Movie Review: HIGH SPIRITS

Originally released: 1988
Starring: Peter O'Toole, Daryl Hannah, Beverly D'Angelo, Steve Guttenberg, Liam Neeson, Jennifer Tilly, Peter Gallagher
Directed by: Neil Jordan
Based on: a script? I assume they had one, anyway.


It's time for another edition of Cheesy Movies Tasha Likes! This 1980s gem takes place in Ireland, which was an exotic place to travel in the '80s, or so I imagine. Peter O'Toole is the last in a long line of Plunkets whose castle is about to moved brick-by-brick to the US by an evil corporate dude. So he sets it up as a haunted hotel to make the money to buy it back. It IS haunted, but he doesn't think it is, so he makes his employees pretend to be ghosts and scare a bunch of American tourists. But the tourists take matters into their own tentacles and fall in love with a few of the ghosts.

I saw High Spirits when I was eight, and I swear I was obsessed with this movie. It has everything I could possibly like: castles, ghosts, people falling in love. But by far my favorite part of the film is Sharon, played by Beverly D'Angelo. She is SO hilarious. As an eight-year-old, she represented ideal womanhood, which is a little bizarre because she is a total raging bitch. I freaking love her! See, Sharon isn't a bad person, she's just trapped in a marriage with this boring guy who is completely uninteresting. But things turn out happily for Sharon, because she meets LIAM NEESON (aka, Martin, a ghost) and he knows EXACTLY what to do when she starts spiraling. *eyebrow wraggle*


Oh yeahs.

Strangely, it appears that in certain circles, this is not considered a "good" film. Like, seriously? Not a good movie? I don't... I can't even... You have true love, a talking horse, a castle, ghosts literally coming out of the walls, Steve Guttenberg getting bitch-slapped, and gratuitous scenes of drunkenness. A better question is, What's NOT to like? I suppose you don't enjoy The Butcher's Wife or Robin Hood either, huh? Huh? Okay, the talking horse is pretty stupid. And Daryl Hannah's accent is pretty bad. But still.

For me, this is a highly enjoyable movie. It's worth watching just to see a young Liam Neeson acting silly and lusty instead of broody and shouting into a phone. And look at how many stars are in it! You know you want to watch it.

Review: THE GHOST AND THE GOTH by Stacey Kade

Alona Dare is the most popular girl at school, until she's hit by a bus one morning ditching first period. That's when her afterlife begins, and the only person who can see her is Will Killian, a loner freak she would not normally be caught dead talking to (pun!). But desperate times and all that...

I'm so glad my library had this novel because I ADORED it! I first saw The Ghost and the Goth on Forever Young Adult, where Jenny loved it but called it out for the cheesy title. The cover is also burn-worthy. BUT. You know that maxim that you should never judge a book by it's cover? It's totally true in this case. I cannot resist ghost stories, especially cute ghost stories with romance, and The Ghost and the Goth is an ideal example of that.

First of all, I LOVED the characters. I'm in complete book lust with Will, who is stoic and too smart for his own good. Being able to talk to the dead can make your life pretty miserable, so he tries his best to fade into the background in the hopes that the ghosts at school won't notice him. It's also pretty difficult to appear normal when it looks like you're talking to yourself a lot.

Alona, on the other hand, isn't exactly likable; but she is hilarious. Her attempts at giving people compliments were painfully funny, and the fact that she does help out Will and can get things done made me warm up to her. Plus I'm a sucker for opposites-attract romances, and the development of Alona and Will's relationship is so sweet and swoon-worthy.

Added to that, this story is told really well. Stacey Kade does a great of capturing your attention right at the beginning, then revealing layers and secrets to the characters and story at the perfect pace. She also has the atmosphere of a high school nailed down pretty well--in fact, I wonder a little if we didn't go to the same high school, because I recognized a few of these characters. The only part of the book where the tone was slightly off was the climax, but I'm willing to overlook that even though it was kind of cheesy.

The ending also bothered me, as Kade had several opportunities to wrap-up the story, either tragically or comically, and bypassed all of them. That's right, welcome to the time-and-money-suck vortex of unnecessary YA series. The Ghost and the Goth could (and should) have been a standalone novel, but instead it's now a trilogy. I mean, a part of me is happy, because I do love Alona and Will, but there's a bigger part of me that wants to do this:



Why does every single book need to be part of a series? Why? Why? Why? Why? Why?

Aside from that, though, this book is pretty brilliant. Great characters, romance, fab storytelling--I actually bought a copy, that's how much I enjoyed it. I really think you ought to read it.



Musical notes: Really the entire Taylor Swift catalog, but let's go with "Haunted"

Book Review: DARKER STILL by Leanna Renee Hieber

In 1880's New York City, a young girl who is mute falls in love with a painting. This may seem like an usual plot, but actually there's a long tradition of stories and fables where art either comes to life, traps a live person, or seems to be alive to the point where someone falls in love the subject. What do they all have in common? They all have something to do with sex and the gaze. They all suggest that a truth lies in the image that's hidden by ordinary life. And they're all more interesting than Darker Still.

I really wanted to like this novel. Leanna Renee Hieber was one of the first authors to connect with my blog because I reviewed her first book, and I think she's a great writer. As an art historian, I tend to read every book that has something to do with art I come across and, in a very weird coincidence, I wrote about runes in painting for my master's thesis. Also, Colette from A Buckeye Girl Reads got a copy of Darker Still signed and then mailed it to me! Wasn't that nice of her?

With all that, one might think this book and I would be sure bets--I certainly thought so--but I wound up not finishing it. Perhaps it might be because I know too much about the subject, but I don't think so. I don't expect total historical accuracy from novels, especially in a subject as obscure as the occult in art. However, I DO expect a good story, and that simply didn't happen here.

Darker Still started out okay. It's "framed" in the way novels from the nineteenth century tend to be, as part of a police file that includes the main character's journal. At first I thought this was pretty brilliant and clever, but I was quickly bothered by the fact that the "journal entries" didn't read like journal entries, but like a regular novel in the first person.

When I really knew this book and I wouldn't get along, though, was the first time Natalie sets eyes on the portrait of Lord Denbury. This is basically the meet-cute of the book, yes? Even if it's just a painting, I expected something--some spark, some chemistry, or at the very least something interesting--to happen. But alas, nada. I read over the scene three times just to make sure I hadn't missed a key word or sentence that would tell me why everyone found this portrait to be so intriguing.



To be sure, the portrait has a somewhat curious history (although nothing sensational) and the subject is handsome--or so we're told. But the problem is that as a reader I cannot see this portrait. I'm told Denbury is handsome, but the way he's described makes him sound like Zoolander. The rest of the painting was related in a very stark, bare-bones manner, and sounded like a totally orndinary portrait. Rather boring and old-fashioned, in fact; certainly nothing to cause a Madame X-level of buzz.

Furthermore, while reading about the painting I kept being distracted by inconsistencies that pulled me out of the story. For example, Natalie describes Denbury thusly: "Tiny traces between his nose and the corners of his pursed and perfect lips indicated that his mouth would grow lines of an often wide smile as he aged." First of all, that's a pretty tortured sentence (one of many). And second of all, what seventeen-year-old thinks about how a person is going to age? The whole scene is wrapped up by Natalie declaring, "And yet, there was something terribly compelling about him." UHG. Insta-love much? Not only is that the romance cliche to end all romance novel cliches, but I don't find him compelling, and there's no reason why Natalie does beyond the fact that everyone else seems to.

I kept reading in the hopes the book would improve when Natalie went into the portrait, and it did a bit, but Denbury seemed silly rather than mysterious, and the villains were cartoonishly obvious. I was laughing a whole hell of a lot, and not because the book was trying to be funny. It was because of cheesy scenes like this:

I studied the particulars of the scene. The book The Girl remained jutting out from the shelf.

And then I noticed a new shift. Something else out of place. Different.

On his desk, the pristine blotter bore droplets of ink, and the quill was lying on its side rather than upright in the shaft of the inkwell. Two words seemed to scream up at me from a note that faced my direction on his desk.

Yes, you!

Haha! Denbury wants YOU! Yes, you! Just in case you thought he was telegraphing the cat. Or when Natalie finally meets this supposed 19-year-old heart-throb and he commences with the desk-pounding and exclamation-marking:

"Denbury pounded his fist on his desk in fury. 'The bloody bastard!'"

Two pages later...

"'I'd just begun to live!' He pounded his fist against the desk..."

At this point I'd started to feel like Darker Still was an adaptation of The Nutcracker and Mouse King, where a young girl becomes nonsensically obsessed with a painting instead of a nutcracker. But rather than turning out to be a prince, the guy is a bombastic octogenarian Whig; and instead of sweeping her off to an enchanted palace made of candy, he takes her to a 9x11 office cubicle with a fake fireplace. Très romantic.

On top of all this, I really hated Natalie as a character. Her personality basically IS that she's mute. That's it. There doesn't seem to be any reason for what she does beyond the fact that someone else wants her to do it, or any reasoning behind her ideas other than someone else thought it. Of course, she never really NEEDS to think, seeing as how who is good and who is evil and what exactly is going on and what she needs to do about it is all telegraphed to her, in a painfully obvious fashion. Snorz!

I heard a saying the other day that "A cat sat on a mat is not a story. A cat sat on another cat's mat is a story." This book is about a cat who sat on a mat. Everything just happens, with no conflict or intrigue to keep the reader engaged. There's no sense of atmosphere, historical place and time, characters with personalities, or stakes. And this why it read so young to me--as if it was written for 8-11 year-olds rather than teens or adults--because there's really no depth to the story at all. What you see is what you get, and that's pretty damn boring in art, life, and literature.

Book Review: THE NAME OF THE STAR by Maureen Johnson

When Rory's parents accept a year-long job in Bristol, England, she leaves her small town near New Orleans for London and Wexford boarding school. Situated in the heart of Whitechapel, the part of town Jack the Ripper frequented in 1888, Wexford becomes the center of a media storm when it's clear a Ripper copycat is recreating the Victorian killings. When Rory actually sees him on the night of one of the murders, she becomes the focal point of the new Ripper's obsession and attracts the attention of Torchwood an elite group of government agents who specialize in supernatural investigations.



I have a fondness for ghost stories and I am a sucker for novels with Jack the Ripper subplots, so I wanted to read this book as soon as I heard about it from Memory at Stella Matutina. It's really pretty good, although the cover is a little misleading in some ways--for one thing, this book is not romantic. Three make-out sessions does not a romance make, let's just get that straight. It's really more of a YA version of an urban fantasy novel than anything else (also: Team Stephen!). As for the ghostly image of Jack the Ripper, it would have been more accurate to have it be John Druitt from Sanctuary (side note: I can't BELIEVE there were no Torchwood references in this entire novel, although there was at least a Doctor Who shout-out).

However! One thing the back cover blurbs are completely right about is how atmospheric and creepy this novel is. You really do feel like you're in London, and that ghosts might show up at any moment and try to murder you in your sleep--and these are the type of ghosts who do actually murder people. Johnson's descriptions of the cultural adjustments an American has to make living in London are spot-on; and without boring you with it, she perfectly describes the practical details of not only living in the city but going to a boarding school.

I also really liked Rory and how quirky and weird she seemed into comparison to her English classmates. However, she was a little too grown-up and self-sufficient to be a believable seventeen-year-old, in my opinion. Also, the whole cell phone thing was REALLY lame, and there was a ton of exposition at the end that made the last fifty pages feel like they were going on and on and on. I didn't get her relationship with Jerome at all, and all the other 'normal' characters were marginalized after the Ghostbusters showed up, which was disappointing.

Even with those drawbacks, though, this is a very well-written, well-researched book. It's full of action, is fast-paced, and has a great escapist, spooky feel to it. There isn't a lot of emotional self-reflection going on here, but there's enough character development to keep you engaged. Perfect for curling up with on a winter's night, and definitely appealing to a very wide range of people.



Musical Notes: It's unimaginative, but I couldn't get "Psycho Killer" by The Talking Heads out of my head while reading this.