“One of the sanest, surest, and most generous joys of life comes from being happy over the good fortune of others.”
~Robert A. Heinlein (Stranger in a Strange Land)
Let it not be said that I am not generous, for I want to share my happiness with you! I arrived home Friday afternoon to find a package on my doorstep from Annie, the 10 year old reader extraordinaire, who participated in the recent Once Upon a Time Challenge. During the challenge Annie read the Lord of the Rings books for the first time. Due to some wonderful good fortune I was able to share my love of the Lord of the Rings films with Annie and her mother. The above arrived by way of thanks on Friday: 2 packages of delicious homemade brownies (which we have been slowly devouring over the weekend), a gift card to Barnes and Noble, and the most wonderful homemade card:
There are moments when you go to the bookstore with a specific purpose in mind, and you come home with the treasure you set out to find. There are other moments when one can wander around the bookstore experiencing myriad temptations, but nothing speaks to you. And then there are times like I had yesterday afternoon. Times in which you wander quite aimlessly to and fro and then a book catches your eye and you feel its pull and you just know that you will have to leave with that book. Yesterday that book was Freaks by Annette Curtis Klause. The full title of the story is Freaks: Alive, on the Inside, but I prefer the simple title and will thus refer to it in that regard for the remainder of this review.
There is no mystery regarding my initial attraction to this book:
It only took one week…if fact, it took less than one week, and two movies to restore my faith in Hollywood’s ability to create memorable summer blockbusters. The first movie–Die Hard 4.0–the second, Transformers. I vaguely remember seeing Tranformers as a child but had no nostalgic connection to the series, so I went into this movie hoping for fun with big robots, an entertaining story, and hoping that Transformers would really be more than meets the eye.
As we swing into summer, let’s remember what summer is all about. Or what it used to be about when we were young: Freedom! I recently declared a summer of freedom in my reading (and have decided to steal a phrase coined by Dark Orpheus here: wanderlust reading). I am happy to see that others are posting about their summer freedom as well:
Do you ever get the feeling that someone, somewhere, has forgotten that movies are supposed to be fun? That they are entertainment? That the experience of going out with a group of friends, mortgaging the house for a hot dog and a box of Milk Duds, and parking yourself in a dark room for two or three hours can actually be exhilarating?
I think the cast and crew of Live Free or Die Hard, or Die Hard 4 for those keeping track, believed that people had indeed forgotten and so they made it their mission to return Hollywood film making to the fun category. Mission impossible? Not hardly, this film pumps fun into the action film genre and does so with a vengeance.
