Warning: this review gives away the ending.

Me and Will (1999)
Directed and written by Melissa Behr and Sherrie Rose
Starring Melissa Behr and Sherrie Rose
A Melissa Behr and Sherrie Rose joint.

This is not a good movie.

It is a long movie. An unintentionally funny movie. An erratically dramatic movie. A very, very badly edited movie. But it is not a good movie.

Gory Losers? Groinal Lodgings?

Why, if it was so bad, did we watch the whole thing?

I’ll tell you why. Because the cable movie ratings warned us about how it had AC and GL and so forth, and my roommate was convinced that GL stood for Gay and Lesbian.

To be fair, we had plenty of reasons to think that they might, as I think my roommate put it, “realize that they really loved each other all along and then do it.” First of all, it was on Showtime, home of the cornier American version of Queer as Folk and of The L Word.

Secondly, it’s a buddy movie about two hot tough femme women riding motorcycles across the country, which is usually Hollywood code for lesbian. They even code one of them as “butch,” making her “the tough one” and naming her Will, of all things. Why Will? Because she’s butch, I guess. We didn’t really get any other explanation. The other one is named Jane, which at first I thought was just a pseudonym she was giving out. Nope. Her name’s actually Jane.

Thirdly, the only actual city we see on their road trip is San Francisco, in which they spend a ludicrous amount of time considering that they’re going from Los Angeles to Montana. They rave about how they’re going to move there. All right, they’re saying it because hot men are passing them – and there’s a reason they’re passing you, ladies – but then they go into a diner with a ridiculously flirty waitress (played by Traci Lords). We are just getting so many mixed messages here.

The Good, the Bad, the Plot, and the Editing

The plot. The plot? The plot….

Well, there was a plot. I remember it; we drove by it several times. Occasionally we even slowed down enough to see what was supposed to be going on.

See, they’re in rehab. And they hate rehab. And they like motorcycles. And one of them knows where the motorcycle from Easy Rider is, because her dad’s friend owns it.

So of course they break out of rehab, get ahold of some motorcycles of their own, and drive up to Montana to get it. I mean, wouldn’t you?

The rehab angle actually provides much of the movie’s unintentional humor. I watched it with my roommate, who had two years in Alcoholics Anonymous at the time, and a friend of ours who had a year, along with my own year and a half in various other twelve step programs. As my roommate remarked, it seemed like it was written by someone who had a month sober and said, “Oh wow! I should make a movie about this!”

This inspiration, you see, provided the subplot, which is that… well, it’s that Will has a drug problem, basically.

The subplot is supposed to be that Will and Jane make a passionate commitment to each other to stay sober until they find the famous chopper – and then get totally wasted. The movie has a very difficult time sticking to a plot, so this subplot basically turns into “Hey! Addictions sure are tough to shake, huh?” But we do get a lot of accidentally funny moments where one of them, out of nowhere, starts spouting twelve-step slogans, or yelping about “the committee in my head!” or reciting the Serenity Prayer – and then they go right back to their standard “bad girl” personas.

Pacing and Plot Problems

This would be a pretty good plot if it made any sense. I mean, yes, break out of rehab. But how? What are the dangers? Where are the wacky or dramatic chase scenes? How the hell did they get those motorcycles? We don’t know; I mean, we’re only the viewers. We only planted our butts in those seats for two entire commercial-free hours for this movie. Why should we know what’s going on?

I’m not bitter at all.

That’s one example of the terrible editing. We repeatedly go from Dramatic Disclosure to Sudden Resolution without much thought. The editing is problematic on another level as well. For example, when they go to San Francisco – inexplicable as that already is – we are treated to at least two separate montages in which they appear to cross the Golden Gate Bridge repeatedly. It’s not that they like to ride their bikes across the bridge and pay that stiff $5 toll over and over – it’s simple overuse of “Hey! Look! They’re in San Francisco! You know ’cause you can see that bridge!”

And that’s not even the bridge they would take if they were coming from L.A.

Then there’s the amount of time they spend in San Francisco. See? Why would they do this if they weren’t setting us up for that all-important lesbian subplot? Damnit. This movie – like the bad hustler movie we saw afterward, and the really terrible softcore porn after that – has a little difficulty with pacing. There are long pauses, slowly delivered dialogue, and a lot of scenes that just show people walking, or sitting, or putting their clothes on.

Possibly the most egregious examples of the movie’s rocky pacing are in their relationships with their parents. Quite a way into the movie, with no warning and no previous voiceovers, we are suddenly assaulted by the sound of Jane’s voice reading what appear to be cheesy song lyrics. But no: it turns out that she is telling us that Will was sexually abused by her father, and that Will suddenly realizes at this point that she needs to confront him. No sooner do we learn this than Will goes to a pay phone. She calls him, freaks out, hangs up, goes into a bar, does shots, vomits up blood, and they never, ever speak of it again.

The same time and effort are put into the five or ten minute scene with Jane’s mother. Her mom is clearly supposed to have obsessive-compulsive disorder; they play it subtle by not telling us this outright, but they are thwarted by the incredibly over-the-top OCD stereotypes. She twitches, she mutters numbers and counts fish sticks under her breath, she washes her hands every five seconds… they’re not taking any chances that we might not get it. She’s also quite abusive: she screams at her daughter at the drop of a hat, hits Jane’s hand when she puts a drink down without a coaster, and manipulates her shamelessly. Jane apologizes meekly and wipes off the coaster (not the counter) with the hem of her shirt. Yet after five or ten minutes of this cavalcade of scenery-chewing, Jane takes her mother’s hand and has a Meaningful Moment where All is Made Right Between Them.

Man… those two days of rehab must have been good.

Credit Where Credit’s Due

This movie did keep us guessing. It never took the easy solution to a crisis: although the famous chopper was ridiculously easy to get, none of the other plot points were resolved. Will does not confront or reconcile with her father, who we never see. She does not resolve her drug and alcohol abuse problems; in fact, she overdoses at the end and dies. When her boyfriend turns out to have been following her throughout the road trip and she gets back in his car, she doesn’t go back with him; he just comes along for the ride. When they stop to fix one of the bikes and a cop hits his wife with a flashlight, throws her out of the truck, and then Will and Jane try to rescue her and he comes back and assaults Will, they just let her get back in his truck. Nobody gets easy answers, least of all the audience.

The movie also gets some credit because it was written by the two leads, Melissa Behr and Sherrie Rose. One review raved about them; apparently they’ve been unjustly relegated to roles in “exploitation (movies) and cheap TV shows,” and wrote and produced this movie on their own. That’s pretty impressive, and this movie has great potential. Someday, perhaps, someone will remake it — or just edit the version that’s already out there.

I don’t know where this book gets off saying “A Novel” on the cover. Bookends is chick lit, pure and simple.

What’s the difference? Well, chick lit books are of course novels, in the sense that they’re fiction, but novels aren’t necessarily chick lit. Chick lit is very specific: it has a female protagonist; the purpose of the story is to hook her up with the guy who the author has, early on, chosen as the obvious perfect guy for her; it’s narrated by the protagonist; and the protagonist has almost no personality, only a collection of fun facts you know about her.

I’ll write later about Chick Lit Protagonist Syndrome, but suffice it to say that they’re almost universally wildly codependent, with very little self-knowledge, compulsive emotional eating, no idea whether the guy really likes them even if he comes in with “I Really Like You, Protagonist” tattooed on his forehead, and deep shame about themselves and especially their bodies (which are always telegraphed as very very beautiful despite what the protagonist thinks). Oh, and every man in the book is either gay, married to a friend of the protagonist’s, or a future love interest. There are no other options.

This one also can’t tell a story. Jeeezus. The pacing of this book is rocky; it starts out with several chapters about the characters in their early twenties, then rockets forward to the 31-year-old present with no explanation for the early chapters, then much later on brings back the one character who left the group in those early chapters. It’s obvious that she must be coming back, but only because it would be a terrible book if such a pivotal character were introduced and then totally dropped.

The story gets back on track with her return, only to drift off again toward the end as every plot thread has to get wrapped up, often off-camera. I can’t tell you how many of the characters’ experiences are just summarized for us by the narrator. There are times, in the last few chapters, where days and even weeks of intense character development are retold at a breathless pace. Like, she has the narrator tell us that her friend Si is telling us his friend Eva’s life story, and we hear the whole ENTIRE thing third-hand, and then we get this:

“And she really is [fine],” Si told me, in wonder, in awe, and then he said goodbye and put down the phone, because he had the rest of the night to think about what she’d said.

Come on: how would the narrator even know what he was going to think and do after he hung up? It ends up ringing false because (like any good codependent) the narrator has no boundaries. That is, Green is trying to write the story from the perspective of an omniscient narrator, but puts her in the body of a specific character who couldn’t know all this stuff and isn’t the right vehicle for it.

The problem here is that Jane Green has too many great characters with fascinating stories for one book – the way that she chose to tell it. Si’s story would have made a much better book. Or she could have told different chapters of Bookends from different perspectives, letting the overall story unfold as each character played their own part. That would have made an incredible book. Instead, the story is hamstrung by being forced through one rather passive woman’s perspective.

There are also too many stories happening – the opening of this new bookstore, Bookends, which is co-owned by the protagonist and another main character, and even lends the book its name, takes up a lot of time but barely serves to advance the plot at all. It’s a major undertaking, and a major success, and yet there’s no emotional impact to it: we’re told that it makes the other main character’s life very busy, which puts stress on her marriage, but it causes so few problems for the protagonist that it seems pointless other than as occasional comic relief.

So: chick lit. Because of the boundary problems, the Chick Lit Protagonist Syndrome, and the slapdash writing. I’m not saying that chick lit can’t be well-written, but this particular kind of slapdash fast-paced gallop through a storyline, with little pause for real emotional depth, is characteristic of the genre. I enjoyed Bookends anyway, but I don’t think I would read it again.

With Take a Thief, Mercedes Lackey has delighted fans and self-abusers alike with another steaming pile of horrific crap.

Think I liked it? Well, I didn’t.

Take a Thief is….

Dear god.

The Plot

Let’s take this first. This is the main reason people read her books, I believe.

There is one thing that Mercedes Lackey does well, and that is escapism. Specifically, it is the boilerplate plot from which all her books are spawned.

There is always someone who had, or is having, a terrible, terrible childhood. There is always some waif who gets rescued by the Throbbingly Beautiful And Incidentally Psychic White Horse and becomes a Herald. Or a Herald who has repressed all the pain and torment of their childhood and is only now resolving it, in the middle of winter, trapped in a cabin with the one other Herald with whom they are destined to Do It, in a howling snowstorm which is the worst blizzard Valdemar has seen since the Most Recent Dramatic Historical Event Which Everyone In This Book Is Referencing.

The symbolism! The electricity! The DRAMA!

People read Mercedes Lackey for the emotional release, just like a good (or in this case, an asstacularly horrible) Greek play. The more tormented the teen, the more they will enjoy Mercedes Lackey. In fact, readers of all ages can dive into any one of her over-italicized creations and thrill to the vindication of the mistreated character du jour.

Most of the biographical blurbs about her specifically note the fact that she had a “normal childhood,” and I’ve heard that she refuses to talk about her normal childhood in interviews. Other than to insist that it was perfectly normal. Yet many of her books involve the recurring theme of some mistreated youth overcoming tremendous odds to become a beloved hero and then graciously forgiving their family.

I’m just saying.

And it is addictive stuff; there is something exciting about the dramatic build-up and release of all these experiences, no matter how badly written. In fact, the worse the better – we don’t want our dramatic orgasm to be all cluttered up with silly things like a cohesive plot!

The Setting

I’m not being entirely fair. There is one other reason I can see to read her books.

She spends a tremendous amount of time in each book simply explaining exactly how every single teeny-tiny aspect of this particular place in her imaginary world works.

This may not sound like a good thing. And it isn’t. But there is something pleasantly hypnotic about it at times. She is the perfect author for any gamer who has ever spent more time fantasizing about creating a perfectly, infinitely detailed society and history than actually setting up a game.

Normally, this habit of hers drives me crazy. She desperately needs a decent editor, for this and other reasons. With proper editing, Take a Thief could have been a really snazzy short story instead of a mediocre novel. Of course, with proper editing, she would have far fewer books out, so it’s not really in her financial interest to sacrifice quantity for quality.

But in Take a Thief, she got away with it a lot of the time. This is one of the few novels of hers in which some of the ridiculous exposition made sense; for example, having seven pages of endless natter about exactly why and how Skif committed each crime did actually add something to the book.

If she could only have omitted every other ten-page stretch of expository obsessive musings and faux-humorous asides….

The latter is one of my main problems with “Misty” Lackey’s writing.

The Writing Style

Have you ever been invited to sit in on a game of Vampire: The Masquerade, or whatever the kids are playing nowadays? And you’re surrounded by people you don’t know that well, or at all, and they keep shouting out things that are clearly in-jokes, which don’t make any sense to you, as if the in-joke itself is inherently funny?

“Look! A frog!”
(uproarious, hysterical laughter all around)

Kind of like the advertising for Napoleon Dynamite, which offered a free watch that said “Iiiidiot!” out loud. I’m sure that’s hysterical to the fans, but I’m left wondering why I want a watch that insults me.

Well, “Misty’s” books are like that. She loads ‘em up with italics, dashes, and exclamation marks and proceeds to make jokes that — well — aren’t exactly funny! Like this:

This was not the sort of atmosphere he’d expect a priest to seek out!

To make matters worse, she elbows us in the ribs like that all the damn time. It’s not just for jokes: any time she wants to make a point, or show someone’s reaction to something, she breaks out the italics and the leftover bags of cut-rate punctuation.

Alberich examined the subject, asked his questions, made his statements, came to his decisions, and left it alone.

If he trusted the person in question.

And he trusted Skif.

That was a very, very strange realization.

And when all else fails, when she’s hammered her points in so hard that the hammer broke, she starts veering out of the universal narrator voice and breaking the fourth wall:

So Bazie had built this thing in the first place?

Best of all is when she does all of them at once:

Even if this one hadn’t actually murdered poor folks, he probably wouldn’t care that his friend had. And my Lord Rovenar was oh, so conveniently away on his family estate in the country.

But wait, there’s more.

The Characters

God help her, they speak in dialect.

Now, in real life, there are many reasons to write in dialect. But to invent her own accents and slang and differences in linguistic structure and then make everyone speak that way is… impressive, and also, astonishingly annoying.

People, in real life, had to fight for the ability to write in their own dialects, the way they spoke, the rhythms they grew up with, and still be published, and not get raked over the critics’ coals. Like Zora Neale Hurston. And this is what Misty does with that:

“Nah, I’ll be doin’ that t’ all uv them, then into th’ bleach they goes, an’ no sign where they come from!” Bazie rubbed his hands together with glee. “An’ that’ll mean a full five siller fer the lot from a feller what’s got a business in these things, an’ all fer a liddle bit uv easy work for ye an me! Nah, what sez ye t’ that, young’un?”

Skif could only shake his head in admiration. “That — I’m mortal glad I grabbed fer Deek’s ankle yesterday!”

And Bazie roared with laughter. “So’m we, boy!” he chuckled. “So’m we!”

It’s a little-known fact that Daw Books had to create a special area of their budget just for replacing Misty’s worn-out apostrophe key over and over.

The Screams Of Her Victims Before At Last Sweet Death Claims Them

I think my favorite thing about this whole wonderful fantastic book is the way she addresses child sexual abuse.

The plot, eventually, centers around what the FBI calls “child sex rings”. Additionally, Skif grows up working in his uncle’s tavern alongside a young woman who is forced into prostitution as well as taken into the proprietor’s bed. This is how Misty deals with them finding out that the young woman has just barely turned fifteen:

“Fifteen!” Skif’s eyes bulged. “I’da swore she was eighteen, sure! Sixteen, anyroad!”

Then again – he’d simply assumed she was. There wasn’t much of her, and she wasn’t exactly talkative. She had breasts, and she was of middling height, but some girls developed early. Wasn’t there a saying that those who were a bit behind in the brains department were generally ahead on the physical side?

And she says it again later:

In the years since running off, Skif had learned a lot about his uncle, and he’d learned that when it came to women, Londer had to pay for what he got. Since he’d already paid for Maisie, it followed that he’d probably seen no reason why he shouldn’t have her first. Not that he’d shown any interest in anything too young to have breasts, but half-wits often matured early, and Londer probably wouldn’t even think twice about her real age if he’d taken her.

See? It’s okay, because he didn’t rape her out of a desire to fuck little kids – he did it because he paid for her! And plus she already had breasts! And anyway, the real issue is that she looked eighteen!

Regardless of what it is that she meant to achieve with this subplot, all it does is detract from her later claim that child sexual abuse is “worse than death.” If Skif really thinks it’s worse than death, he should probably have a worthier reaction than “Oh well! Half-wits got some big boobs!”

That’s quality writing, right there. And, while she keeps sort of obliquely referring to people sexually abusing much younger children, she never lets the characters actually think about it or reference it openly – the entire thing is kept pretty much peripheral to the plot, even when it becomes the denouement of the novel.

Actually, I take it back. My favorite thing about the book is the way that she addresses horsefucking.

Now, she doesn’t talk openly about that either. But consider the following interactions between Skif and his magical pure white throbbingly beautiful psychic blue-eyed horse who “Chose” him:

She paced close to him, and once again he was caught — though not nearly so deeply — in those sparkling sapphire eyes….

He gazed into that abyss, and thought back at Cymry as hard as he could — :Is that the only reason you Chose me?:

Because if it was –

— if it was, and all of the love and belonging that had filled his heart and soul when he first looked into her eyes was a lie, a ruse to catch someone with his particular “set of skills”–

:Are you out of your mind?: she snapped indignantly, shaken right out of her solemnity by the question. :Can’t you feel why I Chose you?:

That answer, unrehearsed, unfeigned, reassured him as no speech could have. And something in him shifted, straining against a barrier he hadn’t realized was there until that moment….

:Skif — do you really, really want me to leave you?: The voice in his mind was no more than a whisper, but it was a whisper that woke the echoes of that unforgettable moment when he felt an empty place inside him fill with something he had wanted for so long, so very, very long –

He rushed to greet her, and as he touched her, he felt enveloped in that same wonderful feeling that had been creeping in all afternoon, past doubts, past fears, past every obstacle. He pulled her head down to his chest and ran his hand along her cheeks, while she breathed into his tunic and made little contented sounds. He could have stayed that way for the rest of the afternoon….

Isn’t that sweet? The pure, soft-core love between a boy and his psychic horse. It reads like the romance novels in the supermarket, the ones that used to inspire my friends to dramatic readings, the ones where people would gasp out things like “So bonny! So very, very bonny!”

Mercedes Lackey’s writing bears every resemblance to a quasi-historical romance novel with a geek twist. She pumps it out at great velocity, with little variation in the basic characters, setting, or plot elements; she uses wildly purple prose at times, and lacks any subtlety in her language; she coyly skirts the edges of any really difficult issues, or treats them with very broad strokes, as if they were dressing for the main characters’ emotional roller-coasters; and she puts most of her literary effort into trying to show off the sheer detail of her fictional setting, impoverishing the characters and robbing the novel of any emotional depth.

However, it must be said that this is not her worst book. Her stand-alone novels tend to suck less than the stories which she tries to stretch into trilogies. So if you must read a Mercedes Lackey novel, this might as well be it.

I’ve heard a couple of people condemn this series as badly-written, “trashy” in the bad way. I don’t really get that; I’m INCREDIBLY picky about writing, how can anyone be pickier than me? They must have a different meaning for “trashy.” And for bad writing.

I really enjoy Charlaine Harris’ writing style. Her other mysteries tend to be a little on the depressing (or in some cases just depressed) side for me, but what we now call the “True Blood” series is saved from that by heroine Sookie Stackhouse’s determined optimism.

It took me a while to figure out what Harris was doing that I liked so much, stylistically. I finally realized that she is in touch with the sensory world here in a way I haven’t seen in her other novels or in many books in general. The pacing alternates between action and regular, everyday experiences like sunbathing or taking a bubble bath. Sookie, as the narrator of the series, shares her feelings about everything, often subtly – both physical feelings and emotional ones. Harris doesn’t hit us over the head with “THIS IS HOW SOOKIE FEELS ABOUT THIS GUY,” either; she weaves all these psychological and sensory impressions into the narrative so deftly that it’s easy not to notice they’re there, even as they flavor the entire experience of reading her books.

I enjoy the fact, too, that these are survivor novels. It’s made perfectly clear from the beginning that Sookie was abused by her “funny uncle”. It’s a more active plot line in this first book, but Harris doesn’t just drop it after that; the fact comes up from time to time in later books as appropriate, just as it would in real life. Sookie occasionally gives some thought to how it’s affected her, and we can see more ways that she may not even realize: her self-image, for example, starts out fairly low and slowly blossoms over the course of the books, and she is a 26-year-old (if I remember right) virgin when the books start, which supposedly is because she is also telepathic but can’t be totally unconnected to the abuse.

Fun, adventurous reads, although I will say it gets pretty violent from time to time. There’s always the sense that the good guys will win, as opposed to in real life, plus the excitement of seeing HOW they will win – since werewolves, magic, fairies, and all kinds of other really well-thought-out supernatural nuttiness keeps getting thrown into the equation.

Really, my ultimate recommendation for these books comes from a gut level: no matter how many times I read them, I still just want to read them over and over and over again. There aren’t a whole lot of books that work that way for me, so the Sookie Stackhouse books hold a special place in my heart.

Sidebar: I enjoy the HBO series a great deal too; although they often take extreme liberties with the plot and characters, so far (halfway through the first season – yes, I’m behind) the plotlines still seem very true to the original characters. Cut for spoilers: Read the rest of this entry »