case, this is a subplot that I feel is not only grossly cliché and completely out of place in the show itself, but one I think we women ought to be downright offended by.  If you’re not offended by it, rest assured that I am offended on your behalf.  Wrap that shit up, Glee, and give me more songs by Journey or I may bail before the year’s out.  You’re on alert, yo.

The Forgotten — I recognize that this is not a good show.  That said, you know what?  I’m enjoying it anyway.  I really like Christian Slater; I can’t help myself.  And even though everybody starts off dead and so there is never a happy ending, I kind of like the concept behind this series — a show about a group of volunteers with various sorts of skills who spend their free time working as amateur sleuths.  I love sleuthing — it’s why I became a librarian, in fact.  In any case, while I haven’t been overly impressed so far with the plots, it MIGHT get better.  It COULD get better.  I’ll hang in a little while longer.

NCIS: Los Angeles — Oh, please, I KNOW this one is not a good show.  I’m still watching this one just because every episode is so amazingly stupid and bad, it is absolutely hilarious.  I laugh out loud no fewer than 8 times per episode, which is more than The Daily Show gets out of me half the time these days.  Oh god, I love this one.  I LOVE IT.  I have never seen a show this ridiculous.  It’s totally awesome.  Plus, I will never get tired of looking at L. L. Cool J’s butt, no matter how old I get.  Or how old he gets.  May we grow old together, in fact, me and L. L Cool J.  And L. L. Cool J’s butt.  All three of us, old.  Together.  Forever.

Flash Forward — I’m behind by three episodes, and I think it’s because. . . meh.  I mean, I like the concept of this series, and I fully intend to get caught up (this weekend, even).  But I haven’t gotten sucked into it that solidly yet.  Not like I got with Lost, certainly.  I never fell behind on a single episode of Lost until season three, come to think of it, but I started falling behind on FF on EPISODE three.  Probably not a great sign.  That said, I’m still IN.  I’m just not IN all the way.  I’m sort of hokey-pokey-in.  One foot, one hand, shakin’ it all about.  What do you guys think of this one?  If it lasts long enough, Joseph Fiennes or John Cho for Boyfriend of the Week?  Both?

Three Rivers – It’s terrible, I know it.  Stop, I know it.  But still.  Of the three new medical shows (Mercy and Trauma being the other two), it’s the only one I watched a second episode of, and even though I haven’t then watched any more, I’m letting them pile up on the DVR for a rainy day and am even sort of looking forward to the day that rainy day finally arrives.  Incidentally, I recently went to the ER myself and guess what was playing on the TV while I was there — Mercy and Trauma. I motioned to the TV set and said to the doctor, “Really? Isn’t that kind of like playing Castaway on an airplane?”   And he laughed and said the nurses liked it.  Personally?  I think health care reform needs to start RIGHT THERE.

I think this is it for me and the NEW shows this year.  I’d love to hear what you guys are watching (is anybody still watching Eastwick, for example?  How’s it going?  Did you guys end up loving The Good Wife?  What did I miss that I ought to check out?  Any of the new sit-coms good?).  Hit the comments and chat us all up and together, we’ll make it to the next Boyfriend of the Week write-up, due FRIDAY come hell or high water.  (Or, more likely here in Seattle, a hell OF high water.)

BOOK: Moby-Dick by Herman Melville (1851)

I somehow managed to get through both high school and college (as an English major, no less!) without ever reading this novel, one of the most famous books ever written.  Don’t ask me how it happened.  I don’t have an answer.  What’s important is that I finally got around to it, right?

When I first started reading this book, I was absolutely flabbergasted by how completely wonderful it was.  The first 200 or so are not only brilliantly written, but quirky and hilarious and delightful as well.  I couldn’t put it down, and only about fifty pages into it, I was so in love with the narrator, (call him) Ishmael, I was seriously starting to consider making him a Boyfriend of the Week (hey, weirder Boyfriends have happened: meet Sock Puppet).

And then I got to the middle.  The middle 200 or so pages of this novel are absolutely brutal.  Unless you have a vested interest in whaling yourself, and particularly in the ins-and-outs of butchering the whales you have snagged, you are going to get to the middle of this novel and curse my name for having recommended it to you. There is an entire chapter, I kid you not, that provides step-by-step instruction on how to behead a sperm whale.  Now, granted, the fact this process requires a detailed tutorial makes some sense,  because beheading an animal that has no neck would be no easy feat, right?  The thing is, once you’ve read that chapter, there is no un-reading it.  And I have to confess, well, let’s just say: regrets, I’ve had a few.

THAT SAID, the nice thing about the sloggy middle of this otherwise-entertaining book is that the chapters are short and usefully-titled, which makes it extremely easy to skim past the parts that are of no import to you.  Jump past the whaling encyclopedia and straight on to the end, where the action heats up anew, the characters start getting their asses whomped, and fights, fights, fights!  But exciting drama aside, the analogy of Ahab’s obsessive whale hunt, and the analogies that can be applied to his ultimate fate, are thought-provoking and powerful.

All in all, this book had a tremendous impact on me (to the point where I started using lines from the text as my Facebook status updates, even, because they were so beautifully written), and I’m very grateful to the friend of mine who encouraged me to read it along with him.  Maybe you’ll feel the same way about me if you pick it up now yourselves.  Let me know, yes?

[LITERATURE]

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