The Wild Blog in the West

With novels like The Chocolate Wars , A Separate Peace , and  Lord of the Flies under its banner, Young Adult literature was never a bastion of sweetness and optimism.  Rather, Young Adult literature (or "YA," as it is fashionably called) is used frequently to explore dark themes about ourselves and our society.  In fact, one could even argue that YA novels are often darker  than adult novels, not only because the events are happening to kids, but also because authors can take advantage of the "kids' novels are safe" misconception to push the envelope. Certainly The Hunger Games  trilogy does not shy from darkness.  It's a post-Apocalyptic world where North America has been separated into 13 districts, each with its own specialty, while an oppressive Capitol rules over all of them.  If you have not read The Hunger Games , or you have only seen the first movie, stop reading now because I will be discussing the first and second novel along with the third i

I don't normally do this, but I figured it was appropriate for the musical that many regard as Stephen Sondheim's masterpiece.  Prior to my review , I had listened to some of the songs and watched part of the stage musical, but I wanted to post the review while the movie was still fresh in my mind. Since then, I have watched the entire stage production on YouTube with George Hearn and Angela Lansbury, purchased the 2005 Broadway version with Patti LuPone and Michael Cerveris, and watched the 2001 Sweeney Todd  concert in front of the San Francisco Symphony, starring LuPone, Hearn, and Neil Patrick Harris as Toby.  While I feel as certain as before that Tim Burton's Sweeney Todd  was a very good musical adaptation, I am able to approach the transition with a more nuanced perspective. And durn it, if I can go on and on about the changes to Les Miserables  over the years, I can at least give some attention to the American Mozart's masterwork, can't I? After wat

I had another post planned, but I doubt I could finish it before the night is out, so I thought I would just through together a handy-dandy list instead.  People love lists! So, without further ado, my list of scary things related (sometimes marginally) to Halloween... 1.  Scariest Movie.   Oh boy, that's hard to narrow down.  I'm a highly susceptible person who gets spooked very easily.  I was one of the kids who was freaked out by Return to Oz .  Large Marge in Pee Wee's Big Adventure scared the fuck out of me.  Even Ghostbusters  left me afraid to close my eyes.  So to this day, I have watched very few horror movies... yet somehow I really like reading synopses of horror movies.  Don't ask me why.   The Exorcist scared the crap out of me when I saw it, not because of pea soup head-spinning girl, but because of those random flashes of the devil (or whatever that was).  I could not stop thinking about them.  But I would say that the scariest movie I saw was the

Now I've done it.  It's bad enough that I put Mamma Mia! on the Right list, but a Burtonized Sweeney Todd ? Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street  (2007), directed by Tim Burton, was well-received upon its release , but has apparently received mixed reviews from fans of the stage musical.  The stage musical was written by the legendary Stephen Sondheim and premiered on Broadway in 1979, then in the West End in 1980. Based on 19th Century legends, Sweeney Todd is the tale of a London barber who just finished serving a long sentence for a crime he did not commit.  He was sentenced by the corrupt Judge Turpin, who lusted after his pretty young wife.  After Todd -- then known as Benjamin Barker -- was shipped off, Turpin invited his wife, Lucy, to his home under false pretenses and then raped her.  Lucy took arsenic afterward, and the judge took her and Barker's young daughter, Johanna, as his ward.  Flash forward 15 years, and Todd returns to his old home to fin

While I sit here in the United States waiting for Downton Abbey 's Series Four -- not at all  reading episode spoilers or looking for places to download the episodes -- I have been thinking about the show's appeal to Americans.  Part of it is no doubt due to the fascination with British history, its aristocracy, and the pretty-pretty that comes with it.  But another reason could be the nostalgia for our country's past. Not that everything was so great in the U.S. from 1912 to 1922.  After World War I, there were greater tendencies toward xenophobia and isolationism.  "Lost Generation" writers like Gertrude Stein, Ernest Hemingway, and F. Scott Fitzgerald rejected post-war American culture.  Life was still significantly worse for anyone who was not a white male of Anglo-Saxon descent. Yet at the same time, the U.S. was taking center stage for the first time.  Woodrow Wilson introduced the idea of the League of Nations, which was unsuccessful, but paved the wa

Since I'm on this animation kick, I might as well get something off of my chest that I've been thinking about for a while: is it possible that the creators of MTV's Daria sent the wrong message in the end? Daria  premiered on MTV in 1997 as the rare portrayal of a social outcast.  Not someone who was an "outcast" while looking and acting like a fashion model, but a genuine introvert with no interest in wider social approval.  The first season established a pattern where Daria Morgendorffer and her friend, Jane Lane, stood off to one side and criticized the activities that people their age were taught to embrace. At the same time, these episodes -- frequently referred to as "fish in a barrel" episodes -- started to feel a little stale.  Were Daria and Jane really the only two smart ones in the city of Lawndale?  Were other people really so stupid?  And even if they were, would they just stand by, grinning vacantly, while getting insulted?  The only

... Though being anime, that almost goes without saying. I'm not a great devourer of anime.  There are some that I truly like, but I'm indifferent toward the rest.  Because my greatest exposure to anime occurred about 10 years ago, all of my favorites date from the 1990s and early 2000s... so apologies if some truly great anime series have premiered since then.  I enjoyed  Neon Genesis Evangelion ,  Cowboy Bebop , and a quiet little series called Serial Experiments Lain . While the other anime involved giant monsters and space travel, Lain was a 13-episode series about a lonely girl.  The setting was the present -- or the near future.  Or was it?  One of the intriguing things about Serial Experiments Lain was that it posed questions about human connection, what was and was not real, and this strange new thing called the "Internet." Lain premiered in 1998, when the Internet as a public resource was still fairly new.  Remember how excited and nervous we were a