I struggled to decide what to write about last night, and it didn’t help that I got home late and began the evening by catching up on Scandal. Spoilers: things are getting intense and I want to be Abby’s friend.
Anyway, this weekend I watched Odd Thomas, the movie based on the Dean Koontz novel of the same name. It is currently on Netflix, if my review happens to make you want to watch it. Odd Thomas is about a short-order cook, named Odd, at a local diner-type establishment who can see the dead, and this helps him solve murders for his detective friend and possibly father-figure (played by Willem Dafoe, who I think is always fun to watch). He is a strange dude, but pretty adorable.
He can also see these awful creatures called Bodachs, which helps him sometimes prevent death/murder. They don’t really say anything about deaths that aren’t murders or big tragedies, so I don’t know how those work in this universe. Bodachs like to hover around people who are either about to die, or cause the gruesome deaths of other people, because they feed off the pain and suffering. They’re pretty terrifying though, because if they find out you can see them, they’ll kill you. This particular fact causes much stress throughout the movie for our hero, Odd.
Then there’s Stormy, Odd’s One True Love, they’ll be together forever, girlfriend. She is also a manic pixie dream girl. And I mean the full-on, Wikipedia definition from the first paragraph. She’s pretty, she works in an ice cream shop, she talks like she’s stuck in a dream world, and she drives a vespa. If she is not a MPDG, I don’t know what is. As a result, I found her existence annoying, even though she was a tiny bit useful in helping Odd solve the mystery (though honestly he did most of it on his own). Stormy was mostly an object that Odd had to protect, while the other two female characters were a vague mother-figure (detective friend’s wife) and a random girl who tries to hit on Odd, then gets randomly murdered.
It’s rather unfortunate, actually, because otherwise I really enjoyed this movie. It was quirky in a similar way to Wristcutters: A Love Story (although that movie has decidedly better female characters). I also liked the mystery aspect of it, because it kept me guessing right up until the end (although one could argue about one of the final twists in the mystery as being cheating, but I’ll leave that to you to decide for yourself).
This movie kind of makes me want to read the Odd Thomas novel series by Dean Koontz. I’ve never read any of his novels. But the lame portrayal of female characters give me pause. At any rate, it’s a fun movie, and a different kind of supernatural than what’s so often mainstream. Odd Thomas himself is a decent enough character, and I think they explain/present his backstory concisely at the beginning – which is sometimes hard to do with a story like this. The world was established very quickly, and there’s really only one thing that doesn’t fit, but this happens at the end, so I don’t want to give any spoilers, but you’ll probably see what I mean when you get to it.
Now, I must be off to get ready for the first day of the semester! My LAST semester of graduate school! If all goes according to plan…
Making My Own Worlds 