Timothy Callahan

Is this the end?

I considered my writing to be a little bit more than a hobby, yet not exactly a career.  Sure, I wanted to be good at it and I worked hard at being good at it but I never thought I worked harder than say, a person who works on his car on the weekends. Or someone who works hard at a local dinner theater.  I write because it’s something I enjoy doing and if I succeed at it or make money off it, all the better.   

There are times when I work hard to get something published, it never happens, but I try.  I have gone the self-publishing route but really, I don’t have the time to promote my work as I should.  Maybe if I quit my job and worked at it full time I could get some publishing deals, but the truth is I’m not really brave enough to just go off and do something like that. 

I missed some chances when I was unemployed but to be honest I was more worried about getting a job than publishing anything.  Besides, all I had was one short novel that was good, but not great.  I did send it to places, heck I still send it places every once in a while, but so far no one has touched it. I can’t blame them, I’m not a popular name and agents and publishers want people who can make them money. I might be able to make them money but who’s going to take that chance?  If I were an agent or a publisher I don’t think I’d buy my novels.  The writings good, but not strong.  Why spend money publishing something that only a few people might buy?  Agents and publishers tell you they like to take chances on new writers but the odd are I won’t be one of them.   That’s not putting myself down, that’s an honest truth. 

It sounds like I’m giving up or I’m a pessimist.  Trust me, most people around me think I’m too optimistic about things.  I guess when you’re a realist about things that automatically makes it sound pessimistic.  I have hope that if I keep sending my stuff out someone will bite.  It will probably never happen but I have hope.   

I know my work and it’s good.  I like my work.  I read stuff that I’ve written years ago and I like it. I can see its flaws of course but I see flaws in most of the stuff I read.  Are my flaws any worst?   Maybe but until a professional reads my work I’ll never know.  Of course, the only way to get a pro to read my work is to get published.  Or pay a lot of money. I don’t have a lot of money so I’ll have to wait for a pro to buy my stuff.  Which probably won’t ever happen. 

When I spend an hour or so writing something I stop and wonder why I’m doing it.  Who am I writing for?  I want to write for people other than me and a handful of people who might listen to my podcasted writings at podiobooks.com.  The truth is, I’m not sure who I’m writing for anymore. In my 20’s and 30’s I wrote to try to get published.  I wrote to tell people I did something that was interesting.   I wrote because it was a release from a life that, while not horrible, had a bunch of holes that needed to be filled.  I wrote because my imagination was so large it needed an outlet.  I haven’t felt the need to fill any holes in my soul for a while. I wrote the Arwen saga because I had an idea that wouldn’t go away.  Now that that saga is done and I have nothing else to say I wonder why I still write. 

I’m working on another novel and my heart isn’t really in it. Could it be because the novel isn’t good enough to hold my interest or is it something more?  Have I finally gotten sick of spending the limited hours I have in the day writing something that no one will read?  Has my mind finally stopped supplying me with ideas?  Have I gotten to the point in my life where I don’t need to write anymore?  Or, do I simply need to sit back and relax and not worry about all those things?  

 

My Christmas Wish

All I want for Christmas is a comment on my blog
a comment on my blog.
Oh a comment on my blog.
All I want for Christmas is a comment on my blog
So I can know if someone's reading.

It seems so long since I could say
OMG I have comment to approve.
Gosh oh gee how happy I'd be
To see no spam to remove (click, click, click)

All I want for Christmas is a comment on my blog
a comment on my blog.
Oh a comment on my blog.
All I want for Christmas is a comment on my blog
I can know if someone's reading.


See ,if I only had
a comment on my blog
then I could wish you
"Merry Christmas!"

My quibids.com experience

First off, don't believe the hype about Qbuids.com, a penny auction site that seems to be pretty popular. Second, don't believe all the people who are dissing the site, calling it a rip off and to avoid it at all cost. The truth is the site falls somewhere in between, it's not all that great but if you do some research and follow some simple rules you'll see that it's not exactly a rip off either.

First off, what is a Penny auction site? Basically it's an auction site sort of like Ebay (in the same way a slot machine is sort of like a PS3.) where you pay 60 cents for every bid you make. You bid against other's for the product which is on a timer. If the timer reaches 0 and you're the last person to bid you win the auction. If someone else bids the timer resets, normally it resets to 10 seconds but I've seen it reset to 20 and even 30 a few times. Each bid adds a penny to the price of the product which normally starts at 0 dollars.

I think that's the first thing most people get right away, that each bid cost 60 cents, which means if you see a product that's a dollar and 100 bids have been made on it, at 60 cents apiece that's 60 dollars for Quidids' bottom line. Not a bad business strategy if you can get away with it. It also means if you and someone else gets into a bidding war on something and each of you spend 50 bids on a product and you lose, you're not only out the product but out 30 dollars and 50 bids. So, only bid on things you want and accept the fact you might not win and, if you don't win, don't get mad cause that's just how this site works. A read a lot of reviews and most people seemed upset at this point, that they spend 100+ bids on something and lost. So, keep in mind that if you lose you will lose your bids and your money but Quibids is pretty upfront with all that so I'm not sure how people feel they've been ripped off. To get ripped off I feel you need someone to take your money in a way that you didn't know about, or sell you a product that's not worth what you spend on it.

The real appeal to the site is the fact that you can get some really good things really cheap. I saw a PS3 sell for about 5 bucks (500 bids @ 60 cents a bid, do the math cause I don't feel like it.) Saw some Gift Cards sell for about 90% of what they're worth so you do get some really good deals if you win. In fact, I got two 10 dollar gift cards for Walmart, a 50 dollar gift card for Fandango and I won about 200 free bids, all for less than five dollars so that's good.

Before placing any bid, heck before signing up I looked carefully at the site and discovered a few thing that I found, well, interesting. As you can image the site really wants you to bid a lot and they make that very, very easy with an autobid feature that is very dangerous for you and I feel it's something that, if you sign up for the site, you need to be careful with. Of all the things I saw on the site this is the one thing that I can honestly say I didn't really like and the one thing that made me uncomfortable using. Basically, you can set an autobid to bid for you if you're away from the computer of if you don't feel like clicking the button. There is a cap, 20 bids, and you can start bidding when the price gets to a certain point, but if you think about it you can see how this system favors Quibids and not the bidder. Think about it, what if you get into a bidding war with two other people who are using Autobid up to the cap? The computer will just bid and bid and bid until the other computer runs out of bids or until you do. It just seems too random, too stacked against the bidder. I hated when I went against an autobidder cause I knew I was going to have to outbid a dumb computer. In fact, if I saw a bunch of autobids for an auction I just left without bidding.

When you sign up you do need to buy at least 100 bids at 60 bucks so that's what I started with. It didn't take long for me to win a about 200 more bids (there are always auctions for more bids, another way for Quibids to get some free money.) so it's easy to get them if you want, it's always easy to lose all your bids the first day if you're not lucky or careful.

I did find a few things odd that I want to talk about here. Well, only one thing actually. It seemed that I won a lot of little auctions when I first signed up then it got harder and harder to win even the little ones. Now, I could have just gotten lucky, which is probably the case, but it did seem odd. The some kind of odd that would happen to me when I went on dating sites, wouldn't get any hits for months, then just as my membership was up I'd start getting hits again. That kind of odd, as if the site were saying "See how easy it is to win? Now, get more bids and you'll win just as easy!" I'm suspicious but without any evidence and with nothing more than a few samples I can't say exactly what I'm talking about. Like I said, it could have been dumb luck that I won all those things the first week then couldn't even sniff a win in the two weeks that followed.

So, in conclusion, I enjoyed the three weeks I played around on Quibids but I'd never go back to it. In actually it's more of a gambling site and less of an auction site. It's easy to get absorbed in it, just like it's easy to get absorbed into pushing a button on a slot machine. I did get more out of it then I put in by about 10 bucks (that 50 dollar gift card put me over the top) but, like I said, either I got lucky or the system was rigged to pull me in. That's something you'll have to figure out yourself if you ever choose to check the site out.

Characters are people too.

I love the fact I have Netflix and Netflix is now showing a lot of the stuff I used to watch as I was growing up. Over the course of a week I was able to cherry pick some of my favorite Star Trek Next Generation episodes, a few Buffy and Angle shows, and some Arrested Development. I'm eagerly waiting for them to get Deep Space Nine so I can watch those as well. TV was a huge part of forming my imagination, more so than books or movies, although they also played a huge roll, just as big as Television.

What I found interesting as I was watching Next Gen was just how much that show did influence me. Story structure, characters, situations, all the things that show did well I can see in my work today. The Arwen, my very own Star Ship series, can easily trace its roots back to Episodes like Best of Both worlds, Cause and Effect, and The Inner light. It's no coincidence I guess that those are my favorite episodes and, on some level, I wanted to re-write them in some way with my own characters. It wasn't really a conscience choice, it just sort of happened.

Another show that really influenced me, more as a young kid than a teenager, was Star Blazers or, if you were in Japan, Space battleship Yamato. I loved that show so much. I used to race home after school to watch it. I would then try to draw the episode and when I figured out I have no artistic ability I used to write stories about the show, using my own characters in place of the ones on TV. Of course, the stories I wrote were just mirroring the stories on the TV by that really was my first attempts to write a story, all because of that show.

One of the odd things that struck me at that early age were characters. I felt like I was giving people life! If I thought of a character and I wrote about that character I was sort of creating a new life form in my mind and that life form could only act if I let them act, could only do what I wanted them to do. As an 11 year old that was a pretty powerful concept and one that I held on to even as I was learning how to write and how to build story and structure. I would create a character and in my eye the person was alive, not just a figment of my imagination but a real, live being. Which is way I always feel bad when I kill someone in a story.

I also hate it when I just remove a character completely. To me I not only killed someone but he or she no longer existed! That's kind of dark.

In my one novel, Ida, I had to do that. I killed a character half way through the book for impact not realizing I would need him later in the story. I had created another character to take his place but as I wrote it I thought, "why did I just create this new guy when I had a perfectly good guy that I killed?" So, I went back and unkilled the guy and totally wrote out the new guy. I felt bad for the new guy so if I ever do a sequel maybe I'll give him a part. I also think the guy I killed was pretty happy to be alive again, especially since his death was kind of painful to begin with.

I also did that with another character in my Arwen books. I was going to kill him in book two but decided not to but then I killed him in book three for no good reason really. Come to think of it he should have died in the second story cause his death then would have meant more than his death in the third. Oh well, if I could do it over again I would but I can't so he lived to see another story. . .where he died.

When writers talk about how the characters tell them what to do most people who don't write have a hard time understanding that. I understand it. More than once my characters have told me what they want and what they want to do in a situation. I find it hard to get anything past my characters, if they need to act dumb for some sort of plot point to happen I have a hard time making them dumb and I feel I need to trick them into going for the plot point before going forward. Smart characters who act dumb really annoy me so I think it's more that I don't want someone to read my work and go, 'wow, that character is normally on the ball, how does she not know what's going to happen?'

That drives me nuts when I see it on a TV show or a movie. I'll give you an example of a show that I liked a lot but had a hard time watching because the characters acted way dumber than they were supposed to be.

One of the news shows I enjoyed, before it was canceled, was No Ordinary Family. In this show you had a bunch of really smart people. It was a show about people with super powers and how they adjusted to those powers. In fact, one kid had the powers of super-duper smartness.

In one of the episodes they meet a shape shifter who could make herself look like anyone in the family. Now, I can see that fooling people the first time and it made that episode kind of fun. Eventually they find out she's a shape shifter and beat her, she escapes and they hope they've seen the last of her, only they don't know if she'll be back or not.

A few episodes later she does return and does the same thing, taking the shape of family members to get information out of them. Now, as I'm watching that show I can't help but think, "boy, these guys are dumb. They know someone is out there after them who can look like any member of the family wouldn't it be smart to, oh I don't know, come up with code words to ask someone a question only they know when they first meet?"

That's just one example from one show, there are lots of other shows with lots of other examples I can think of. I personally think it takes a lot of imagination to come up with a way to fool your characters without them being dumb.

Like I learned in improv, play up to your characters intelligence, don't make him a dumb guy cause the audience can see right through that.

Captain America, I salute you!

One of the key elements to any good Super Hero movie is this, does the movie hold true to the character? One of the issues I had with the Fantastic Four movies was that they didn't seem to hold true to the comic renditions of the Fantastic Four. There were some elements but for the most part what you saw on the big screen was only a shadow of what was in the comic. One of the things that made the first two Spider-man movies a success was the Spider-manness of the movies. I also think that's what made the third movie a bit of a letdown, it didn't feel like a Spider-man comic through most of its running time. In fact, the times it felt like a Spider-man comic were the best moments in the movie to me. Sandman's transformation, Spider-man and Sandman's first fight, and when Peter Finally got rid of the costume, those felt like Spider-man moments and I enjoyed them. Dancing Peter Parker? Emo Parker? Peter hitting MJ, even by accident, the final fight? Those didn't feel genuine, they didn't feel like Spider-man and I think people picked up on that.

This all brings me to Captain America. They could not have put a more perfect Captain America movie on the screen, not now, not ever. This felt like a Captain America movie, this felt as if they took all the World War 2 Captain America stories, studied then, then placed them on the big screen. Captain America has always been a better character when they focused on his World War 2 days, he was a superhero born in the 40's when it was okay to publish comic books with the main superhero punching Hitler on the jaw and when they place him in the era it's a perfect fit. When I first heard they were making a Captain America movie I thought to myself, "I hope they set it in the second world war" cause that's where we need to be to be introduced to this man. When I found out that's what they were doing I was sold on the movie and looked forward to seeing it.

Personally I think they should set all Captain America movies in the Second World war, I understand they can't cause of the Avengers movie but how cool would that have been?

If I had one complaint about the movie, and this really did kind of bother me, was the it didn't really have a plot. It seemed to be just a series of scenes strung together to get more action, which isn't a bad thing for a superhero movie, but I wanted a little more depth. We had events, things that happened, but the plot was pretty much "go to this location and destroy this base, fight this cool bad guy, talk about it later, rinse and repeat." The acts were really easy to see: Act one: Steve gets his powers. Act two: Steve learns how to be Captain America by going on tour. Act Three: Steve Rogers becomes Captain America, war hero, selfless defender of the American Way. As a writer this structure bothered me, but not enough not to love the movie.

As for everything else I loved it. Chris Pine, an actor I thought was great in Fantastic Four and his cameo in Scott Pilgrim VS the World, was pitch perfect as Steve Rogers.

The Red Skull, Hugo Weaving, perfect, just how I pictured him.

Action was perfect as well. Loved the shield effect, especially the sound it made when being thrown.

I'm looking forward to the Avengers movie, and the trailer at the end of Captain America made me want to see it even more. I can only hope it feels like and Avengers movie cause if it does it'll be one of the best Super Hero movies of all time.

Transformers 3: Dark of the moon or, they blew up Chicago real good

Let's just get one thing out of the way. I enjoyed this movie a whole lot more than I enjoyed the last one, but not as much as I enjoyed the first and I think I liked the first one more because of the novelty of the whole thing than it was a really good movie. In the long run I think this is the movie that will stand the test of multiple viewings.

If I were to sit down with Michael Bay to ask him one question I think it would be, "do you hate Chicago?" cause that city got beat up real bad in the last hour or so. Seriously, was Roget Ebert's reviews of your movies so bad you decided to destroy the city he lives in? I visited Chicago, I liked Chicago, and to see it trashed the way it was, seeing places I had visited was just brutal to watch. Seeing is citizens vaporized like that was harsh. Seeing both Autobot and Decepitcons trashing buildings without a care, well, what can I say, next time I visit the city I'll place a wreath next to the building that fell over in honor of all those fake people who lost their lives.

I'm having a really hard time coming up with an opinion on this movie, mostly because if you see it excepting something other than large robots fight each other and destroy a city you won't get it. All the same stuff from the other two movies are in this one (minus the racist robot siblings, thank goodness.) Will Sam's parents embarrass him? Check! Will Sam's girlfriend get in trouble and he'll need to rescue her? Check! Will Megatron be a total wuss? Check! Actually, that last one angers me more than the racists robots. In the cartoon Megatron was the man, he was a bad ass who could go toe to toe with all the Autobots save Prime and come out on top. In the first movie he's beaten by Sam! In the second he bows down to another Decepticon, in this one he's a brain damaged robot who follows orders from yet another bad guy! I mean, whatever happened to the Decepticon who, when Unicon tells him he was summoned his reply is, "No one summons Megatron!" Heck, even Starscream had a better badass moment that Megatron and that's just sad! As you can tell, Megatron is my favorite, followed by Starscream.

Okay, so, might as well just go with the highlights then in nice, handy dandy list:

Things I liked:

The best scene in the entire movie was the paratroopers flying through Chicago. The shot was simply amazing and what made it even more amazing was that it wasn't a special effect, it looked like they just but winged suits on a bunch of guys and dropped them from a plane and filmed them flying over Chicago. Sure, I knew some of the shots were effects but I'd say about 80% of the sequence was really happening as it was being filmed and that really made it amazing.

Really, the last hour or so when the battle of Chicago started was really cool. The pacing felt just right and some of the stuff that happened was fun. From the tilting skycrapper, to the fighting in the streets, to the scenes of Decepticons hanging from buildings waiting to go into action, it all felt right and it felt like an epic Transformers movie.

Laserbeak, what a great addition to the franchise. Loved him in the movie, I'm just wondering where Soundwave was.

Rosie Huntington-Whiteley: Nuff said!

Things I didn't like:

Most of the humor sucked as normal. The parents, not funny. The small robots, well except for one line, not funny.

All the Star Trek nods because Lenord Nemoy was one of the voices. I thought the first one was fun, when they were watching the Star Trek Episode when Spock goes nuts. The second one, not sure if it was a nod or not but it felt like one, the third one was kind of "wha?" But, okay, the forth one was pretty good I thought. I think that was the only one we needed cause it was funny and it made everyone who got the joke laugh so, instead of four how about just one really good one next time, huh?

Except for a few robots most of the Autobots and Decepticons were hard to keep track of, when are they going to fix that?

Megatron being a wuss, see above.

Transformers 3 really does deliver on what you'd expect. I sometimes find it amazing as I watch Transformers repeats on Hub that the silly cartoon I loved as a kid is now a movie franchise making billions of dollars world wide.

Almost science

I remember my first really bad comment on one of my stories. It was a story where I had the entire city of Chicago evacuating the city after a rather brutal alien invasion of the city. I had never really seen a mass evacuation, never really thought about the logistics behind millions of people walking down a highway toward a military base twenty miles away. I posted that chapter of a larger story on AOL's writing board and let people read and comment on it. I remember being pretty excited, I had posted a few short stories and they got some positive remarks so I was pretty confident that this epic tale would be no different. Heck, it had everything, a dynamic leader, some twists and turns, some heroism, everything I loved to read about and everything I love to write about. So, you can image my surprise when I get a very lengthy comment on the story ripping it apart line by line.

Thinking back on it now it actually wasn't that bad. The guy pretty much pointed out all the logical holes I had created, things that wouldn't be possible with so many people leaving the city. He asked good questions, how did they feed these people? How did they organize them? How did they all go to the bathroom, stuff that I really should have asked myself before writing the scene. But, at that time, 20 years or so ago when I wrote it, I was angry thinking that I didn't need to answer those kinds of questions, it was the story that was important, it was the heroes, that characters, the invasion, who cares what they ate or slept or peed. That wasn't the point!

Of course he was right, I need to ask myself questions before writing a technical scene like that. I need to figure out how to solve those kinds of problems and, since I write science fiction I can make magical solutions to the problems using science! Of course my science needs to be vaguely plausible and normally, I'm okay with that. A strange concept now could be common place in the future, I just need to nudge it in the direction of 'yeah, it could happen.'

I think I got pretty good at that. Wormholes can't open so I have to figure out a way to make it open. Okay, I saw a show on the Science Channel about Particle Accelerators and how they could accidently create Strangelets, an exotic particle that turns all other particles around it into a strangelet and could open a wormhole. Cool, that's prefect! So, I use it for my Arwen stories and it works well in the stories. Do I need to explain how we fit a particle accelerator into a starship when most of them today are miles and miles in circumference? Nah, I figured the people who are listening or reading can figure out that in 300 years we could probably scale it down to starship size so I didn't worry about that.

So, I think things through pretty well, for the most part, when I'm writing stories like this. Sometimes I'll think about it for weeks before even starting the story. I normally feel pretty confident sitting down that I can at least BS my way through the technical stuff until the second or third drafts but I can't cover everything and every time I post a story I worry if someone is going to send me an e-mail detailing why my science is wrong and why I should never write another science fiction story ever again.

I worry about that but it has never happened. When someone does comment on something I screwed up I take it in stride and move on. Heck, once it's out there it's really hard to bring it back so I just have to let the moment of stupidity hang there for everyone to see and read. And, to be honest, most of the time they're right and it forces me to think harder the next time I write a story in which a Dyson Sphere is 17 AU's in diameter. How will that affect, well, everything from its gravity signature to how close you need to be before you crash into it, how do the inhabitance live in it, stuff like that.

I love fantastic ideas and I love fantastic ideas in Science Fiction and, even if they don't make total sense when you really think about them, there really is a power to the imagination.

Movie Review: Green Lantern, the greenest movie ever!

Watching Green Lantern was such a strange experience. It was as if I was watching two or three different movies on one. One movie was really awesome and I would watch again and again, the other movie was kind of okay and I would probably catch it every now and again in cable, the third movie I hated and wished it would die.

The awesome movie was pretty much everything that had to do with the Green Lantern and the Green Lantern Corps. I sat watching the mythology being built there, the ideas behind the Corps, the aliens, the way the ring was used and loved every minute of it. Watching those parts had me thinking that I haven't seen a good, pure Space Opera movie in a while and made me miss those kinds of movies. The kinds were ships and people would just fly through the great expanse of space fighting with everything they got. I loved stuff and I wished they had spent more time in space building on the history of the Corps. Which brings me to the second movie, or, everything else that happened on Earth.

Pretty much everything on Earth had me wishing we'd go back to space. Not that it was all bad, the dogfight between Hal and the drones was very nicely done and very fun to watch. The creepiness of the badguy, Hector and watching him become something really weird was a lot of fun. Actually, I sort of felt bad for Hector and could understand why he turned to evil. Seeing Green Lantern learn his powers and show off for his girlfriend was kind of fun too. (Although I do wonder, how many superheroes learn of their powers by beating up Rednecks? It's happened to often I'm wondering if it's a cliché by now.)

But, then we have the actual bad movie, the third one, which was pretty much everything that had to do with Hal and his girlfriend Carol Ferris. Except for one scene (which, I'll admit, was a pretty funny scene) I just didn't believe these two would be together. There just wasn't much chemistry between Ryan Reynolds and Blake Lively. They went through all the motions, all the clichés that make comic book movies boring and makes me want to wait for the next scene without them. Everything about it felt shoehorned, as if the writers were like, "well, he needs someone to save and someone who will save him late in the movie."

I'll give you an example about what I mean. Hal has just returned from training on another planet, he goes home, sleeps, then goes out with Carol to talk about their relationship. I'm in the theater thinking to myself, "dude, you were just on another planet and this is what you want to do!? The first words out of my mouth would be, 'Hey! You'll never believe what just happened to me!'" The last thing I'd want is to spend time with my girlfriend, heck, I could make my own girlfriend! (I know, that's gross and she'd be green but really, who hasn't thought about that before?)

Anyway, the Green Lantern was good movie, I look forward to watching it again and I would recommend it, as long as you can overlook the boring parts cause the good parts are really, really good.

Nice review fo the Arwen

Found this doing a Google search.  Always do a Google search for your work!

Arwen review

Super 8 was Super Gr8!

Sometimes when you see a movie you just have to go with your heart. Sometimes movies just sort of hit you in a sweet spot that makes you smile, makes you wonder why there aren't more movies like this, and makes you just ignore all the clichés and stuff you've seen a hundred times before. Super 8 was one of those movies, one of a short list of movies I've seen that makes one part of my brain yell "shut up!" to the part of my brain that's thinking, "you know, we've seen scenes like this a hundred times before."

After watching it I left the theater with a little smile on my face. Yes, as one of my friends said, it was sort of ET meets the Goonies or, as my girlfriend said, reminded her of Stand by me and I can see all three of those comparisons. When you get a large group of boys, with one girl, together for an adventure it's going to draw comparisons to all movies that use that formula, Goonies being the most famous. The only thing with Goonies was, you knew those kids were never in any real danger. With Super 8 you worry that one of them is going to be killed and on multiple occasions they almost were.

Okay, so a quick summary of the plot. A group of boys are making a zombie movie (which you get to as the credits roll so don't leave too soon.) when they witness a horrible train crash. After the crash strange things start to happen near the town and only the kids know something's not right. Also, they may have captured what's causing the oddness on their camera. What follows is a group of scared kids trying to piece together a mystery based on what little information they have. But really, the movie is more about the bonding of the boys and girl through danger, mystery, and even a little romance.

That's what really got to me in the movie, the kids acted like real kids. Sure, there was some Hollywooding of their actions but for the most part they felt like kids, not adults in kids bodies which a lot of movies sometimes make children. They were scared, determined, loyal, afraid to get caught in some lie, and scared to death of adults. It all felt real and that made the impact of the ending that much more touching cause you felt these kids could be your friends, or the friend of your child.

Was it a perfect movie? Well, no. The mystery was kind of lame cause anyone who's seen these kinds of movies could figure out what the monster was. The clichés did run thick some of the time, from the military jerk who was covering things up, the scene where a lighter wouldn't start until the most dramatic time possible. They had a drunk Dad who was redeemed at the end and the sheriff didn't have too much depth. Most of the character depth went to the kids which was more than enough to carry the movie. Oh, and there was a really sugary sweet part near the end that, even though it was as cliché, nearly brought me to tears. Damn you soft heart!

So, in conclusion, see the movie! See it! See it! See it! You'll think it's gr8 also!!