Me & Earl & the Dying Girl (bring tissues)

Got off work early and had to choose between seeing Inside Out and Me & Earl & the Dying Girl.  Couldn't get there in time for Inside Out, so Earl it was.  Grabbed a stack of tissues on the way out the door.  Needed them all.  (Are you really surprised, considering the title?)  Wish they had actually been tissues instead of napkins.

I liked this movie a lot.  Probably more like PG-16, but, as an adult, I found it hilarious and, obviously, an excellent tear-duct cleanser. 

Greg's actor may be in his mid-20s, but he does not stand on dignity when depicting the hilarious and painful interactions between a really awkward teenaged boy and his mother.  I was glad that there was really no one else in the theater because I was laughing pretty hard.

Earl stole the show.  He was pitch perfect every time.  Wow.  Almost every line and interaction with others made me snort.  His rapid-fire, spot-on psychoanalysis of Greg while stoned was a gem.

The Dying Girl had one of the harder roles.  Actresses tend to get chosen for being, you know, attractive, and this was not a high-budget film, so there was only so much they could do to make her look sick and ugly, and a lot of scenes involved her being too exhausted from the chemo to really even have many lines.  There were a lot of opportunities for her to simply sit there, looking tragic and helplessly attractive; I think they sidestepped many of those opportunities (partly because Greg's actor is a great face-actor, and his awkwardness and unease and heart-on-sleeve expressions as he wrestled through these emotional minefield kept things more real).

The history teacher was fun.  All the parents were pretty good, too.  Their roles were a bit over-the-top and could easily have been more caricature than anything, but there was enough real and understandable emotion / humanity / character in each of them that they weren't just goofy adults.

And the high school kids.  I swear I went to school with a dead-ringer for that twirpy drug dealer, and the goth/steampunk kid is a hoot, as well.  Makes one glad to not be in high school.

The nature of the narrative was interesting, too.  As the narrator continuously points out, this is not a love story, so all the things that one would expect to happen in this kind of story just don't.  And that leaves lots of room for real life to crowd in.  Friendship, decisions about higher education, struggles with friends and family: these are what the movie is made of because even when someone you love is dying, life does go on.  It's just so much harder for everyone.

Good movie.  Strong in story, character, world, and execution.  And tear-jerking.  Seriously.

a found poem - for writers who like definitions

.

To put it another way,

when a competent writer
tells you a story, you know
what happened.

When a good writer 

tells you a story, 

you feel it 

happen to you.

When a great writer

tells you a story, you feel

your life change

because of it.

But let’s not worry
about that one now.)

- John Scalzi

In honor of 80 degree October days

I am in love with Kieli.  It's a series of books translated from Japanese about a teenager isolated because of her past and her abilities and what happens when she meets someone even more lonely and isolated than she is.  It's aimed at a teenage audience (it's called a light novel), so it's not particularly challenging.  The writing isn't necessarily Pulitzer caliber.  It's horror, a genre I normally don't get on well with, and there are some serious gross-out moments.  What is it, then, that makes me love it so much that it's the first thing I read when I get a new batch of books that contain it among them, no matter how large the batch is (as long as it's sunny out, and I can read in the sun because, otherwise, even the "light" horror will drown me).

There's a lot to like about it.  In the past I've wondered what draws me to the series most.  The atmosphere of sweet, awkward melancholy or the dreamy quality of the storytelling (interrupted by brief and disturbingly clear instants of graphic violence and action)?  Is is the reflective mood?  The detached but sad tone?  The brisk pacing that seems languid at the same time?  The spine-tingling weirdness that creeps in sometimes?  The amusing and crotchety relationship between the lead characters?

This round (volume 3), though, I realize that one of the most powerful draws to it for me is the way that it approaches the walls we put up around ourselves and how to co-exist with them.  That sounds dreadfully opaque.  What it comes down to is that I respect this author for not taking the easy way out, like so many other Japanese stories about teen girls do.  We put walls up, and there can be all kinds of very legitimate reasons for that.  In a lot of Japanese stories aimed at teen girls, the author will tease me by bringing up the subject and then inevitably let me down by making the answer a simple, "Bust down the walls, be friendly to everyone, and everything will be fine!  Nice conquers all!"  That is not reality.  It is false, saccharine, and kind of enraging, especially when it's the cliche in a long series that could do so much with the idea.

Don't get me wrong: I can like those series well enough.  I do like a happy ending.  But I love a happy ending that is earned by blood, sweat, and tears. I love a series like Kieli that says, "Here is what it's like for these people who have excellent reasons to have walls, and here is how sometimes they trust, and it's a good thing, and sometimes they trust and it's a bad thing.  Here is how their walls save them and keep them alive, and here is how their walls crush them, sometimes at the same time."  In other words, it's kind of like real life even though the setting is horror/fantasy/sci-fi.  I love how "genre" works can sort of sidle up to these issues and deal with them sideways.

I do want a happy ending for these characters; I really do.  But I want a believable happy ending.  And I don't see yet how that will happen.  The author is too good at those real-life twists and turns to pander to the reader.  They're billing it as a romance, so I believe things will work out, and I look forward to seeing how, but right now, I love reading about these broken people searching for God knows what.

A new technique-related literary crush: not simple

I recently finished a quietly devastating work of literary fiction by Natsume Ono called not simple.

Things that impressed me included the following:

• Reverse chronology as necessity
• Tightly polished artistry
• Distancing techniques to prevent brutality from becoming melodrama
• Beautiful intersection of form and content
• Trust in readers to follow story and understand
• Title and its relationship to form and content

USE OF REVERSE CHRONOLOGY
Knowing how a story ends chronologically does not have to kill the narrative tension.  not simple tells bits of the story mostly going backwards as the book advances toward the end (and not quite the beginning).

TIGHTLY POLISHED ARTISTRY
Every conversation accomplishes multiple purposes.  The story you thought you knew because you knew the ending keeps needing revision in the reader's mind.  I had to stop reading to ponder each new, horrific revelation and how it affected the future I had previously read about and what I had seen of the past, etc.  The reread value for this one will be quite high with all the revelations, nuance, subtext, and other well-done stuff.

DISTANCING TECHNIQUES
This story could so easily be a melodrama.  One way the author avoided this slide was the use of emotionally stunted characters under-responding (not just to keep things from being hysterical but because that's who they are and how they would respond).  No histrionics here, folks, just tragic people trapped in fractured relationships (reflected in the short, choppy, fragmented scenes and non-linear progression of the story) dealing with blow after blow until they reach an end you already know from the beginning.  Scenes that could have been shown but would have pushed things over the edge were related as conversations, often relayed second-hand.  We learn about characters by what is unsaid and by their actions.  The balance between show and tell feels organic and pitch-perfect.

BEAUTIFUL INTERSECTION OF FORM AND CONTENT
This story has to be told as a graphic novel.  There is not enough inner monologue for it to work as a prose story.  As a story made of text alone, it would be too bleak and too talky while also being too image-driven.  Pictures make this story work (you know the cliche about how much a picture is worth).  At the same time, I don't think this would make a good film.  The chronological jumping around and all the fragmented, short scenes would make my head hurt, and the emotional deadness would be hard for living actors to portray, I think, without trending towards the outrageous melodrama.

TRUST IN READERS
There are a lot of times where Ono doesn't spell things out, but careful readers will feel the craters left by the implications of specific lines.  No way, so that's why . . .   Yes, that's why, dear reader, but the author doesn't bludgeon you with it and never intrudes as a narrator.  It's up to you to find the heartbeats of the story.

TITLE
The phrase not simple is used by people to describe the protagonist's life and life story.  It could be used of just about every piece of the work itself.  The characters are complex, and you could sum up their situations in a trivial way, sometimes, but it's more complicated than it seems.  Not artificially complicated, just organically complex.  Could the story have been told just as engaginly in straight chronological order?  Yeah, probably.  But it wasn't told with the mixed chronology as a gimmick.  I get the sense that the author told it that way, so she could end it with the heartbreaking hopeful tone she does.  Does it have a happy ending?  Well, yes and no and more no but also kind of a bafflingly uplifting yes.  It's just not that simple to explain. 

You should probably read it to find out.

How Not to Do New Year's Resolutions

I really dug Donald Miller's Blue Like Jazz and am really anticipating the time when I get to read A Million Miles in a Thousand Years.  (Very, very soon, I pray, after I land a new job.)


Since he's been thinking so hard about story, he has a few suggestions for those who don't really do New Year's Resolutions (as in, don't make them or don't keep them).  Take a look at his ideas here and then here.

What do you think?  Does the idea of setting up narratives for yourself seem silly or pretty darned inspirational?  If it inspires you, what story do you want to write first.  :)

Christmas presents and other plot devices

As a child, I took Christmas presents very seriously.  We were told that if we touched the wrapped presents under the tree, our parents would know, and we would not get the presents.  Putting aside my willingness to believe that my parents would just somehow know, I wanted to get the presents, so I never touched them.

I was careful not to even get too close to the tree in case I fell over and accidentally touched one and then lost it.  Yep, I've always been a bit of a dork, and I'm proud of it.

I assumed that my sisters were the same way, but my sister has since informed me that she didn't need to touch the wrapped presents because she could always find where my mom hid them before she wrapped them.  I am seized with a sudden desire to look through photo albums to see how obvious it is that she is never surprised.  Maybe she was just a good actress.

Needless to say, this idea was a shock to goody-goody me.  I had honestly never even thought of searching out gifts before they were wrapped.  Such deceptiveness!  About gifts people were giving you!  Why would you want to spoil that moment of discovery for yourself, especially as a child?!  Better to be patient and get the whole reward.

I was talking with some folks lately, and only one person in the group was like me.  She never looked for presents.  The others were varied.  Some always looked and found everything every year; others did it for a while but then decided they wanted the surprise and stopped doing it.

My sister proudly admits to turning to the last page or the last chapter to find out who makes it to the end or whodunit.  I cannot imaging doing such a thing.  Why spoil the end for yourself before you get all the anticipation leading up to the end that makes the ending a real payoff?

When I started getting into Japanese pop culture, their habit of often telling you what was coming up in the next episode or the next volume really threw me off.  I felt like the next bit was spoiled if I knew what was coming.  Eventually, I adjusted because knowing what plot point will happen next does not have to ruin the road to that point and the road from it. You can manage a lot of suspense even if you've already told folks what's coming.  

I've started experimenting with how I might be able to use this device in a story I'm working on. I'm studying works that use it to see what might work for my story.

But I still don't want to know what's behind that wrapping paper or in that closet awaiting wrapping paper.  And I refuse to read ahead.

How about you?  Where did you fall on the gift discovery scale?