This is actually a hard movie to review. It isn’t super simple like trying to review Inception, which is just on it’s own. Nor is it slightly more complex like trying to review a standard book-to-movie from a stand-alone book, or that does not have obvious intent to continue the movies. Nor is it critiquing just the closing chapter in a series of movies. No, this is a bit of everything. So I’ll just start wherever I will. It was good. It was actually really good. Better than Half Blood Prince and Order of the Phoenix, in my opinion, and makes Part One kind of worth it. At least, since we didn’t have to wait but a half year. Of course, I do have more in depth thought than that below the fold. And yes, there are spoilers, but I’ll keep them semi-vague.

First, the good: I loved the pacing in this much better than in all of the other recent movies, Deathly Hallows Part One included. I always find it an issue when I realize how comfortable or uncomfortable my chair is or feel an irrepressible need to use the restroom in the middle of a movie. It means the pacing has lagged and I’ve been pulled out of the bubble of the story by something. Deathly Hallows Part Two did not have that problem. Perhaps it was some part due to all the “boring stuff” having been dealt with in Part One and Part Two starting right where things go break-neck fast, from the invasion of Gringots to the battle of Hogwarts.

The action was very good, and there was a lot of wonderful closure scenes for the long-time fans that carried the movie, from Mcgonagall having a short and quick fight with Snape to Molly Weasley having her moment of awesome. There were actually a few parts I choked up on.

Now, the thing is, a monkey could have done this well. There is so much invested in the watcher already from the stories we’ve read to the last 7 movies. Not only are we invested in the characters, we have watched the actors grow up. The emotional investiture is so large, that the movie could have done a passing-to-fair execution and it still would have been amazing for us.

Which is going to bring me to the first thing I didn’t like too much, and that was Neville. I loved Neville in the books. I’ve loved him in the movies. But his big moment to shine, in the courtyard facing Voldemort when all hope seems lost, and he gives his rousing speech . . . well, I just didn’t like it. It was the same old Neville giving a stuttering speech while hobbling around. Now, in “reality”, yes, a sudden spurt of heroism doesn’t make you forget a twisted ankle or public speaking issues, but this isn’t reality. This is a story, and it is meant to bolster us up with small bits of hyperbole. No, I didn’t want Neville to become Tony Blair and wow us with oratory, but he just seemed to lack the fire I read from the speech in the book. I was also mildly annoyed with the slight change to the end of the speech. Neville still had the crowning moment of glory, but they had to stretch it out with action and insult tossing between Voldemort and Harry. Bleh.

Also, the villainous deaths were a bit bleh for me too. That Molly got to keep her use of “Bitch” was great, but her fight with Bellatrix was a bit underwhelming to how it was depicted in the book (where Molly becomes a full on Fury after Ginny is threatened), and also the final duel between Voldemort and Harry. The hole “shrivels to dust and blows away” thing just annoyed me. As I recall, in the book, Voldemort and Bellatrix left behind bodies. I might be wrong, it has been a while since I’ve read the book.

The final thing that annoyed me was the chemistry between Harry and Ginny. I know they have been an awkward love at best, but when they see each other, I don’t get the feeling of “Harry is ignoring her for her own good” and “She understands but is still hurt.” I got “Harry is kind of over her” and “She is hurt but okay with it.” It made their sudden admission less believable to me ten minutes later. Small nitpick, but I’m a writer, I look for these things. Ginny was also always my preferred “ship” for Harry anyway. Saw that one in Book One, yo.

So those are my nitpicks, and honestly, for as much as I wind-bagged on them, they aren’t much. For the most part, the big moments totally delivered on a major level (save poor Neville, that was just okay), the movie moved fast and gave us the closure we have been wanting for many years. I’d say I left the theater with the same warm, fuzzy, and vaguely empty feeling I had after finishing the book, although I got the book at midnight on release, I watched the movie on a matinee. Just saying.

In parting, I leave you with this, a parody of Katy Perry’s Firework song as done by the BYU Divine Comedy group: Firebolt. (Thanks to Peter Ahlstrom, assistant to Brandon Sanderson, for pointing this out to me).

See, it is rather simple.  American Horror films are morality flicks.  Don’t believe me?  OK, who is the survivor?  With rare exception, the chaste, semi-religious, generally all-around good person.  Who dies?  The characters who are, typically, two dimensional pastiches of a sin or vice.  Oh, they usually die because of their vices, too.  Tell me that isn’t a morality film.

So, why does this bother me?  Well, aside from the rather thin veneer of sloppily put together story, I can’t say I really care for heavy handed morality in the fire-and-brimstone fashion.  I am already an a. moral person (not amoral, just ambiguously moral), and my rule-of-thumb is “who’s it gonna hurt?”  Oh, and yes, I consider damage to others, and myself, on spiritual/mental levels in addition to physical.  So having people doing things that, in most cases, are rather harmless things (enjoying a frolick with someone, taking a shortcut, occasionally looking out for themselves first, even being a hair bit cowardly, or being (really) brave).  All these things, while not the most “moral” of activities, really don’t hurt someone, and even have advisedness to them sometimes.

Now, notice that I made the distinction of American Horror.  This fable-like nature seems to be oddly missing from things from across the seas.  Japanese horror is much more psychological in how it messes with the audience and the protagonist, and what European horror I’ve seen tends towards the straight up bizarre.  They don’t overly rely on sudden shocks or flashes to get a scare, and their monsters, while not always the best looking CG wise, can evoke a certain sense of dread that is what Horror should be about.  Not a lesson on who to be.

This is oddly converse to the heavy handed morals of Star Trek, which I love.  Maybe it is because those are less puritanical and more humanitarian, and perhaps it is because it is a positive reinforcement instead of a negative one.  A hopeful, wonderful future where the main characters are good people for the most part and prevail, or a dark world where people die for straying from the straight and narrow.  Not a hard choice, as I see it.

I’ll focus on Avatar, which is funny ‘cause I haven’t seen it.  I almost want to just to look for all the messages within, but it can be boiled down to a quick summary.  Hero’s world wants to invade Native’s world.  Hero becomes a native as a spy, ends up turning completely native, fights off uncompassionate home world.  This story has been done so much that it’s even a Disney movie.  Now, what was the creator of this particular story trying to say?  I’ve heard no less than three explanations.

1) It is a direct re-creation of the Last of the Mohicans/Dances with Wolves story, where the aliens are native Americans and the humans are the “The White Man.”
2) It is an anti-technology piece about the price of expansionist industrialism and the loss simpler, more holistic morality.  Of course nature wins of the industrialists because is more pure.
3) It is a war between Sci-Fi and Fantasy, and Fantasy wins because it is more appealing and hopeful where Sci-Fi is typically grim and pessimistic.

So, what did James Cameron want?  Honestly, I think he just wanted an awesome looking movie.  So how did all these other levels and messages get in?  Because he didn’t even think about them.  It is kind of like my earlier comments on racist stereotypes.  To make an Asian use a katana just because they are Asian is imbedding meanings you never meant to put there.  And just because you didn’t “mean it” doesn’t mean they aren’t there.

Now, I’m going to go right and say that this irks me on two levels.  The first is that people can’t just accept that sometimes a cigar is just a cigar, the second is that apparently I can’t either.  Why do authors (until recently because of super-awareness of the issue) typically write heroes of the same race, religion (or level of conviction), and gender as themselves?  Are we trying to say that white agnostic men (in my case) are the superior hero and neener-neener to anyone else?  No, not really.  We are just following the pre-coded paths in our thought process where we don’t even think about “what would the effect be if the protagonist was a woman, or a minority, or a different religion, etc.”  Again, this is changing, even in myself.  I have written a minority hero (at least in his world), and I have written religious heroes and heroines.  But I always have to think about it.  The default settings are what they are, just like in a video game, and if I’m lazy, I will use them.  And that, unfortunately, can be an endorsement of them.

A friend of mine commented that race is a myth, an imaginary thing made up for various reasons.  He may be right, but racism is hardly a myth, even if what it focuses on is, and it extends into everything.  I’m not going to say writing a “minority” piece is going to make something instantly good fiction, or something that is riddled with “lazy stereotypes” is instantly bad, but I do think in general at least a little thought needs to be put into realizing exactly what trope you are using, and if you really want (or care) if that message is carried through along with anything else.  A neglect to can make your entire story completely off base.  As a closing example, The Jungle by Upton Sinclair, which created a public outcry over the quality of meat and food in processing plants, was supposed to make people angry over the treatment of immigrants.  It caused the FDA to be made, but immigrants were still treated like mud.  Funny, ne?

So it has been the big thing lately for movies to be reboots or re-imaginings of already existing properties.  Either there are more books-to-movies being made or comics-to-movies or just redoing old movies new, the old phrase “originality is dead” has never seemed more true than at the theater these past couple years.  Why, and is this a good thing?

Well, the why is kind of easy.  As in easy money.  Cheaper and easier to just write a new script and story in an existing world and then spend your budget on actors and fancy SFX than to having something wholly original.  Also, you get the nostalgia crowd, those people who see the movie just because it is Ironman or Batman or Narnia.  I wouldn’t be surprised if this is even residual effects of the Writer’s Strike.  Well, better than feature length reality TV, right?

Now, I’m not going to say money is the sole driver, although in Hollywood, as I understand the dirty backside, it is a majority shareholder.  Some of it can also be the SFX themselves.  Could anyone really see the Ironman movie, or Where the Wild Things Are, or the new Batmans, or . . . or . . . or . . . without all of the nifty computer things we can do nowadays?  Heck, for the longest time, they said Lord of the Rings was unfilmable ever, but I think Peter Jackson did a spiffy job.  Also, I will admit, the new Star Trek was visually appealing, even if the Enterprise looked a little like an over-inflated balloon toy.

There can also be nostalgia on the other end too.  Directors and producers and writers wanting to see things from their youth redone in a fantastic new way.  Not like Sherlock Holmes hasn’t been “redone” on television and the silver screen plenty of times.  So yeah, lots of reasons why.

Now, the bigger question, is this good?  I am going to straight up say that I was not happy with the new Star Trek movie.  It was visually appealing, I admit, and a wonderful action romp.  Star Trek was always the first, not so much the second though.  Yes, there were fights and starship battles, but long extended scenes of combat?  Nope, at least not in bullet time with telescoping katana (that he fences with?  Nah).  The core of what Star Trek was, an optimistic future with altruistic heroes, that was gone.  As someone who watched reruns of the original series as a wee child, got to see the sixth movie in the theater (Undiscovered Country), and watched all of TNG as it aired, yeah, not a fan.

Then I saw the Sherlock Holmes movie.  I am not exactly a big S.H. fan.  I know who he is, I love the concept of the character, but I had never actually read any of the original material.  I adored the new movie.  Both for the action scenes which I fully accept were most likely not part of a Conan Doyle story, and for the plot and portrayal of the characters.  Now, as I understand it, the characters were not all that far off in portrayal as the Star Trek ones were, but there were still substantial changes to the concept of Holmes, and I heard some of the “purist” (much as I am a Trek Purist) declaiming the problems with the movie.  And, as I left, even before I read reviews by people I respect that are fans of the source, I knew that I had just seen “the other side”.  I just got to enjoy Holmes in the way that someone who was not all that familiar with Star Trek was able to enjoy the J.J. Abrams movie.

Yeah, things change, but a reboot is not really a reboot.  You are not trying to tell the exact same story in the exact same universe.  That story has already been told.  Could they have done the S.H. movie without even calling it that?  Just make it a fresh, un-attached to anything following the established S.H. tropes?  Yeah, but then it would have just been called a S.H. knockoff.  Now it is a retelling, a new way to look at characters.  Perhaps, just maybe, these fictional beings of authors’ minds are alive and breathing too.  And, just like people, they both age and change, sometimes look different to different people, and above all else, have their own destiny to fulfill.  I think I’ll enjoy watching reboots a little more from now on.  At least, so long as they don’t just have hideous faux-science about black holes in the middle of planets.  Come on, you can only ask so much of me, right?

So last night, I went and saw Where the Wild Things Are.  I’ll go ahead and say: yes, it is a very good movie.  Oddly enough, I never doubted that it would be,  and I honestly don’t know why.  After all, the source material is, as one other reviewer pointed out, only nine sentences long.  I had terminal dread over adaptations of children’s books with far more to work with, such as Cat in the Hat and the newer Grinch.  The new Christmas Carol is kind of up in the air with me, as is the new Tim Burton Alice in Wonderland thing.  Yet, I knew from the first time I saw the preview that Wild Things would be great. (spoilers below the fold)

So, I’ll examine this in two parts, my pre-movie feelings and post-movie feelings.  From the trailer, there was something to it that said this was going to capture the feeling of the book.  Yet, what was that feeling?  Why is it that among so many books for children, Wild Things is so amazingly quintessential.  Well, I’d say it is because it is one of the few books that doesn’t more or less tell kids to sit down and shut up, but instead encourages them to figure things out on their own.  The book tells the story of Max, a wild child who is sent to bed without supper, who instead of sulks, goes on a adventure where he gets to truly be  Wild Thing, has his rumpas, then after he’s had his fill, goes home.  The trailer conveyed that very feeling with a little something extra that I think really added, the whole “Inside all of us is Hope/Fear/a Wild Thing.”  I think the last thing that really had me on board for the movie is that the author of the book was on the production crew.

So, post movie: I think I have actually come to understand some of what the book was getting at even better.  Yes, I understand nine sentences better.  The movie deals not just with juvenile wildness, but with a very common thing for children, which is the demystification of the world.  Learning that things don’t stay static and rosy, and everything has to eventually change (at one point in the movie, they are worrying over the sun dying.  Wow.)  When Max is made the King of the Wild Things, he is charged with keeping away the sadness, and despite his best attempts to make everyone happy, that just isn’t possible, and he has to come to terms with it.  It even gets to the point where the Wild Things turn on him.  I’d dare say, it was actually pretty durn dark.  Yet, in the end, even the Wild Things come to realize that things can’t always stay the same, and Max then goes home.  You get the feeling that everything isn’t better, but it will be more manageable.

So yeah, I think Wild Things did well to keep the wonder of the original story and the core message, which I have come to see as a complex thing revolving around gaining your own understanding of things instead of just accepting what “Mom and Dad” say.  Strong messages of overcoming fear, understanding friendship, and even unconditional love all play a strong role, but through all of it, Max never has a single person there to act as a guide or mentor.  He figures it out on his own.  It is rather empowering to a young child to get that message, and perhaps that is why I have always loved that book.

Art: The art was gorgeous as usual with a Miyazaki film.  As one person—I can’t remember who—said, it is like a five-year-old’s acid trip.  The first couple minutes made me wonder for a bit as it was fairly simple, but it quickly picks up to the usual skillful anime with amazing visuals and ideas that I’ve come to expect from Miyazaki.  So yay art.

Voices: the English voices actually weren’t all that bad.  When I saw the preview I was scared, but that was only because they were rather crazy with how they spliced the dialogue to make the preview, so don’t let that scare you off from the English version.  The all-star cast they have really rocks it.

*Warning,  the bad below, and spoilers too!

Ok, so, stakes.  To give a brief, spoilerific summary, Ponyo is kind of the Little Mermaid story as Hans C. Anderson envisioned it.  The little boy (Sosuke) must love the mermaid (Ponyo) else she will turn into sea-foam instead of a human.  OK, well enough, but here’s the problem.  Never in the movie do I ever have the feeling of worry or dread that Sosuke will even come close to failing to prove his innocent 5 yr old love for his mermaid.  This is compounded as an issue by everyone else in the movie going on as if there is some worry.

So, yeah.  Stakes, they’re important.  As editor Debra Dixon said during one of her workshops I attended, the story needs a Big Dark Moment, usually in the last few pages, where the protagonist faces the critical decision or realization that could make for a “bad” ending if the wrong resolution is picked.  All good stories have them: Frodo succumbing to the Ring, Harry Potter actually dying to Voldomort, Richard Cypher being Confessed by Kahlan, etc etc.  If this moment is not handled correctly by the author, or if it comes at the wrong time, the entire story, no matter how wonderfully crafted, falls flat on its face.

So yeah, when writing, be sure to ask yourself: what is the big black moment?  What is the central, core conflict and problem that the protagonist is personally facing.  Note, this can be different than the driving conflict of the story, such as in (again thank you Ms. Dixon) the Wizard of Oz.  Dorothy’s big black moment was not fighting the Witch or reaching the Wizard, but her moment of thinking that she’d never get home after the Wizard leaves without her.  So yeah, ask yourself, know the answer, and be sure that whatever the big black moment is, we the readers actually are convinced that it is a big black moment from within the character’s head, not just because everyone else in the story is saying it will be.  K?