Abduction

Ok, I know, I know... You are right.  I should have known better.  I thought the movie looked like it could be good.  I thought maybe Taylor Lautner just sicked in the Twilight films cause everyone in the Twilight films sucks quite a bit.  Turns out that Taylor Lautner is actually just a pretty crappy actor.  I thought maybe Maria Bello and Sigourney Weaver would not have attached themselves to a film that was absolute crap. I was wrong.  

This movie was pretty bad from beginning to end.  It starts with Lautner's character, Nathan, riding recklessly on the front of a truck as it races through the mountains.  What this had to do with the rest of the film, I have no idea.  Next we see Nathan getting trashed with his friends and waking up passed out on some girls lawn.  This leads us to seeing his father push him to fight even though he is hung over.  The acting is forced, the fighting is obviously staged, the whole thing is trite.  

If you can't tell from the previews, Nathan isn't who he thinks he is, and neither are his parents.  His real father is CIA, well sort of.  His parents, well the people he thinks are his parents, are CIA agents as well.  They were assigned to protect him.  Then there is the bad guy, a weird man who wants a list that Nathan's real father has, but he has decided to go through Nathan to get it.  Oh yeah and then there is Nathan's shrink, Sigourney Weaver, who is CIA also.  As well as the head of the CIA who is trying to find Nathan but apparently can't be trusted.  Are you following all this?  If not don't worry, none of it was really important.  

What is important in this movie?  Lautner's fighting and jumping over things, that happens a lot.  Lautner making out with his female costar who is a bit of a wuss and with whom he had zero chemistry.  Alfred Molina being outsmarted by a teenager, that happens a good bit as well.  

I will finally admit it.  Taylor Lautner is a crappy actor.  The boy is as fine as the day is long, but he could not act his way out of a paper bag.  Too be fair to the young man, he was trained to fight and be an actor by Billy the Blue Ranger.  I guess if that is your mark for being talented then he is doing a fine job.  The rest of the cast pretty much stank up the screen as well.  The dialogue was forced, the fight scenes were obviously choreographed (and poorly at that), the acting was flat, and the story was just plain boring.  Please save your money.  Even fans of Taylor will leave the theather disappointed, there are only two scenes where he takes his shirt off.  When I shell out ten bucks I expect no less than five gratuitous shots of that beautiful body.  I mean seriously when he acts that badly, what else is the kid good for besides being some serious eye candy?

Happy Viewing (of anything else in theaters)!

Where Were You?

This weekend marks the tenth anniversary of September 11th.  Ten years have come and gone since that day when our world forever changed.  I teach high school students, most of them were too young to remember what happened.  They told stories of being told that a tower fell.  They knew it was a bad thing but they couldn't really comprehend why.  It is like my generation hearing about the assassination of our country's president, or the bombing of Pearl Harbor.  Events we know to be world altering, but that do not feel real.  This, however, was very real.

It was my senior year of high school.  AP Calculus was first thing in the morning.  I couldn't tell you what we were doing in class that day.  We were meeting in a classroom that belonged to another teacher. She came in at some point that morning, which was very unusual, and apologized for interrupting but she said she had to turn on the tv.  Something was wrong with the world trade center in New York.  Before that day I don't know that I ever would have been able to identify exactly what was in those two towers in a city full of such large buildings.

We turned on the television and watched the news reports.  At first we couldn't tell what was wrong, we could only see a lot of smoke coming from the building.  It quickly became evident that a plane had crashed into the side of the building.  Such a horrible accident, how did it happen, what went wrong with the plane?  I remember thinking, how tragically sad this accident was for the people in the plane, and I remember worrying for the people in the building, but at this point I was moving on and thinking that I should really get focused the big chemistry test next period.  That's when we saw the second plane.  I admit that I thought for a moment how strange it was that two planes accidentally crashed into neighboring buildings... something must be very wrong with the computers in the planes.  It slowly started to dawn on us that this had been done on purpose.  That's when the fear kicked in.  When the plane when into the pentagon, panic had taken the place of fear.  What else would be hit today, what would happen tomorrow?  What was going to happen to my dad?  Were the people on base safe?

Shortly after this, the bell rang and we switched classes. How strange it was to be going through the normal motions of a school day.  Shouldn't we be going home, locking ourselves up in a bunker or something?  I'll never forget my chemistry teacher keeping her cool that morning.  Most of us from calculus were headed right to chemistry, AP kids flock together, and we entered the room just going a mile a minute.  Did you hear?  What's going to happen?  How could this be happening? She quieted us down, and calmly handed out our tests.  She had to be kidding right?  Surely we would turn on the tv and keep watching the news.  She was not kidding, she told us that as soon as we change our plans and alter our lives in response to the terrorists, they win.  They may knock us down, but they don't get to keep us there.  So we took our tests and went on to our next classes... that is until the bomb threat.

I am pretty sure that there is a very special place set aside in hell for the person who called in the bomb threat that day.  Bomb threats were not uncommon in my life, they happened multiple times in middle school, military schools being an obvious target overseas.  I have never once been actually frightened of there being a bomb in my school, I always assumed that if you actually wanted to blow up the school you wouldn't warn anyone first.  I was scared that day.  They evacuated us to the soccer field, not a safe distance, and really open for flying shrapnel.  We milled nervously around waiting for the all clear to go back inside, and a shout rings out across the field "I see an airplane."  That kid has a spot in the special hell as well.  I went straight home after school.  My mom and I sat on the couch and watched the coverage of the events of the morning.  When my brother came home and saw the tv, he asked us what movie we were watching.  The middle school had not told the students anything.  Routines went back to normal, but life was never the same again.

It was not a lot more than a year later when I sat in a room in the history building of Georgia Tech and heard that the war had officially begun.  Of course for me the war began a long time before that, when we said goodbye to my dad and he headed to Iraq.  It is hard to describe what it is like to have a parent off at war.  I am so thankful to the community that I had built up around myself, and to my professors, for helping me at that time.  I have never been great at dealing with my feelings, and I did a truly fantastic job that semester of running away from my fears but embracing them at the same time.  I went a really long time skipping class and obsessively watching the news.  Luckily for me, I never heard the names of people that I loved.  There are so many people who were not so lucky.

I was sitting at CCF a few years later when I heard about the death of Laura.  Laura and I were not close, I don't think you could call us friends.  We went to high school together for one year.  It was a very small school.  Laura was a senior when I was a freshman.  We were both on the Model UN team that went to the Hague that year.  I stuck with my freshman friends, and annoyed her and her older friends.  She loaned me her shoes one night though.  They were cute and tall, I was clutzy and I broke them.  She was so angry with me.  I wrote her a letter apologizing about the shoes, she wrote me back telling me not to worry.  In my letter I wished her luck at West Point, she would be attending there in the fall.  Graduating just in time to serve in Afghanistan and get hit by an IED.  I learned of her death from my friend DeSean.  He had always wanted to fight in a war when we were growing up.  He spoke of it often.  We were able to meet up one spring in Tucson, TX.  Sadly, he wasn't the same young man anymore.   He had served in Afghanistan as well and seen up close and personal the effects of those deadly devices.

I ask you to take a look back this weekend as well.  Remember where you were when you heard about the twin towers.  Be thankful for the freedom that you have in your life.  If you see a soldier, a police officer, or a firefighter stop them to say thank you for everything that they do and for the sacrifices they make.  So many men and women have died since that day fighting to protect you and I.  We are truly blessed to have the freedoms that we do, but freedom is definitely not free.  It is paid for everyday by people in uniform, take a minute and say thanks, it may mean more to them than you will ever know.

Uglies

As most of you by now know, I am an avid reader of young adult fiction.  I gobble up these books like I used to gobble... well everything.  I think the appeal of these books is that you can fully escape into them.  It's like boarding a plane to a new place (without the pricey plane ticket).  People often dismiss these books as trivial, and it's true that some of them are.  Admittedly there was not a whole lot to the Pretty Little Liars series, what you read was what you got.  The truth is, though, that most of these young adult novels are quite thought provoking.  They ask you to question things that you have always believed, to look at the world through a different set of eyes.  I think this quality is especially important for the intended audience, teenagers so often merely skim the surface of life without bothering to think any deeper.  The Twilight series, the books people not the movies, encourages girls to find strength in themselves.  Not physical strength like what is so obvious in the vampires, but mental and emotional strength is what makes Bella special and in the end saves everyone.  The Host makes us question what it means to really be human, and look at the dangers of thinking you can fix all the problems of the planet.  The Heist Society books highlight the importance of family and not giving in to what seems like impossible situations.  The Uglies series raises a bunch of similar questions.

Uglies is yet another dystopic society book.  Years in the future, the Rusties (us) have all died out and civilazation has "evolved" and learned from it's "mistakes."  Realizing that people were treated differently based on their looks, the government gives everyone an operation at the age of 16 to make them pretty.  This way everyone is treated equally, no one is picked on for their looks, and problems essentially disappear.  Everyone is sorted into groups.  You start as a Littlie, living with your parents who are "Middle Pretties." When you are 12, and thus reaching your awkward years, you move into Uglytown and you are considered to be an "ugly".  When you are 16 you are turned surgically into a "New Pretty."  The surgery not only changes your appearance to what is considered classically beautiful (big eyes, smooth skin, full lips, medium height, medium build, silky hair, etc.) it also fixes your vision, strengthens your immune system and tones your muscles.  The theory is that when everyone is pretty, no one really stands out anymore.  The Uglies all tease each other and point out their worst features, but it doesn't bother them because they know when they reach 16 they will be pretty.  Anorexia is a disease of the past, so is obesity.

The questions this book raises are very interesting.  I can see the appeal of taking appearance out of the equation, but is their solution the best one?  Would it not be better if people could start seeing the pretty inside of people instead of having to have people look just so before they are valued.  I like the way it highlights the dangers of judging people based on their looks, their skin tone, their clothes.  Yes, the solution in this book was extreme, but was it warranted.  How far will we go in our hatred?  Not that long ago we enslaved people based purely on their skin.  We thought of them as inhuman, and why? Because they looked a little different?  Ridiculous.  The effects of that stupidity are still haunting us today.  Now we have somehow decided that people that practice different religions than us are dangerous.  We have based our beliefs of a whole group of people based on the actions of a few.  Ironically it is exactly that thought process that spurred the extremists to attack our nation.  If you could fix these things, would you?  Where would you draw the line if you thought you could help the world?  This book has definitely got me thinking, and I am hoping that it has the minds of the younger generation churning as well.

While I definitely enjoyed the story of Uglies, I found the writing to be a little immature.  It is definitely aimed at a younger group than I usually read.  The descriptions of situations were a little simpler than I would like, and the book reads very quickly.  Despite this simplification of wording the book still resonates and makes the reader question who they are and what they really believe about beauty.  I definitely recommend the story.  I am going to read the rest of the series as well, I hope that the thought provoking questions still ring out from the concurring pages.  I will definitely let you know.  :)

Happy Reading.