Category: Reviews

The five best moms of fiction

Let’s hear it for the moms. Mother’s Day is Sunday, so I wanted to share my top five favorite fictional mothers. 

Marge Simpson

Ah, Marge. She’s exactly what we all think of when we think of a mom. She’s kind,Marge supportive, loving. She bakes cookies and makes her family warm breakfasts every day. She believes in Bart even at his worst. She supports Lisa even in her most depressed. 

My favorite moment from Marge is when Lisa is depressed. Marge thinks back to her mother, and her insistence that Marge always has a smile on her face.

Marge tells Lisa that if she’s going to be sad that she should go ahead and be sad. She, Marge, would ride it out with her. 

Lynn Sear

I know it’s really popular to shit on M. Night Shyamalan right now, and with good reason. I’ll never forgive him for what he did to Avitar the Last Airbender. But that doesn’t mean that all of his movies are bad. Sixth Sense was, in fact, really freaking good. And Lynn Sear was pretty freaking cool.

Look at Sixth Sense from her perspective. Her kid is weird, he’s depressed. He spends more time than a normal kid talking to people she can’t see. And then, at the end of the damned movie, he starts babbling on about her dead father and how proud of her he is. And she just loves him and does her best to help with a situation she can’t begin to understand. 

Sarah Connor

Sarah Connor is a badass, scary as hell character who takes no shit from anyone. She raises her son the best way she knows how given what she knows. She makes sure that he has the training to survive the coming apocalypse. She hangs out with guys who will teach her son. She doesn’t give a damn about her own life, just so long as she can make him the man he needs to be.

Joyce Byers

Played by the fantastic Winona Ryder, Joyce is exactly the sort of adult we always want to see in horror movies. She sees the crazy shit going on, she listens to the concerns of the kids, and she listens to them! She doesn’t dismiss the kids because they’re children. Weird shit starts going down, and she’s paying enough attention to see it. And when her kid goes missing, she never gives up on him.

Morticia Addams

This is the hill I will die on! Morticia Addams is the best mom in fiction and no one can Morticiatell me any different! 

Morticia’s whole life is about her kids. She loves them fiercely, but she doesn’t hover. She allows them to grow, explore, make mistakes and learn from them. But she’s always there when they need her.

Morticia doesn’t miss PTA meetings. She goes to every open house. And when her kids start making some decisions she doesn’t agree with, like wanting to go to shudder Summer Camp, she supports them. 

So that’s my list of the top five best moms in fiction. Now I want to hear from you. Who’s your favorite fictional mom? Let us know in the comments below. 

Preorder Falling From Grace and be entered to win a free signed copy of Broken Patterns. Click here for details.

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Splitting books between two movies. Room for detail or a money grab?

Books, especially fantasy books, have experienced a great swelling of interest. Streaming services and cable channels scramble for new content. As they can often offer a long-form setup and give more room to tell a story, more and more good books are ending up there. And they’re doing way better there! For instance, the movie Series of Unfortunate Events with Jim Carey was terrible. But the series from Netflix with Neil Patrick Harris was phenomenal. Seriously, if you haven’t seen it, block out some time and binge it.

As an answer to this, movie companies have started looking for ways to give more space to tell stories the right way. They’re doing this by splitting books into multiple movies. 

Sometimes this works. Sometimes it doesn’t.

I am the first person to complain about books being made into movies. They always leave out the best parts! There’s always some scene or character I was excited to see that just never happens. And why did they never happen? Because they weren’t considered essential to the plot, so they were taken out for time.

Having two movies’ worth of time allows for the whole story to be told. Things that aren’tsplitting movies pic hp essential to the plot but essential to the enjoyment of the story are all there. The directors even have space to add in new elements as well. One fine example of this is Harry Potter and The Deathly Hallows. There’s a great scene with Harry and Hermione dancing to the radio while on the run. It’s a sweet moment in a dark time, and it wasn’t in the book. I’m glad it was in the movie.

That isn’t to say that this can’t be taken to far. Take, for example, The Hobbit movies. The Hobbit is a fine book, but it’s not a particularly long book. There’s not enough material to span two movies, let alone three. And unfortunately, the team responsible for beefing up the story wasn’t gifted with what I’d call creativity. 

So why do it all in that case? Well, the easiest answer is that three movies will make more money than one. I’m willing to pay that money if the movies are good. If the movie is full of unsatisfying filler, I’m feeling pretty ripped off. 

There’s another issue with the two to three movie system. There is by far too much time splitting movies pic hgbetween the films. Waiting for Mockingjay part two was torture. But then, I’m not a super patient person. 

Like most things, splitting novels between two movies have the potential to be a great choice. It also has the potential to destroy what would otherwise have been a fantastic movie experience. It all comes down to intention as most things do. Is the studio trying to give the story the space it needs? Or are they just after a double return on their investment?

So, what do you think? Are there books you feel needed the two movie experience? Or are there some that would have been better left to one? Let us know in the comments. 

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Dead Like Me, a series review

One thing I love about the modern way we watch tv is the ability to binge-watch old shows. Can you believe I’d never seen Seinfeld? We sure fixed that now.

Another show we recently binged that took a depressingly short amount of time was Dead Like Me.

Originally a Showtime show, we found it on Amazon Prime. 

Dead like me pic oneThe show centers around an eighteen-year-old girl named George (Ellen Muth). She’s killed by a toilet seat falling out of the sky.

Upon dying, George is chosen to become a Grim Reaper, as the Reaper who took her soul has now moved on. 

On where? No idea, that’s sort of a thing. None of the reapers know what’s waiting on the other side. They just know that they have to take the souls of those who have passed on to where they’re going. 

George is greeted by Rube, played by Mandy Patinkin. He dispenses sticky notes with a first initial, last name, date and time. 

This show was brilliant. We watched both seasons in no time at all. Let me break it down for you.

The show isn’t shy about hitting the hard issues in the first episode. Or any of them. The people who are dying aren’t bad. They’re children, beloved husbands, parents. Innocent, happy people who simply have an appointment.

For example, in the first episode, George has to take the soul of a little girl who dies in a train accident. We also take a good long look at what the loss of a child does to George’s parents. What losing a sister costs her little sister, Reggie.

This isn’t to say this show isn’t also funny as hell. I mean, George is killed by a falling toilet seat. She ends up working at a temp agency because being a grim reaper doesn’t pay. Literally, she’s not getting paid for this gig, and she still needs to do things like eat and pay rent.

Dead Like Me seems to go out of its way to not answer any big questions about the afterlife. The reapers don’t know. They only know that it looks different to every person and it looks fantastic. It’s like that episode of Are you Afraid of The Dark, Station 109.1. Near the end, Roy (played by Gilbert Gottfried) tells the main character that the afterlife is only terrible if you’ve led a bad life.

“If you’ve led a good life, it’s the best thing going.” 

One thing that I always like to see is well-written characters. Characters that feel like they could be people walking through my own life. And Dead Like Me hit that on every level.

Not a single character on this show was exactly good, bad or frankly sane. They’ve all go dead like me pic twotheir thing. They’re selfish, lazy, thieving, angry. Nothing is clear, really, about any of them. For example, the darling husband and I watched every episode together, and we couldn’t agree on whether George’s mom is a good woman trying her best, or a self-centered bitch who verbally abused her husband. I consider the fact that two people who tend to think alike on most things were so conflicted by this person.

So, that was all the good. Now, on to what wasn’t so great. 

The show ended after two seasons. And it ended with far too many questions unanswered. I feel I need to warn you now, a lot of questions just don’t get answered. It doesn’t end on this big awful cliffhanger. But you never find out how Rube died. You never find out what happened to Betty when she followed a dead person into the light. You never find out why one dead person turned into a graveling. You just don’t know. You don’t know if Mason ever gets clean if Daisy finds the fulfillment she’s looking for. You just don’t know.

And if you were hoping that the movie was going to answer any of these questions, you’re going to be sorely disappointed.

Let’s talk a little about the movie. Because while it wasn’t Serenity, it wasn’t what it could be.

The story starts with Rube finally getting his last reap and heading into whatever awaits Reapers after they’re done. He’s replaced by a slick Reaper named Kane. He encourages them to break all the rules, including saving people from their death, stealing from the dead and visiting family from their previous lives. Hilarity, and lots of pain, ensues.

But the whole thing is super convoluted and rushed. It was hard to follow everything as it was going so fast. I won’t say the ending wasn’t satisfying. But it wasn’t what it could be.

Would I say it’s not worth watching? Absolutely not. I loved every episode. Do I wish it was more satisfying? Yes, of course. But then, I imagine that George wishes the answers that waited for her after death was more satisfying. So maybe the show did exactly what it was supposed to do.

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