Recycled jokes, one-dimensional characters and no character development, and a strange cocktail of (not very funny) comedy cum Michael Mooreish political satire cum John Grisham thriller. Didn’t work for me at all. Much laughter from the rest of the cinema made me think it was a nationality thing even though I’d been informed by the friend who dragged me along what the premise meant given the existence of a similar celebrity character in the US (I’m Australian, was watching it in Canada), but my flatmate told me later the critics slammed it too. Re the laughing from others, I wouldn’t take that to mean anything good either. I’ve since learnt that people here just seem to laugh a lot in the cinema. It’s like having a laugh track on a prime time comedy: it erupts periodically but it doesn’t mean it’s funny. :P

Really one-dimensional. And I don’t mean the animation, though I guess I wasn’t the biggest fan of that either. I’m not the hugest fan of the big shift to 3D animation that’s gone on in recent years, which (initially, at least) seemed to me to be more about the medium than about the story, but stuff like ‘Finding Nemo’ (which made me grudgingly but finally and firmly agree that they can do some cool stuff with it) has so much more personality than this, whose animation is in a hand-drawn style yet still manages to look bland. Most of this is irrelevant, though: from what I could tell from reading the DVD case, this was all done digitally, therefore should be expected to have been given the same attention as any other of the 3D, digitally animated flicks being put out these days; but it just doesn’t seem like it has been. The backdrop art was great, but the characters in front of it were just… as I say, one-dimensional, in all respects. The humour that’s directed towards adults in many of the new animated films is sadly lacks here, too, which is really unfortunate. No catchy pop song aimed at the charts like a lot of others of its kind have, which again seems to suggest its being a low priority for the company. Generally it feels like this was rushed through at the development level. Certainly watchable, but, yeah: meh.

Rot. I picked this up wanting some easy to read whilst travelling, prompted mostly by my recognition of the author’s name due to her having spoken to a 20th Century Women’s Writing class I took a couple of years back. I couldn’t remember anything she spoke to us about, but surely if she was hauled in to talk to us she must have some merit, I figured. Er… nup. I was after something easy to read, as I mentioned, but, whilst certainly easy to read in terms of its prose style, this was hellish to get through. I complained about how bad it was to the person beside me in the bus through all the second half; she commented to me on a rest stop, as I sat reading furiously, that it looked like I had changed my view of it and was interested, but I just wanted to get the hell through it so I could dump it in the bookshelf of the next backpacker hostel I was staying in and stop having to carry the thing around.

So, really, not recommended.

That said, the premise didn’t interest me at all, even as I bought the book. Maybe if it does you, reading further might be more worthwhile for you than it was for me. I was expecting the writing style or the thought the story inspired to draw my interest into what seemed like a rather mediocre premise, but neither prose nor the ideas communicated through it had any substance. All the way through to the end, I waited. Nothing. Cold, uninteresting and ultimately unbelievable implied author who inspired no feelings in me for either her or her family (whose response to her death are what the book’s primarily about), and a less important parallel storyline having to do with the solution of her murder that you only want to be tied up in the end because it means a nice neat (too neat) closure for everyone and, hence, the end of the book.

Too, did anyone else familiar with the work of singer Dar Williams feel any suspicion that Sebold’s been listening to the song ‘Alleluia’ when she has her narrator in a heaven that includes a school cafeteria? That such a mediocre piece of work should have proceeded from an idea to which the author can’t even lay a claim of originality made the book grate even more on me.

In short: don’t bother.

A bit ho-hum, really, by comparison to, say, ‘Oranges’ or ‘The Passion’. Still, it’s more ‘Worth consuming’ than ‘Wishy-washy’, I think.

Themes presented in the intro were, I think, more interesting than the writing/stories themselves in larger part, though a few good ones and one great one at the end (by unidenfiable author, just to make things frustrating: I’d love to read more of her work if I could get my hands on any, but, alas, not to be) made it worth the purchase.

Oh, yeah, look, y’know, it’s got a nice message behind it, and all, so I hate to diss it, but…. one-dimensional CRAP, anyone?