Weekly Geeks 2009-27: Best Movie Adaptations

Back in March, Weekly Geeks discussed the worst book-to-movie adaptations. This week, we're talking about the best.

The movie that immediately popped into my head is also one of my all-time favorite movies, Stand by Me, based on the novella The Body by Stephen King. The movie stayed pretty true to the book except for one scene in the book that wasn't in the movie, but, quite frankly, I thought that was a good decision. It wasn't central to the plot at all, and it wasn't anything that I cared for.

I loved this movie when it came out in 1986, and I still love it today. Wil Wheaton, River Phoenix, Corey Feldman, Jerry O'Connell and Keifer Sutherland were all young and relatively unknown at the time, and I think they all did an amazing job. Richard Dreyfuss is perfect as the narrator of this story, and, of course, Ben E. King's "Stand by Me" (listen to a clip below) leads the soundtrack perfectly. Having Rob Reiner at the helm as director probably didn't hurt either. Here's a YouTube clip of the first few minutes of the movie. I wouldn't listen to it at work or in front of the kids, but that's just me. Of course, you never know how long these things will be available, so here's a link to the trailer at IMDB.com as well.

Another movie that I actually liked better than the book is The Hours. I thought the book, by Michael Cunningham, was OK, but the movie really got to me for some reason. It was one of those that you just want to sit and digest for a while after you watch it-no talking, no going out for dessert and coffee or shopping with friends afterward, but in a kind of depressing, I-think-I-just-want-to-sit-here-and-cry-cathartically-for-a-while kind of way. (I'm really selling it, aren't I?) Again, a stellar cast leads this film which was nominated for 9 Academy Awards (and numerous other awards). Nicole Kidman won for Best Actress in a Leading Role, and Julianne Moore and Meryl Streep turned in wonderful performances as the other female leads as well. Ed Harris (love him!), John C. Reilly, and Jeff Daniels make their appearances as well. You can watch the trailer here, and as long as it's available you can watch this clip which, I think, is a pretty good explanation of why Nicole Kidman walked away with the Oscar.

Incidentally, our local theater just reopened. It's just a small, two-screen theater, but it closed down about a year-and-a-half ago due to financial constraints. A local couple bought the theater, renovated it and reopened it this weekend as the Laie Palms Cinemas, just in time for the release of the latest Harry Potter movie. We didn't make it out for the premier, but hopefully, they were able to draw a big crowd and they will be successful. This theater is about 10 minutes from our house, and is the only place that I know of that uses actual butter on their popcorn, not oily-flavored crap "butter flavoring." The next closest theater is about 30 minutes away, so I am looking forward to having a theater nearby again!

Garden Bloggers' Bloom Day-July 2009

Boy, it doesn't seem like any time has passed at all since our last GBBD, but here we are again! To see what else is blooming around the world, visit Carol at May Dreams Gardens. Here's what's blooming in my yard.

Leucophyllum frutescens, or Texas sage, has been a good plant for me. I've had it in a container for a couple years now, and it doesn't do much, but when it does it's very pretty. It's drought tolerant, which is good, seeing as how my pots experience frequent bouts of drought. I believe mine is the 'Green Cloud' variety. Mostly, it's just a nice foliage plant, but after a good rain pretty pink flowers just pop out all over the place.

Here's some bougainvillea, lining up nicely for a shot.

A camera shot over the rock wall reveals that my lantana are still doing well.

Last month, we saw Pam Tajima. Pam is starting to fade a little bit, so this month we'll be looking at...Pam's unnamed brother. Dang. He's got a tag, but there's nothing on it. We'll call him Bob.

I was having a hard time getting a clear picture of Bob. Seems every time I tried to take a picture I was getting jostled around by some mysterious force. Apparently Buster was not as interested in my picture taking as he was in letting me know that he had not yet had breakfast.

Hello. Can I help you?

Technically this isn't blooming, but I thought the red ti plant was pretty in the morning light.



Remember my mysterious purple plant that we watched unfold and grow? Well, now it's blooming too. Always something new with this one!

My golden shrimp plant, Pachystachys lutea was a big hit with everyone last month, and since it is still blooming like crazy I thought I'd provide a close up shot.

Again, these aren't exactly "blooming" but they are popping up all over my lawn, so I thought I would include them too.



And, finally, my poor crape myrtles-they went from sticks that showed no sign of ever blooming again last month to past their prime this month, but they were quite pretty in between.

This month was kind of a challenge, but I hope you all enjoyed hanging out with me and Buster in the garden!

What I'm Reading Now-Gang Leader for a Day: A Rogue Sociologist Takes to the Streets

This is another overdue review that I am now up-to-date on thanks to all the Weekly Geeks who asked me questions about it. I'm glad they did too because a lot of the questions that people asked are probably not the questions I would have thought to address otherwise.

Cover via Amazon

Gang Leader for a Day: A Rogue Sociologist Takes to the Streets by Sudhir Venkatesh-I thought this book was fascinating. This was another airport find, and it was a good one. Many weekly geeks had similar questions. Eva from A Striped Armchair asked, "Was Gang Leader for a Day intellectual? Or did the author make lots of questionable assumptions/conclusions? (I wasn't a fan of Freakonomics, so if you've read that, do you think I'd enjoy this one?)" I didn't read Freakonomics, so I can't really compare the two, but I felt like the information that was being presented was pretty sound. Mostly it was the author's real-life experiences, but he also presented some background information about the area that he was researching to bring together a bigger picture of how a decision on the city level, to tear down a housing project for example, affected not only the residents of that community on an individual level but also the gang structure within that community and other neighboring communities as well.

Kim of Sophisticated Dorkiness wanted to know if I thought "the author was able to keep his objectivity when writing about his experience? And how well did he balance storytelling with facts and figures to give some context about what his experience meant?" and Jennie at Biblio File wondered, "Is Gang Leader for a Day an overly academic book, or is it written for a more general audience?"

First of all, I don't think this is an overly academic book at all, and it is totally accessible to a general audience. If you're pushing this one aside because it sounds too much like school work, you're missing out. It's not all facts and figures and statistics at all, in fact, I think that was sort of the point of the book. He set out to find people to fill out surveys, to gather the data, to get the facts and figures; what he found out was that that information is useless if you don't understand why. Why are these people poor? Why don't they have jobs? Why don't they just move to a better neighborhood? Why do they put up with gang activity where they live? Why do women sell their bodies? Why don't they just apply for government aid?

...which brings me around to Kim's question. I don't know if the author was able to remain entirely objective; he did a good job of trying to stay neutral and objective, but he was writing largely about his experience hanging out IN A GANG. He was not a gang member; he was a nice boy from California who was in grad school, trying to gather some good information on poverty to impress his professors. Some subjectivity is going to creep in. He did try to assess things objectively, but in order to actually gain any valuable information, he had to get personally involved, not only with the gang leader, JT, but with the tenants of the building that JT's gang lived in, JT's family, the leader of the local Boys & Girls Club. As he found out, walking into the midst of a gang with a questionnaire full of questions like, How does it feel to be black and poor? wasn't really an effective way to gain useful information about people living in poverty. After the author spent an angsty night being held captive in a stairwell by the members of JT's gang, the Black Kings, JT's advice was:

"Go back to where you came from," he told me, "and be more careful when you walk around the city." Then, as I began gathering up my bag and clipboard, he talked to me about the proper way to study people. "You shouldn't go around asking them silly-ass questions," he said. "With people like us, you should hang out, get to know what they do, how they do it. No one is going to answer questions like that. You need to understand how young people live on the streets."

And that's what he did. For about 10 years, Sudhir hung out with JT, getting to know the members of the Black Kings, finding out why people would join a gang, put up with a gang selling drugs in their building, why police officers often showed up to mediate gang disputes rather than throwing as many gang members in jail as they could.

This isn't a book about how many youth are dropping out of high school and joining gangs each year and what percentage get arrested and how that percentage correlates to average yearly income, etc. If you've ever wondered why you can't just take a gang off the street and get them out of a neighborhood read this book. They are so insidiously woven into the neighborhoods that they are involved in, at least big organizations like the Black Kings were. The gangs sell drugs in the lobby of the apartment building, but in return they give money to the building president so that she can buy supplies for the children in the building. They cook crack in the vacant apartments, but they provide protection from abusive boyfriends to the women who live in the building. JT requires all of his gang members to receive a high school diploma or GED, and they are not allowed to use drugs. So, he keeps them in school and off drugs for the privilege of selling drugs, earning money, and rising up the ranks within the gang. Crime is kept to a minimum because if the cops come around, the drug business gets interrupted and people lose money, and people don't want to lose money...

which brings us around to what Trisha at Eclectic/Eccentric wanted to know, "...what did you think of Gang Leader for a Day? Was it an honest look at life in a gang or was it more of a kitchy book - was the author just interested in sensationalism?" I thought that this was a pretty honest look at things. It wasn't overdone with gang shootings and people shooting up on drugs or anything like that. Those elements were present, but they weren't as prominent as you might think, and they were presented as a realistic part of the everyday life, not just as the next sensational thing the author witnessed. The title comes from a day when the author is giving JT a hard time about his role as gang leader. He essentially says, "How hard can it be? You go around, you talk to people, you make arrangements for things; I could do that," and JT gives him the reigns to be in charge for a day, to handle all the things that he has to handle every day, and Sudhir realizes that there's more to being a gang leader than just being a thug. You can watch a clip of the author talking a little more about this here.

I don't want to say that this book glamorizes gang life, but it does present the human side of it, makes you see that just because someone is in a gang doesn't mean they are a bad person. It explores the reality of living in poverty, living in a gang, surrounded by a gang, protected by a gang, threatened by a gang. Also, if you're someone who can't stomach hearing (or reading) the N-word, this book is not for you. It is used with abandon because that's how it is used on the street. It's not pretty but neither is real life sometimes.

Thanks to everyone who asked me questions about this book. I hope I answered all of them. If not, feel free to ask me more. It's been a couple months now since I read it, so I didn't have a lot of quotes or examples top-of-mind, but my overall impression was that this is a book I would definitely recommend.

Traveling to Thailand

**Edited 7/17 to add: I've listed this as my Weekly Geeks post for Weekly Geeks 2009-26:Where in the World Have You Been? I wanted to get another post up with more information about my actual trip, but so far, this is all I've managed to post, and it DOES fit in with this week's theme. :) If you want to hear more about my Thailand travels please come back during the week to check for updates.**

Wow, where to begin?? I didn't mean to mysteriously disappear, but I'm always weirded out about announcing, "Hey, world, I'm going to be out of the country, away from my house, for the next 10 days!" It's not like I've got my address posted here or anything, but you know. I also didn't mean to cause anyone anxiety about wishing me a good time. Nanny Goats in Panties wished me a fun time and then worried that maybe I was going in for heart surgery or something, which would have been awk-waaaaaard. But no worries! I did not go away for surgery (even though I did go to Thailand and I hear you can get all kinds of things done there for a lot cheaper than you can here), and I did have a good time in some unexpected ways.

The main reason for our trip was to attend my bother-in-law's wedding. Since we were going to be all the way in Thailand, we figured we might as well make a vacation of it too. Now, I love living in Hawaii, but travel to virtually anywhere is a bitch. Thailand involves an 8-hour plane ride to Tokyo, then the inevitable 4-hour layover, then another 6 hours from Tokyo to Bangkok. Upon arrival in Bangkok, we waited for my husband's two other brothers to arrive from the U.S. mainland (so, okay, granted, they had a lot more traveling to do than we did) then had a 2-hour drive to Pattaya where my brother-in-law who was getting married lives.

Ah, but this brings us to our first photo Q &A from the other day.

Q: Where can I get me a beer machine like that??

A: Well, I don't know if you can get yourself a beer machine like this, but you can go visit one in any of the airport lounges in Narita International Airport (NRT), assuming, of course, that you can get into the airport lounges. My husband travels enough that he can. There is a cooler of chilled glasses next to the machine, and as you can see, you put the glass on the machine, press a button, and it pours you a perfect glass of beer. This is one of the ways in which the 4-hour layover is made more tolerable in Japan. Ah, wouldn't you know it, someone has posted a YouTube video of the beer machine in action.

Another way to kill time while wandering around Narita is to check out the Nippon Origami Museum that is located in Terminal 1. They have examples of all kinds of origami figurines, but my favorite was the basset hound.

Also, the hippos were pretty cute.

But, really, they have all sorts of things to look at; there are entire dioramas showing things like village life and dinosaurs if I remember correctly, which I may not because, really, I just wanted a picture of the basset hound, and no matter which way you cut it, I was on at least 6 hours of travel by the time I reached Narita. Either way, the displays were way more impressive than any of the shoe-box and chicken bone dioramas I made as a kid. What? You never made dinosaurs out of chicken bones as a kid? Huh. I guess my elementary school was just cooler than yours. And probably in a much drier climate as well.

Um...anyway, our flight from Tokyo to Bangkok was fairly uneventful, except that I didn't realize it was going to be a 6-hour flight. For some reason, I had it in my head that it was like 2 or 3 hours, maaaybe 4. So, I was almost in tears when, at the 4-hour mark, I realized that we still had about 2 hours to go. Luckily, we at least had a pretty view for part of the flight. The sun was setting as we were heading to Bangkok, and this was the view from our window.

I've never really been above the clouds for sunset, and,I have to say, that's one of the coolest sunsets I've ever seen.

Coming soon!

Where can I get me a beer machine like that??

Why are three grown women dressed like they're going to prom?

I'm riding an elephant!

Where was I when this storm moved in?  Hint:  Not inside!

And finally, horseback riding 101.

Out of touch, but just for a bit

I am going to be taking some time off, so I will be post-less and comment-less for a while.  Please feel free to leave comments-I'll get back to them soon.  I will also finish my pending book reviews when I get back too, I promise!  Until then, be good and have fun!  

What I'm Reading Now-Fables Vol.1: Legends in Exile

My next Weekly Geeks catch-up review is:

Fables Vol. 1:  Legends in Exile by Bill Willingham-This is the first graphic novel that I have ever read, and I had been hearing so many great things about it, I figured it would be a good place to start.  Briefly, all the characters that you know and love from your childhood stories like Snow White, the Big Bad Wolf, Blue Beard, Prince Charming, etc. have been run out of their homelands by an evil adversary and are now living in Fabletown among us normal folk.  They have all agreed to set aside their differences, asylum has been granted for past deeds (like giant killing, home destruction, and granny consumption), and they are preparing to celebrate Remembrance Day when the murder of Rose Red sends Fabletown's sheriff, Bigby (The Big Bad Wolf), on a search for the killer.  

Quite a few of you had questions about this, so let's get started!  

Nymeth of Things Mean a Lot asks Are you planning to continue with the series? I'm not sure that I necessarily "plan" to continue with the series; let's just say, I wouldn't be averse to it.  I did enjoy it, but I'm not going crazy wondering what happens next.  Although...somebody call me if Snow and Bigby ever get together cuz I'm pretty sure that would be hot!  Who was your favourtie character? Why? Speaking of Bigby, I think he might be my favorite character.  He's great as the reformed-bad-guy-turned-sheriff, he can still wolf-out in the name of the law, and he looks hot in a towel (and it doesn't look like I'm the only one who thinks so!).  I also kind of like Prince Charming though.  Well, actually, I found him despicable, but that's exactly what I liked about him.  In all the fairy tales he's the hero, the one true love, the savior, and here we see the other side of that.  He's a mooch, and a playboy and totally full of himself.  No wonder Snow White divorced him!  Do you think the concept behind the series was well executed in this book? I do think the concept was well executed.  I like some of the ideas that Willingham came up with to make the story workable.  For instance, Jack (famous for growing beanstalks and killing giants), is a prime suspect in Rose Red's killing, but all of that giant killer stuff is inadmissible since that happened before the general amnesty.  I also liked the little side stories we got like Beauty and the Beast having marital difficulties-she gets mad, he starts turning back into a beast, and it's hard to keep a low profile when you're walking around all half-beasty and all.  Pinocchio is pissed because he's over 300 years old and still hasn't gone through puberty.  Little things like that make for a fun departure from the main story.   

Bart, over at Bart's Bookshelf said, I've heard so many good things about the series, if you had to pick one thing to convince me to go out and find a copy what would it be? Honestly, the fact that it's so short is a big sell for me.  My tastes might not be your tastes, what I liked you might not like, I've never read anything else in this genre, so I don't really have anything to compare it to, etc.; but you can always give it a try, and if you don't like it, you haven't wasted days reading it, and if you do, then bonus!  

Eva from A Striped Armchair wanted to know-Did you enjoy Fables? What did you think of the illustrations? I did enjoy it, and I liked the illustrations OK.  They didn't particularly stand out for me in any way, but, again, I don't really have a lot to compare them to.  What I did like was that at the beginning of each issue appears the original series covers by James Jean and Alex Maleev, which are quite different from the artwork within each issue.

Thank you, everyone, for your questions!  I enjoyed my foray into the graphic novel set, and I will certainly let you know if I come back for more.  

Other reviews:

Eva at A Striped Armchair

Chris at Stuff as Dreams are Made On...

Joanne at The Book Zombie

Fyrefly at Fyrefly's Book Blog

Kim L. at Bold. Blue. Adventure

Sally at Books and Musings from Down Under

Have you read this book?  If so, what did you think?  Will you be reading the rest of the series?  How do you like it compared to other graphic novels?  If you've reviewed this book let me know, and I will add a link to your review (Nymeth, did I miss yours?)