1st Movie Adaptation of the 1st Book in a Series

From best to worst, here's how my list would stack up:


Fellowship of the Ring. 
          I defy any of you to show me a better first-book-adaptation than that.

The Hunger Games. 
          Okay, so the shaky-cam was a little annoying, but come on, it was pretty awesome. Nothing TOO out of place, good actors, good effects, good earnest adaptation.

~NEW~ Divergent.  
          Again, a good, earnest adaptation. Brought the events of the book to life very nicely, took itself as seriously as the book intended, just wasn't as compelling for me as The Hunger Games. I think casting was excellent, really enjoyed the music and direction, just everything about the movie production itself was excellent. What I felt was lacking in the movie was also sort of a necessary evil.  They pulled back on a lot of parts of the movie that should have been honestly more violent than they were depicted. I realize they had to do that to keep a PG-13 rating and therefore keep the audience, but I feel like that lost a lot of the feel of the book. The story hits hard, on purpose, and it felt like the movie pulled the punches a bit. Can't put my finger on specifics, but that's my assessment.

Harry Potter and the Sorceror's Stone. 
          My wife and I disagree on this, but that's alright. I didn't like it much at the time, but it tried so hard. And it got the whole movie saga rolling, so you have to give it props for that.

Vampire Academy. 
          Now, before you get surprised that this is right after Harry Potter, look down on this list and see how bad the rest of them were. Now we'll proceed. This movie has the unique property of being the only one on this list whose book I did not read prior to seeing the movie. That being said, my overall reaction to the movie was to say "I'll bet this was a pretty good book." Not that I loved the movie. Too much emo and too many Hollywood fangs in one place for my taste, but I enjoyed the protagonist, the writing was pretty hilarious in some parts, and they did a good job of explaining what was going on in a way that didn't make you feel lost at any point, even though I hadn't read the book. But it was incredibly rushed, scenes moving too fast without any room to breathe whatsoever, and not in a Stark Trek Into Darkness kinda way. I felt like I was watching a Hank Green YouTube video the entire time, which is not what I go to the movies to see at all. All that being said, I don't want two hours of my life back, it was a fun and different vampire system to play around with, and it was fairly enjoyable for a bit of mindless YA-turned-film.

City of Bones. 
          This is where I put this one. Worse than Harry Potter, but better than the last entries on this list. The effects were pretty, the characters were more or less as I remember them from the book, the plot . . . was close enough that it was recognizable, but there were so, SO many moments when the writing just fell flat on its face. Cassandra Clare, you should've written this one yourself.

The Golden Compass. 
          Seriously, if you didn't read the book, you were probably really, really lost. Don't feel bad, everyone was. Even Ian Mckellan as a polar bear and the mere presence of Derek Jacoby (normally enough for me to like just about anything) couldn't save this one.

Twilight. 
          All-around-fail. Just . . . bad. So bad.


Next to come on this list - The Maze Runner, August 2014

SOMEthing

Warning: the very first sentence of this post will immediately make you start thinking up excuses not to listen to anything else I have to say.

I’d like to talk today about service.

Now, if you’re a regular attendee of any church that regularly speaks on this subject (like mine) then that sentence immediately sets off a chain of almost physiological Pavlovian responses as soon as you hear it.  First, there’s the fight or flight conflict to resolve, or in this case, the guilt-or-get-out conflict.  If you choose to leave (as I have on a few occasions) then you avoid the guilt you know you’re about to experience if you stay, but you’re also the person who gets up and just leaves as soon as someone’s begun their talk.  (Kids are a wonderful loophole for this entire problem, since they always provide an excused absence from the chapel at any time, but that’s a topic for another blog) On the other hand, you could stay.  I normally slouch down a little in my seat and immediately become fascinated with the hymnbooks in front of me even though I’ve been looking at the same ones since I was three weeks old. 

Whatever the case is, the immediate response to being informed that you’re about to hear a talk on service is avoidance in some form.  We all know why.  We don’t do enough. No one does.  Not a single person who pays attention to a service talk walks away saying “Yup, that’s one commandment I’ve got down pat. On to the next.”  Commandments like Tithing or the Word of Wisdom or Chastity, those you can (most of the time) say that either you’re following the law or you’re not.  Not to say that those don’t include room for improvement even for the best among us, but they’re fairly cut and dry. Am I giving ten percent of my gross income in a faithful tithe? Check.  Am I keeping the counsel put forward in the Word of Wisdom pertaining to dietary and practical guidelines? Check. Do I have sexual relations only with my legally married spouse? Check.  Those are things you can pretty much know you’re doing right.  But even if you volunteer forty hours a week at a soup kitchen, mow your senior citizen neighbor’s yard and give a weekly contribution to the March of Dimes, there is still more than you could be giving. 

In short, service is not a pass/fail commandment.  Too bad, I like those. 

I admit very freely, it’s not my strong suit either.  I’m not writing this post because I think it is at all. Far from it.  I suck at giving service.  I’m terrible at giving up my time, because I want so desperately to hold onto the time that I have.  The few hours a day after work that I get to spend with Adam and my best friend, that other parent of his.  Those are precious to me. I want every minute, every moment of them that I can hang onto for myself.  When I lose them, for whatever reason, my day feels empty. It’s like I ate all my vegetables like an obedient little child and then got the main course and dessert of the day snatched away from me anyway.  I feel very much like that attitude of selfishness regarding our own time is incredibly universal.  I’m incredibly selfish with that time, and though I know that’s still a fault I possess, it’s not my worst one by a long shot, so it might be a while before I get around to working on it.

This is not a talk on service by any means, but there’s one central comment that I’d like to make about it.  I recently went over to help out two friends of ours, a couple who’d just moved into a lovely townhouse.  Tons more space than their old place, incredibly good deal, they’re very excited about heading into it and stretching out a little bit.  So they’re painting everything in the house before they move their stuff in at the end of the month, and they say they’d like some help painting.  Sure, no problem. Anyone with reasonable manual dexterity can work a paintbrush, I figure. I’m no Picasso, but I can do my best to avoid the molding when doing the little detail work around the edges.  Few hours on a Saturday.  I admit, it’s certainly not my ideal way of spending a chunk of my weekend, but they know that, I know that, anyone who’s ever had a weekend knows that.  But they’re my friends and I want to help them, so I say yes and go over there.

Now, I like these people. They’re fairly awesome.  But by no stretch of the imagination do I consider them close friends.  I, personally, just haven’t known them that long or that well to say that they’re people I have a particularly close, frequent or intimate friendship with.  So they’re more than acquaintances, but less than BFFs.  They’re friends.  Good middle ground. 

And yet I’m pretty much the only person who showed up to help them paint.

I’m sorry . . . really?

I don’t mean this as a comment on these two at all. Like I said, they’re great people, I enjoy them thoroughly.  But for people that awesome to have only a peripheral acquaintance show up to help them paint their new home? That’s . . . that’s not okay.  And it shows, I think, my point from earlier, that selfishness with our own time is a universal trait.  Yes, it was Saturday afternoon on the nicest day of the year so far.  No, no one wants to spend that kind of day inside painting.  But come on. They were doing it alone, and it was a lot to do.

Is the painted or unpainted nature of the walls of their own home ultimately the responsibility and prerogative of the couple in question? Yes. No argument there.  Are they perfectly capable of getting all of it done? Yes, I know they are. Though I’m not sure time-wise how quickly that will happen.  But are there other people around them who could look at them, realize they’re in a place of need, and pop out of their own selfishness for just a few hours and do this thing to help ease their way? Yes. There are.  I know there are.  There are people around all of us who are capable of giving, capable of helping, capable of reaching out a hand to help give you a little nudge when you’re faltering and get you back on track.  It doesn’t take much to make a person feel that you care about them and really want to help them.  I know they are surrounded by people, tons and tons of them, who have the capacity to have been there to help them paint their house and make the work go more quickly.  I just don’t know where those people were, and it broke my heart to see the stress on their faces when they realized no one else was really showing up but me. 

So the comment that I would like to make about service is not that we need to be doing more or that we need to be making sure our hearts are in it or that we give all that we possibly can to those around us.  Realist that I am, I’m aware that the second I engage in any of those platitudes that have been spouted on a weekly/daily/hourly basis from the pulpits of churches across the world, minds shut off.  Guilt sets in, and rationalization comes in to act as the antivenom of that guilt.  That doesn’t work. Never has, never will.  What I would like to say is this:

Do something.

I’m not suggesting that anyone overhaul their lives for the greater good and go looking for an unfriendly sword to fall on for anyone else. But if you keep the perspective of doing something for those around you on a regular basis, a paid meal, a helpful contact for someone in need of some assistance, tech support, putting air in a person’s tires when they need it, helping to paint, helping to move, just helping to watch a kid when a pair of parents need a night to be adults for a change, if you want to do something for someone else, you’ll find an opportunity around you.  If you don’t want to, you’ll make excuses whenever opportunities do present themselves to you.  That’s just how the brain works. Guilt-or-go-home.  If we just do SOMEthing, the world would be a much merrier place, and there would be fewer couples standing in their living rooms right now looking at a half-painted room and only a few days to get all of their stuff moved in, with just the two of them.  No one wants that. No one wants to BE that, and no one wants to force someone else to have that happen to them.

I’m glad I did something. It wasn’t a big deal to me, it wasn’t some huge sacrifice, and it doesn’t need to be. I hope it made a difference to them for the better, and that I didn’t get too much paint on the molding in the process. 

Just do something.  The world spins smoother that way.

Utopianism, Optimism, and Presentism: or “Things Will Be Alright When: Rantgush the First”

Listening to: Cat’s in the Cradle – Cat Stevens

There seems to be a utopian ideal inside of most, if not all, members of the human race.  It could be on any scale, large or small, personal or societal, economic or religious. It’s the feeling inside us all that starts with the words “things will be alright when . . .” and then proceeds to describe the necessary change that will effect a better world. 

This, I’m coming more and more to believe, is not a healthy way to start a sentence.

I don’t mean, in saying this, to insinuate that instances of optimism in life are a bad thing. Far from it. We are encouraged in most situations (and commanded in others, see Gordon B. Hinckley) to be optimistic, and I think it is absolutely right that we should do so. But the sentiment of “things will be alright when . . .” is not optimism, in the strictest sense.  Optimism is a point of view, an attitude and perspective on life that is not, or at least should not be, specific to any given situation. Optimism is the attitude that things will go well, or that they will improve over time. Optimism is having a personality that is saturated with hope, until it is not just a matter of hoping for certain things, but of truly possessing a ‘hope for all things.’ 

The thought process I’m talking about here is the one that says, “when I get out of my parents’ house, then I’ll finally be free to do what I want,” or, “when the kids are out of the house, then we’ll be able to have some free time again.”  And yes, my son is only ten months old and I’ve already had that thought. You may now go ahead and have your condescending and judgmental thoughts in my direction. I’ll wait. 

Back? Great. Let’s continue.

There are a lot of other iterations of this pattern that may be somewhat more subtle, but fall into the same general realm for the purposes of this discussion.  When I get a house, I’ll finally be an adult. When I get a new job, then I’ll be happy with life.  Once I get married, everything else will be wonderful.  When I get that credit card paid off, I’ll be able to start saving money. When I get to five o’clock, I’ll be much happier about life.  When I finally see Paris in the spring, or the pyramids, or Jerusalem, or Athens, I’ll feel like my life is complete.  When I retire, then I can be happy.  Once I get this bottle of wine open, I’ll feel better about life.

I do this a lot.  Everyone does, to some extent. We love these thought experiments because they’re essentially fantasizing about a life other than our own. In which we can save money, have more space, have more time, have fewer headaches and more fun. We love them for the same reason we love to think about getting our Hogwarts acceptance letter, because it takes us out of the world we're presently in and puts us into some other world, no matter how miniscule the differences between those two worlds are. 

But that’s just it.  The entire process removes us from the world we currently inhabit, which is where we’re located in this moment of time, and it’s the one we need to deal with.  I would love to be able to sit back and say that I’m really going to enjoy Adam when he gets old enough to talk to and play games with. I really look forward to teaching this guy to play chess and love old cartoons. I’m going to love reading Harry Potter to him and talking to him about which house he wants to belong to.  I’m going to enjoy watching him grow up and play sports and do homework and book reports and science projects, start dating the wrong girls, maybe finally start dating the right ones, whatever the kid’s going to do with his life.  I look at all those things and I think “man, it’s going to be so much more fun to be a father when he’s . . .” 

In the meantime, he’s over there in his crib asleep at the moment, and I’m sitting here realizing that I’m focusing so much on what he isn’t yet that I’m not looking at him for what he’s already become. I’m reading books to him that are so short and simple I’ve memorized them, all the while waiting on the day that I can get his opinion on The Hobbit, and I’m letting that fantasy make me utterly bored with the current version of him.  “When you comin’ home, Dad? I don’t know when, but we’ll get together then, yeah.  You know we’ll have a good time then.”  I’ve always loved that song, and it’s the perfect version of this entire philosophy. 

So I’m going to try and remember, every time I look at the clock and pray for the big hand to race around to the twelve and the little hand to jump ahead to the five, to sit back and remind myself to do the best work I can while I’m at work.  I’m going to look up at my son when he’s walking around and encourage him on the level he’s currently reached instead of just looking ahead.  I’m going to look around at the life that we’ve created for ourselves as a couple and be grateful for what we’ve built already and the blessings we currently enjoy instead of focusing on the ones we hope to gain in the coming months and years.  I’m going to try very hard to watch how I begin my sentences.  And someday, when I’ve gotten really good at keeping those future fantasies out of my speech . . . ah, dang it . . .

This is your life. And not only is it ending one minute at a time, (thank you, Tyler) but it’s also progressing one minute at a time. It’s never going to be easy.  You’re never going to sit back at the end of the day and say “wow, nothing at all was difficult for me today.”  You’re never going to look at your finances and say “I have enough money for the rest of my life, guaranteed.”  You’re never going to look at your knowledge of the universe and say “I don’t need to learn anything else, I’m good.”  You’re never going to look at yourself in the mirror and say “I’m finished working on my appearance, that last sit-up did it.”  The world is never going to get cheaper to live in. The society around you is always going to have problems, no matter how well-balanced its various regulatory systems.  Even in a perfect world, I’m convinced the DMV is still going to be infuriating. Things are never going to be the fantasy we believe they’re capable of someday becoming. 

That is not to say that these various goals are not worth working toward. That’s not what I’m saying.  I’m saying that at some point, we need to accept that life will always be a work in progress.  If it is not, you are no longer alive. Knowing this, then, that we will always be somewhere on the continuum between the beginning and the theoretical end, we need to put more focus on being happy going five over the speed limit with the windows down, dealing with rush hour traffic while blaring music with a heartbeat, than we do on the destination.  

So here I am, and here I’m going. It’s a nice place to be, this moment I’m sitting in, and I’m grateful for the chance to have gotten into it at all. 

(photo quote by Terry Goodkind)