Will you forgive my error, dear readers? My miscalculations? To err is human, they say.
Anyhow,
#33 Paper Towns (estimated Monday rank: #44/43)
I have an 86-mile round trip to work every day. Some might say "Ugh, dude! Sounds awful!" And yeah, sometimes it is. But on the plus side, I listen to a lot of books on tape (CD). Thanks to this wonderful advent, I read/listened to a combined 29 books in 2015. Did it make me any smarter? More read, if you will? That, friends, is debatable. These sonic adventures ran the gamut from intellectual to totally stupid. The point is, you have to make the most of your commute, even if that means it sometimes includes young adult fiction.
I really liked John Green's Paper Towns as a book, and I liked about half of it as a movie. More accurately, the first half. The second half veered too far from the trajectory of the narrative for me to take it seriously. I won't bore you with why-especially because it's my duty to be keeping it #spoilerfree for those who read and have not yet viewed.
The story goes like this:
Quentin "Q" Jacobsen (Nat Wolff) is an Orlando-area high school senior who has, since he was a kid and actually hung out with her, obsessed over the legendary Margo Roth Spiegelman (British multimillionaire model Cara Delevigne), his across the street neighbor who somehow manages to constantly defy authority and commit various offenses all while being like, the most popular girl in school with the most popular hunk boyfriend. Q, on the other hand, spends his time hanging in the band room with his lifelong pals Ben (Austin Abrams) and Radar (Marcus), much further down on the Jefferson Park H.S. hierarchy. One night Margo shows up at his window (just like she did when they were kids, awwww) and asks to use his car, i.e., his mom's van. What transpires from there is a revenge plot against her now ex-boyfriend, her now ex-best friend and more involving, among other items, catfish, Nair hair removal product, saran wrap and vaseline. During their suburban Orlando terrorism ("We bring the RAIN, not the scattered showers," she says to him at one point), he feels alive and excited and different. The next day, she is not in school, not at home, not hanging around-she is gone. Through a series of clues she leaves him, he decides to forgo prom (in the book, it's graduation) to track her down, possibly a number of states away, and his posse decides to show their solidarity and come along.
The old adage is that the book is always better than the movie. In this case, it holds up. Some of the same snappy dialogue from the novel is present, as are some of the plot devices. I just don't get why they decided to make the changes that they did, because said changes were stupid and disappointing.
#32 He Named Me Malala
Malala Yousafzai, Pakistani teenager/speaker/Nobel Peace Prize recipient, is the subject of Davis Guggenheim's (An Inconvenient Truth, Waiting for 'Superman') latest intellectual romp. You may know the story by now: Malala begins writing a blog at age 11 detailing the Taliban occupation of Pakistan and her life surrounding the occupation, it gets picked up by BBC and distributed all across the world and, as a result of her outspokenness, she is shot three times by the Taliban on the bus ride to school. Miraculously, she survived the attack and has gone on to become a worldwide name in the fight for woman's equality, especially when it comes to the educational rights of women.
It seems like the aim of Guggenheim is to paint a portrait of Malala as a normal teenager who couldn't have a normal life if she tried. Throughout, there are animated sequences to tell stories from her childhood and fill in the blanks for the parts of her life that have not been covered by the ever-present cameras and scrutiny that come with being a worldwide hero. A lot of these carefully-scored sequences felt cheesy, as did the montages of her shaking hands with various world leaders. I would have traded them for more interviews with her and her father, both fascinating people who didn't necessarily need the cinema-magic treatment.
#31 Everest
A certain someone I know has a very good friend from college who is the daughter of Dr. Beck Weathers of Dallas, Texas. Why is that important? He is one of the characters profiled in nonfiction guru John Krakauer's Into Thin Air, the story of a 1996 Mount Everest expedition that ends in tragedy and would eventually become the basis for the movie Everest. Weathers is portrayed here by Josh Brolin, and yes, his daughter (our friend) is featured in a scene, rocking some decidedly '90s overalls and portrayed by British model-actress Mia Goth, age 21, currently dating Shia LeBoeuf.
Along with Dr. Beck Weathers on the ill-fated trek are: Rob (Jason Clarke), a New Zealander and expedition leader; Scott (Jake Gyllenhaal), an American expedition leader; Doug (John Hawkes), a mailman attempting for the second to summit Everest after failing the first; Yasuko Numba (Naoko Mori), trying to knock out the very last of the worldwide Seven Summits; journalist Krakauer (Michael Kelly, House of Cards' Doug Stamper); and base camp mother/cook/secretary Helen Wilton (Emily Watson). In layman's terms, and this certainly isn't a spoiler, things start out going fine for the crew until they are hit by a blizzard upon returning from the summit. This is not good. Will they make it back down to base camp before they run out of oxygen/freeze to death/get buried in football field's worth of snow?
For all of its faults (at times overdramatic, spread out among far too many characters), Everest was a pretty solid cinematic foray about people who risk everything for the thrill and the chance to plant a flag. It looked great, so much so that I had physical reactions to the height, namely shaky-ass knees when they extended a metal ladder over a crevasse and scaled across it. There's beauty in the near-vomit, folks.
Join me next time as we careen haphazardly into the top 30!
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