Putting the Fun in Dysfunctional

Over the weekend I was able to watch not one, but two different movies, both dark comedies (dramadies?) about dysfunctional families. Little Miss Sunshine, the first, was wonderful, funny and sad (my favorite combination in film or books – if you can do both well, then bless you). I enjoyed it a great deal and would highly recommend it. Of course, next to the family in the second film I watched, Sunshine’s family hardly seems dysfunctional at all. I’d been dying to see a film adaptation of Running with Scissors since I read the book. I’ve since devoured every book I could from Augusten Burroughs and Scissors isn’t even my favorite, but it is funny and insane and I really liked the book. I also really liked the movie. Sure I love books, but I do appreciate that film and print are two different mediums, so it doesn’t bother me if the film based on a book is not the same as the book. I don’t hold to the idea that the book is always better. Since I am a sucker about reading reviews, I tend to hit the imdb after I watch a movie so that I can be a part of the name-calling and assorted insults that comprise the posts written for each film. One delightful chap called this movie a steaming pile of excrement (yep, those were his exact words). I can understand possibly liking the book better or not caring for the movie, but excrement? That seems a bit harsh to me. At any rate, for anyone who has read the book or even anyone who hasn’t, I would recommend the film -- if nothing else, as a way to feel a bit better about your own family for a while.
In the small town where I grew up, I was a bit of an anomaly because my parents were divorced. Of course, now it seems that the opposite would be true. I always thought my family was dysfunctional, but as I age, I realize that we are and always have been disgustingly normal and even a bit boring. Sure, there are worse things than discovering that you have a boring family, but it was a let down to discover that we weren’t so special and strange after all. It seems I shall have to try harder to inflict strangeness into my own life.
And speaking of strangeness, I just finished reading Christopher Moore’s A Dirty Job. It is the funniest, saddest and looniest novel I have read in some time. Since I love Douglas Adams so much, I have often held him up to be the funniest writer I have ever read (and I have read and reread the Hitchhiker’s Guide books several times, though they still aren’t quite as, well, loony as his Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul, which I read in high school). Christopher Moore may just be as funny. I basically snorted and guffawed my way through the book, though there were some pages so sad that I would cry, just to be laughing again on the next page. I’ve read a few of Moore’s books now (a big, big thank you to Brian for the recommendation) and Job just may be my favorite. It has inspired me to continue working on my own novel, which has languished in book limbo for the past few weeks so I could shoot my writing load in brief bits on this blog.