Reviews by Al

The subtitle of the book is: how height affects the health, happiness, and success of boys–and the men they become.  The author being about 5′6" himself seems a bit obsessed about how shortness has impacted his life.  Society is stacked against the short, especially the short male, he says.  They get bullied.  They earn less.  They get no attention from women — who are tallness obsessed it seems.  There are moments when I felt compassion.  And in a way, tall and short is a bit like beauty and ugliness.  You could almost write the same book about unattractive people.  It’s sad, but someone has to be ugly for someone else to be beautiful.  Someone has to be short for someone else to be tall.  (Almost like that movie "Unbreakable" by Shyamalan where someone has to be weak for someone else to be strong.)  But what was my point here.  The author makes some points for the obvious shallow nature of a society which still highly values height (pun intended) even while height confers no obvious true advantage except to see over the heads of others in a crowd and being closer to the hoop in basketball.  Still perhaps it’s an indication of good nutrition (wealth) and good genes.

But back to my earlier point: I wonder if you could make a similar argument to beauty.  Supposely beauty is due to symmetry which comes from good genes and strong immunity.  One might also suggest that beauty does confer obvious reproductive advantage to offspring assuming beauty can be inherited.

So just as the author points out that the short learn to make up for their… shortcoming through other means, I suppose the unattractive have to make up for their unattractiveness through other means.

The author makes the point at the end of the book that the tall are environmentally worse than the short.  They take up more calories.  But I was thinking this is also a genetic signal.  In the past, if a family can sustain the tall genes and the extra calories it requires it must be wealthy or at least have some success.  Unfortunately, height might be less of a viable signal today with all the cheap calories out there. (Today maybe we should replace height with thinness.)

The author also talks about early and late puberty and various confusing studies about this.  I read a different article or book about homosexuality being linked to early puberty.  The author does seem to say that being short can come from delayed puberty.  Combining the two ideas, does that mean that short guys tend not to be gay?  Hmmm, I don’t think that’s true.  Must be some counteracting factor there, because someone would have noticed if gays are all tall or average height.

It was eye opening to read some testimonials included by the author from his tall classmates indicating the advantages even as they saw them — in terms of confidence, attention from teachers, expectations, sports, etc.  Must be nice to be tall.

A film about a closeted doctor and his younger boyfriend and the doctor’s mother, Doña Herlinda.  She understands her son is gay and asks the younger man to live with her son in her house.  Still, she wants her son to get married to a woman (and have grandchildren).  This of course requires a major deception which the mother helps to maintain. It’s kind of a sweet love story in parts.  And really quite good for an 80’s film — in fact, it’s nice to see a film without the recent tiresome depictions of drugged out boy toys and flamboyant, excessive behavior.

Pretty awful films about a gay teenager and his terrible family life, and a real fictional protagonist about to be killed by his author’s pen.  What can I say but awful, awful, awful.

Big ensemble cast for this film about RFK’s assassination produced by Emilio Estevez.  It turns out like a TV movie though.  Pretty superficial film based on made up stories about what happened on the day of the shooting at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles.  The cast has lots of great actors in it, but I wonder something more could have been made of such a great cast.

The actor playing the young protagonist smiles way too much — he’s having far too good of a time.  But it’s an interesting story of kids living on their own in Japan.  Rather amazing how long they lasted on their own.  But it’s also interesting how some people knew of their plight but didn’t report them to authorities.

I found it thought provoking that there’s not much difference between adults and children in such a situation.  The children just didn’t take the situation seriously enough and didn’t have the resources to remedy it.  Also if the eldest child could have be allowed to work, it might have turned out differently.

The new bond guy Daniel Craig is actually pretty good.  And this film has a breathless opening sequence and mostly low tech action.  Not much of the usual Bond gadgetry.  But the extra focus on a well put together story and fine acting is a very good trade-off.

Jet Li plays a street fighter whose ambition grows out of control with his success, yet his life becomes without real aim.  A conflict with other fighters escapes the ring and soon takes a heavy toll.  Suspending ones disbelief is required for much of the movie, yet this is the way of period Chinese martial arts films.

The protagonist of the film is constantly saying sorry.  Nobody knows why.  Gee, that sounds eerily like me.  This is one of those gay coming of age films with the usual crush on a straight boy.  That’s happened to me too.  The kid lives on a farm.  Here’s where the similarities end.

Well done overall, but the ending is easily guessed.

I’m surprised at what make-up can still do for Tom Cruise — like hide his lack of height.  Why put timers in bombs which are in people’s heads?  It just gives them a chance.  It makes them do crazy, desperate things. But suspense for a few plot points is generated this way.  In the end, just a dumb action flick.