The Zaniness of Small Events

This break in the Maui series, the Road to Hana, is brought to you by the letter 'M' and signals a temporarily instituted hold on any further instalments in the who shebang. The Road to Hana is one of our "series as we get to 'em"'s, which means the week's issue is only written as we get to that week, it isn't a longer piece that's being broken up into weekly instalments. We have no idea how it's all going to end, the vast majority of the time. Let me tell you why.

Having just finished two promising (one promising because it actually started out quite strong, the other promising only because a lot of people crowed about how good it was) pieces of entertainment that wound up falling short it hit me (the Head Editor me, the one with control over what goes on on this site, unless I happen to be on vacation) that we sometimes fall into the same trap with our series.

Christopher Moore's Fluke: Or, I Know Why the Winged Whale Sings, to start out with, is very funny, and typically startling Moore. Startling meaning the person lying next to you in bed will jump when you guffaw like a stuck donkey every once in a while at, say, a stoned surfer boy Rastafarian from New Jersey but who thinks he's a native Hawai'ian (and who hasn't been there?). Guffaws per minute it wasn't as funny, at the outset, as Lamb : The Gospel According to Biff, Christ's Childhood Pal (Lamb is funny all the way right through, easily Moore's best book to date). But it's funny. Read-out-loud worthy, as well. Well, at least read-out-loud worthy in that I read bits of it out loud to try and explain why I wasn't laughing. A pregnant woman can get suspicious sometimes, and will imagine you're plotting to kill her if you guffaw out loud and don't explain why you did.

And the descriptions of Maui were fantastic, perhaps moreso because we'd just been there a few weeks before. The book had that distinct feeling of "Hey! We've been there! Wow! And there! And there!" You get to feel a little smug when you've already visited places you're reading about. Smug that you've had the foresight to visit somewhere worthy of writing about (Swindon, of course, being a notable exception, from Jasper Fforde's excellent Thursday Next series - starting with The Eyre Affair: A Novel). Maybe that's just me.

So that was going really well. Until the main character got eaten by a whale. At which point Moore kind of treaded water for a few chapters, something I recognize in my own writing from time to time, especially the travelogue series, in which I forget, at some point in the middle, where I was going with a particular joke or, because I've told a particular joke I know find myself in the literary equivalent of a corner of the kitchen with wet paint all around me, including in the way to any conceivable exit.
So you wind up running in place, and suddenly you've been stuck in one place for three issues and it doesn't look likely that you've got a way to move on in the next week's. That's how Fluke started to feel. And when the whale parts are done and everything's sort of normal again... well, let's just say it never gets up and runs ever again. Or maybe it does. Maybe it was just me, laid low after seeing I do in a Christopher Moore book. Something I do that isn't particularly good form.
It was a good read, but just a bit of a let down, especially after how it all started out, and his previous novel Lamb, which is something I wish I'd gotten around to writing before Moore, just so I could sue him or pillage sales or something.

So that was one. Not a huge let down, in and of itself.

But then along came... Napoleon Dynamite. I had heard a lot about this film. That it was brilliant. That it was very, very funny. Original and hilarious.

I have to say I thought it was a complete and utter pile of... all right, well, let's avoid profanities, as I've gotten this far without them. For the most part. It was awful. I hated it. I hated the writers for writing such a miserable, boring film. I hated the actors, who didn't manage to give a lifeless, pile of... bananas, rotten bananas, that's it, script. I hated the director for giving life to this thing. Twice, once in the short included on the DVD and then a second time with more funding. I hated the people that gave him more funding to make the larger release. What were these people thinking? I hated MTV for releasing such a film, and Fox Searchlight Pictures for doing something in there, too. It really just set off a whole wave of hatred towards an industry that got this thing made. And then the geeks that recommended it. Because they had to be geeks, because our offices are now based in one of the most densely populated geek areas in the world, "Silicon Valley," home of the most absorbed people you'll ever meet.

Okay. Deep breath. Napoleon may have been true to life in Idaho in the late 80s or early 90s, but who the hell cares? Loving detail? Moon boots? Friendship bracelets? For love the love of all that's holy and good, you don't need a film about this stuff, just go watch one of the multitude of programs on VH1 about nostalgia for the 80s and 90s.

But it's comedy! Absurdist comedy! "A good, clean family film, no sex, no swearing, nothing like that," says one of the characters in the DVD special features!

Oh, look, this just hurts too much, it's a little like picking a scab. Only it's a giant scab, like the one left behind if your leg was sawn off at the knee, and the scab is still too fresh to have healed properly and you wind up bleeding to death. Napoleon Dynamite is not a good film.

But, at any rate, it made me feel like, if I couldn't make the Maui series interesting, I wasn't going to do it at all, the world is already a bleak enough place with crap like Napoleon out there.

See you next week!

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