On January 6, I announced that my New Year's resolution was to read some books I didn't think I would like and write about my reaction to them. I was trying for one a month and I've pretty much stuck to that as far as reading goes, I just haven't been writing about them. I gave a large list of categories of books I wouldn't normally read and asked for suggestions, though more are always welcome.
For those keeping track, Water for Elephants is a historical novel that fails the Bechdel test.
I have what I think are good reasons for not liking what I don't like. I don't expect every book to grant me an epiphany about how wrong I was to dislike its genre, though I won't be surprised if that happens once or twice. Mostly, I'm going to read with an open mind and see what I discover.
_____________________________________________________________________________________
I don't know why I have a thing against historical novels written by a modern author, I just kinda do. At least partially, the issue is that I often have trouble identifying with the characters and find that historical novels spend way too much time describing the setting. I don't so much read to explore new worlds as to explore new people, so I tend to find books that spend a lot of time on the setting tiresome.
Water for Elephants really doesn't have that problem. The author does a wonderful job of surrounding you with a depression-ever circus without ever being too lavish in the details. You fill in the battered sequins and smell of horses yourself. The frame story is set in the present day. If anything more detail is used describing the main character's nursing home, but even that never seems excessive. Essentially, Water for Elephants is the story of a large animal vet who is now very old and in a nursing home, but had spent his youth traveling around with a circus during the great depression. The narrative shifts back and forth between the present day in the nursing home and the main character's time working on the circus.
This is a really well-written book. I liked it very much and have told lots of my friends about it. In doing so, I've discovered that it was a fashionable book club book from a few years ago and many people had already read it. I've never been a book club kinda girl and the "Angela's Ashes" sorts of things I perceive they read don't appeal to me. So in a sense, I've found one more reason I wouldn't expect to like Water for Elephants. I did, though.
I know someone who is on the Board of Directors of a local nursing home. This gentleman told me that the Chair of the Board of Directors found the nursing home sequences so powerful that he bought copies for the entire board and the senior management of the nursing home. IMHO, this is a great idea. In both stories, the main character is fighting to keep his dignity in a weird and hostile environment.
The plot is, at times, melodramatic, but I found that the setting and the general mood it evoked made it work. The circus and its employees tend to have a very "us against the world" sort of attitude and people who think that way tend to end up in melodramatic situations, IMHO. What it lacks in subtlety, it makes up for in the sheer pleasure of the well-drawn characters.
The Elephant was a wonderful character.* Though the main character does find love, the relationship between Vet and Elephant feels far more central to the book and far more vital.
CC
who really did read that in February/March
*Animal lovers take note: This is, again, set in a circus during the great Depression. Some scenes are going to be squicky.
Showing posts with label CC reviews stuff. Show all posts
Showing posts with label CC reviews stuff. Show all posts
Monday, July 05, 2010
Friday, January 29, 2010
January's Book I don't expect to like: The Road
On January 6, I announced that my New Year's resolution was to read some books I didn't think I would like and write about my reaction to them. I'm going to try to read one a month. I gave a large list of categories of books I wouldn't normally read and asked for suggestions, but truth be told, I already knew what January's book would be. At Christmastime, my father-in-law had mentioned that Cormac McCarthy's The Road was one of his favorite books (he might have said his favorite) and said he'd be interested to hear what I thought of it if I ever read it.
For those keeping track, The Road is a travelogue of sorts and it fails the Bechdel test*, and yes, it's the sort of book I generally would not expect to like. I have what I think are good reasons for not liking what I don't like. I don't expect every book to grant me an epiphany about how wrong I was to dislike its genre, though I won't be surprised if that happens once or twice. Mostly, I'm going to read with an open mind and see what I discover.
____
In college, I took a class where we had to watch 2001, a Space Odyssey and write a reaction paper to it. I wrote in my paper that I thought that Kubrick was very clever to put the space-ballet-like scenes of outer space with lovely classical music in and have them go on for so long. Surely, I thought, the viewer who was sitting in a movie theater watching this would be at first transfixed, then as the minutes passed find their attention fading until even the beauty was monotony. The would shift in their seats and reach uneasily into the popcorn bucket, waiting for the dragging loveliness to end.
I allowed as to how if there's a better brief introduction to what years of space travel must feel like, I haven't seen it. I recall getting a rather nasty comment in the margins of that paper. Apparently the professor didn't share my interpretation.
One of the reasons I don't like travelogues is that often the journey is treated as all one needs for a plot structure. It's a wire on which the story's sometimes interchangeable events can be neatly strung. Like 2001, McCarthy has characters on a journey, and like 2001, the story's very monotony gives a vivid sense of what the journey must be like, though "vivid" seems like a strange word to apply to a novel that is so fundamentally bleak. It's not a long novel. I read 3/4 of it in a Starbucks while my husband made an especially lengthy trip around Home Depot. But that time passed very slowly.
The Road is about a father and son who are walking across what seems to be to be the southern part of a post-apocalyptic America, though I'm not sure the geography actually fits unless their journey is much longer than the book makes it seem. The apocalypse, whatever it is, has taken the lives of almost everyone in America and left a thick cloud of dust and ash blocking out the sun. Almost all forms of life are gone and the father and son survive by scavenging. They are walking toward a better life that may or may not exist and trying to avoid cannibals. Stuff happens to them. Sometimes they find food, sometimes they don't.
They spend a lot of nights shivering and holding each other in ways that might have seemed maudlin if this book were about a mother and child, but work given the father's manly stoicism. Somehow he's allowed more melodrama than would have worked with a mother character. Which is not to say that I appreciate what happened to the mother. I don't and I think this otherwise fine book deserved a better written characterization of her. But I don't have to like the way gender is used to understand that it is used effectively in this case. The dynamic of youth vs. maturity is also used well as the father saves the pair's bodies over and over, but the son saves their souls, constantly asking why the pair can't help every desperate person they find on their trip. It's a question that hangs in the air as one reads, yet the father's pragmatic point of view is perfectly understandable.
It felt like I barely took my eyes off the book. McCarthy's lyrical prose reduced my world to the book's. I've read a lot of books where a main character's victories have not brought me nearly the delight or relief that I felt when the father and son find a few cans of vegetables. But the book strongly implies, at least, that every can of vegetables consumed takes the human race a few steps closer to extinction. The father and son do not actually consume other people, but the book doesn't shy away from the fact that their survival almost certainly comes at the cost of the next people to venture down that road and search those cabinets.
Yet at the end, there's a bit of hope.
I started The Road expecting not to like it. Now I'm asking myself if I did and finding the question superfluous. It's like asking oneself if the Rocky Horror Picture Show is a "good" movie.
Sometimes the simple questions just cease to apply.
We will see what February brings.
CC
*The Bechdel test, usually used for movies, is
1. There must be at least two women
2. Who have a conversation
3. About something other than a man
For those keeping track, The Road is a travelogue of sorts and it fails the Bechdel test*, and yes, it's the sort of book I generally would not expect to like. I have what I think are good reasons for not liking what I don't like. I don't expect every book to grant me an epiphany about how wrong I was to dislike its genre, though I won't be surprised if that happens once or twice. Mostly, I'm going to read with an open mind and see what I discover.
____
In college, I took a class where we had to watch 2001, a Space Odyssey and write a reaction paper to it. I wrote in my paper that I thought that Kubrick was very clever to put the space-ballet-like scenes of outer space with lovely classical music in and have them go on for so long. Surely, I thought, the viewer who was sitting in a movie theater watching this would be at first transfixed, then as the minutes passed find their attention fading until even the beauty was monotony. The would shift in their seats and reach uneasily into the popcorn bucket, waiting for the dragging loveliness to end.
I allowed as to how if there's a better brief introduction to what years of space travel must feel like, I haven't seen it. I recall getting a rather nasty comment in the margins of that paper. Apparently the professor didn't share my interpretation.
One of the reasons I don't like travelogues is that often the journey is treated as all one needs for a plot structure. It's a wire on which the story's sometimes interchangeable events can be neatly strung. Like 2001, McCarthy has characters on a journey, and like 2001, the story's very monotony gives a vivid sense of what the journey must be like, though "vivid" seems like a strange word to apply to a novel that is so fundamentally bleak. It's not a long novel. I read 3/4 of it in a Starbucks while my husband made an especially lengthy trip around Home Depot. But that time passed very slowly.
The Road is about a father and son who are walking across what seems to be to be the southern part of a post-apocalyptic America, though I'm not sure the geography actually fits unless their journey is much longer than the book makes it seem. The apocalypse, whatever it is, has taken the lives of almost everyone in America and left a thick cloud of dust and ash blocking out the sun. Almost all forms of life are gone and the father and son survive by scavenging. They are walking toward a better life that may or may not exist and trying to avoid cannibals. Stuff happens to them. Sometimes they find food, sometimes they don't.
They spend a lot of nights shivering and holding each other in ways that might have seemed maudlin if this book were about a mother and child, but work given the father's manly stoicism. Somehow he's allowed more melodrama than would have worked with a mother character. Which is not to say that I appreciate what happened to the mother. I don't and I think this otherwise fine book deserved a better written characterization of her. But I don't have to like the way gender is used to understand that it is used effectively in this case. The dynamic of youth vs. maturity is also used well as the father saves the pair's bodies over and over, but the son saves their souls, constantly asking why the pair can't help every desperate person they find on their trip. It's a question that hangs in the air as one reads, yet the father's pragmatic point of view is perfectly understandable.
It felt like I barely took my eyes off the book. McCarthy's lyrical prose reduced my world to the book's. I've read a lot of books where a main character's victories have not brought me nearly the delight or relief that I felt when the father and son find a few cans of vegetables. But the book strongly implies, at least, that every can of vegetables consumed takes the human race a few steps closer to extinction. The father and son do not actually consume other people, but the book doesn't shy away from the fact that their survival almost certainly comes at the cost of the next people to venture down that road and search those cabinets.
Yet at the end, there's a bit of hope.
I started The Road expecting not to like it. Now I'm asking myself if I did and finding the question superfluous. It's like asking oneself if the Rocky Horror Picture Show is a "good" movie.
Sometimes the simple questions just cease to apply.
We will see what February brings.
CC
*The Bechdel test, usually used for movies, is
1. There must be at least two women
2. Who have a conversation
3. About something other than a man
Sunday, January 17, 2010
CC reviews "the Lovely Bones" and saves you eleven bucks.
Spoilers within if you have no idea what this movie is about, but that shouldn't matter because you shouldn't go to this movie*
For the love of God, do not see this movie. I am, uncharacteristically, almost at a loss for metaphor. But I'm going to try. It's like if, oh George Balanchine, working with a heretofore undiscovered piece of music by, oh, say, Mozart and it was one of those ballets where Cezanne painted the sets, and then Balanchine picked for his dancers, oh, say, KISS.
There are many elements of awesomeness, perhaps brilliance in that hot mess, but it wouldn't fucking work.
The Lovely Bones has some really wonderful elements including the hardest working actors in the history of film. Remember how Hitchcock* essentially tortured Tippi Hedren for a week by doing stuff like tying live, angry birds to her and filming it as they pecked her half-revealed flesh through they clothes they had already torn? Probably a better experience than working on "the Lovely Bones."
If there were Oscars for effort, Mark Wahlberg and Saoirse Ronan would deserve them. And Susan Sarandon chews the scenery like you wouldn't believe in a role where that's clearly what she's expected to do in a Falstaff sort of way. Ronan's role is mostly about wandering around looking amazed, with the occasional scream of anguish, but the few moments when she's allowed to have a personality, she evokes that personality very well. Wahlberg's character is kind of a loon, but you understand why he is the way he is and Wahlberg gives good loon.
The cinematography keeps you watching long after you wish you could stop. It cuts back and forth between different threads of story so much it is impossible to lose yourself in the movie even though you're not sure you want to. You never get the chance to get caught up in the thing, so if you're me you sit there and analyze it. And this movie does not stand up well to analysis.
The directing is so bad that you know exactly what you're watching every second and what the directer is trying to hamfistedly make you feel. You know thirty seconds into the movie that the girl is going to get killed and the tension is built up so slowly and clumsily that by twenty minutes into the movie, your brain is BEGGING the movie to fucking kill her already and destroy this perfectly sweet family because the buildup to that killing and destruction is unbearably plodding and meticulous. I had not been previously aware that I could be that anxious and that bored at the same time.
The last Peter Jackson movie I saw, King Kong, made it clear that Jackson has no clue what to do with tension, a problem I don't recall him having in "The Lord of the Rings" or "Heavenly Creatures." In King Kong, Ann is in constant danger for like 45 minutes of movie while Kong fights off dinosaurs. One assumes that it is inconceivable to Jackson that 45 minutes of Kong wailing on dinosaurs might be a tad excessive. He has the same self-restraint problems here in that there are several situations that should be tense and exciting but go on so damn long that it just gets irritating.
Jackson's CGI-rendered and brightly-colored vision of heaven is, erm, not mine and includes a Magical Asian because, one assumes, Morgan Freeman had other commitments.
Anyway, y'all get the idea.
CC
*To make it absolutely clear, I am NOT advocating a boycott of this movie or ordering you not to see it in any way that you should treat as a command. I am expressing my extreme distaste, not a political agenda. Also, I ain't your Momma and I don't expect you to listen to me just because I say so.
**After finding out that Hedren would not, in fact, fuck him, at least according to Hedren herself as told to Hitchcock biographer Donald Spoto.
For the love of God, do not see this movie. I am, uncharacteristically, almost at a loss for metaphor. But I'm going to try. It's like if, oh George Balanchine, working with a heretofore undiscovered piece of music by, oh, say, Mozart and it was one of those ballets where Cezanne painted the sets, and then Balanchine picked for his dancers, oh, say, KISS.
There are many elements of awesomeness, perhaps brilliance in that hot mess, but it wouldn't fucking work.
The Lovely Bones has some really wonderful elements including the hardest working actors in the history of film. Remember how Hitchcock* essentially tortured Tippi Hedren for a week by doing stuff like tying live, angry birds to her and filming it as they pecked her half-revealed flesh through they clothes they had already torn? Probably a better experience than working on "the Lovely Bones."
If there were Oscars for effort, Mark Wahlberg and Saoirse Ronan would deserve them. And Susan Sarandon chews the scenery like you wouldn't believe in a role where that's clearly what she's expected to do in a Falstaff sort of way. Ronan's role is mostly about wandering around looking amazed, with the occasional scream of anguish, but the few moments when she's allowed to have a personality, she evokes that personality very well. Wahlberg's character is kind of a loon, but you understand why he is the way he is and Wahlberg gives good loon.
The cinematography keeps you watching long after you wish you could stop. It cuts back and forth between different threads of story so much it is impossible to lose yourself in the movie even though you're not sure you want to. You never get the chance to get caught up in the thing, so if you're me you sit there and analyze it. And this movie does not stand up well to analysis.
The directing is so bad that you know exactly what you're watching every second and what the directer is trying to hamfistedly make you feel. You know thirty seconds into the movie that the girl is going to get killed and the tension is built up so slowly and clumsily that by twenty minutes into the movie, your brain is BEGGING the movie to fucking kill her already and destroy this perfectly sweet family because the buildup to that killing and destruction is unbearably plodding and meticulous. I had not been previously aware that I could be that anxious and that bored at the same time.
The last Peter Jackson movie I saw, King Kong, made it clear that Jackson has no clue what to do with tension, a problem I don't recall him having in "The Lord of the Rings" or "Heavenly Creatures." In King Kong, Ann is in constant danger for like 45 minutes of movie while Kong fights off dinosaurs. One assumes that it is inconceivable to Jackson that 45 minutes of Kong wailing on dinosaurs might be a tad excessive. He has the same self-restraint problems here in that there are several situations that should be tense and exciting but go on so damn long that it just gets irritating.
Jackson's CGI-rendered and brightly-colored vision of heaven is, erm, not mine and includes a Magical Asian because, one assumes, Morgan Freeman had other commitments.
Anyway, y'all get the idea.
CC
*To make it absolutely clear, I am NOT advocating a boycott of this movie or ordering you not to see it in any way that you should treat as a command. I am expressing my extreme distaste, not a political agenda. Also, I ain't your Momma and I don't expect you to listen to me just because I say so.
**After finding out that Hedren would not, in fact, fuck him, at least according to Hedren herself as told to Hitchcock biographer Donald Spoto.
Friday, August 15, 2008
Against her better judgment, CC saw Mamma Mia
By myself, because the only person who wanted to see it was Cubit and she has been out of town.
I have to say that I agree with Peacebang's take pretty much fully.
I'd like to add that there was sufficient Christine Baranski. (I had been wondering about this.)
One note, as I watched the movie I was totally, TOTALLY, wanting Christine Baranski and Julie Walters to hook up. I was really hoping that "Take a Chance on Me" was being saved for that. How much cooler would that scene have been if it had been Christine Baranski walking across those tables toward Julie Walters?*
CC
*I always do this. I'm such a Yenta for movie characters. I had high hopes for James Marsden and Queen Latifah in "Hairspray". There was chemistry there, kids.
I have to say that I agree with Peacebang's take pretty much fully.
I'd like to add that there was sufficient Christine Baranski. (I had been wondering about this.)
One note, as I watched the movie I was totally, TOTALLY, wanting Christine Baranski and Julie Walters to hook up. I was really hoping that "Take a Chance on Me" was being saved for that. How much cooler would that scene have been if it had been Christine Baranski walking across those tables toward Julie Walters?*
CC
*I always do this. I'm such a Yenta for movie characters. I had high hopes for James Marsden and Queen Latifah in "Hairspray". There was chemistry there, kids.
Wednesday, July 30, 2008
Oh, how I hated the Batman movie.
THERE IS A DIFFERENCE OF OPINION IN THE COMMENTS AS TO WHETHER THIS CONTAINS SPOILERS. I DON'T THINK I'VE SPOILED ANYTHING MAJOR, BUT YOU'VE NOW BEEN WARNED.
Long time readers know that at one point, I threw fundraising parties for Republican members of Congress professionally. It wasn’t as hard for me as I suspect it would have been for a lot of UUs as I’m plenty socially liberal but have something of a libertarian twist to my thinking on economic and government power issues.
Anyway, I often ate lunch with my boss, who was the wife of a retired army guy. She knew I was fairly socially liberal and sometimes liked to quiz me on why I believed what I did. I would do the same in turn for her views. It was fun and I learned a lot. Anyway, one time, the subject of torture came up. She brought up a lot of toy situations where her husband was in danger or there was a ticking bomb. There was a certain unfairness to the conversation in that there was no way I could say “Actually, I would rather your husband be blown to smithereens than have my country torturing people, Boss.” But I think I got that message across, as annoying as she found it.
Watching the Batman movie felt a lot like having that conversation over again, albeit with an imaginative emo college kid rather than my relatively staid and realistic ex-boss. The whole movie to me felt like one big toy situation contrived to make me sympathetic to the “There are times when we have to destroy our values to save them” cause and I’m just not gonna get on that bus.
Heath Ledger's portrayal was technichally good, but his character just felt like a big cartoon in that the Joker for all practical purposes has magic powers in this movie. He can do anything, and the movie wants us to believe this so badly it doesn’t bother to explain how he does some of his more amazing feats. (E.g. Joker can sneak lots of bombs and arguably surgical equipment into jail with him.) Also, Joker has to have 30 mooks throughout this movie that follow his orders to the letter, no matter how dangerous or weird they are. Said mooks have to have heard that everybody who helps Joker do anything dies, but they play along anyway and are all dead by the end of the movie. Joker’s mooks can dress up as a police honor guard and of course they look exactly like one with convincing military manuvers and the mooks had no problem kidnapping the real honor guard and stealing their uniforms.
So much of this movie feels so incredibly contrived. For a non-Joker example, a mob boss is either going to visit Prosecutor Harvey Dent in the hospital, or just happens to be standing around alone outside his hospital room, convenient for questioning at a crucial moment. There are a couple of obvious moral dilemmas set up that made me feel like I was back in torts class.
I’m annoyed because I defended Batman on Peacebang’s blog a couple of weeks ago, saying that his brains made up for his lack of super powers. This Batman doesn’t have much in the way of brains as far as I can tell. He doesn’t design and build his own stuff, Lucius Fox* does it for him. He doesn’t even do much detective work. Commissioner Gordon seems to do a lot of the actual thinking and Batman’s technology does the rest. I wasn’t a tremendous fan of Iron Man, but when FortiesGirl pointed out that Tony Stark won his battles by being a better engineer, I had to respect that. This Batman doesn’t need brains. He has toys. But he didn’t build them himself.
One of Batman’s most impressive toys is a pretty clear stand-in for domestic wiretapping (I guess thanks to Obama and McCain's agreement on the issue, Wayne Enterprises won't even get fined) and even my beloved Lucius Fox is taken in by the argument that “We will only use it just this once. Because we REALLY REALLY need it right now. Then we won’t use it again ever." (Admittedly the machine self-destructs, but lots of stuff blows up in this movie and that doesn’t always mean it is permanently gone.)
I’m already getting crap in the comments for having called Batman “neo-con” in what I posted last night, but I think it’s a pretty fair call. Batman is all about protecting Gotham and talks about Gotham City in much the same way as Bush talks about protecting America, almost as if he’s protecting the concept and the ideals rather than the actual people. But then, Batman and the police repeatedly betray those ideals as they torture people**, a quality I feel they share with the Bush administration. The movie spends much of the time trying to convince us that things are so bad that our cowardice justifies betraying who we are.
No, it doesn’t.
Washingtonians have a pretty good idea how people react to a couple of crazy guys randomly going around killing people and then seeming to disappear only to reappear a few days later and do it again. Frankly, we’ve been there. Were some people nuts? Yeah, I guess. But most of us pretty much went on about our lives as usual rather than rioting in the streets or calling for revenge at press conferences.
The sort of mass hysteria the Joker causes is just so extreme as to be unbelievable. Even in after 9-11, people were a little nuts but not this bad and Joker does nothing on 9-11's scale.
I know, I know, it’s a comic book movie. And I know I’m giving it a very large compliment by taking it so seriously, but it still freaks me out to see the number of people who see this as a deep and thought-provoking study of evil.
To me, it looked like one big excuse for the inexcusable.
CC
*Morgan Freeman was great, I gotta say. I think I enjoy him more as Fox than I have in any other role. Please Mr. Freeman, stop playing mystical folks and concentrate on playing tweedy super geniuses.
** At one point the Joker obviously baits a cop into beating him in the interrogation room. Even the cop gets what is going on with the baiting, but attacks Joker anyway, setting in motion a chain of events leading to the Joker’s eventual escape. If the cop hadn’t let himself lose his cool, the movie would have ended a blessed hour earlier with the Joker in the pokey for good. Yet of course, nobody in the movie seems to learn anything from this.
Long time readers know that at one point, I threw fundraising parties for Republican members of Congress professionally. It wasn’t as hard for me as I suspect it would have been for a lot of UUs as I’m plenty socially liberal but have something of a libertarian twist to my thinking on economic and government power issues.
Anyway, I often ate lunch with my boss, who was the wife of a retired army guy. She knew I was fairly socially liberal and sometimes liked to quiz me on why I believed what I did. I would do the same in turn for her views. It was fun and I learned a lot. Anyway, one time, the subject of torture came up. She brought up a lot of toy situations where her husband was in danger or there was a ticking bomb. There was a certain unfairness to the conversation in that there was no way I could say “Actually, I would rather your husband be blown to smithereens than have my country torturing people, Boss.” But I think I got that message across, as annoying as she found it.
Watching the Batman movie felt a lot like having that conversation over again, albeit with an imaginative emo college kid rather than my relatively staid and realistic ex-boss. The whole movie to me felt like one big toy situation contrived to make me sympathetic to the “There are times when we have to destroy our values to save them” cause and I’m just not gonna get on that bus.
Heath Ledger's portrayal was technichally good, but his character just felt like a big cartoon in that the Joker for all practical purposes has magic powers in this movie. He can do anything, and the movie wants us to believe this so badly it doesn’t bother to explain how he does some of his more amazing feats. (E.g. Joker can sneak lots of bombs and arguably surgical equipment into jail with him.) Also, Joker has to have 30 mooks throughout this movie that follow his orders to the letter, no matter how dangerous or weird they are. Said mooks have to have heard that everybody who helps Joker do anything dies, but they play along anyway and are all dead by the end of the movie. Joker’s mooks can dress up as a police honor guard and of course they look exactly like one with convincing military manuvers and the mooks had no problem kidnapping the real honor guard and stealing their uniforms.
So much of this movie feels so incredibly contrived. For a non-Joker example, a mob boss is either going to visit Prosecutor Harvey Dent in the hospital, or just happens to be standing around alone outside his hospital room, convenient for questioning at a crucial moment. There are a couple of obvious moral dilemmas set up that made me feel like I was back in torts class.
I’m annoyed because I defended Batman on Peacebang’s blog a couple of weeks ago, saying that his brains made up for his lack of super powers. This Batman doesn’t have much in the way of brains as far as I can tell. He doesn’t design and build his own stuff, Lucius Fox* does it for him. He doesn’t even do much detective work. Commissioner Gordon seems to do a lot of the actual thinking and Batman’s technology does the rest. I wasn’t a tremendous fan of Iron Man, but when FortiesGirl pointed out that Tony Stark won his battles by being a better engineer, I had to respect that. This Batman doesn’t need brains. He has toys. But he didn’t build them himself.
One of Batman’s most impressive toys is a pretty clear stand-in for domestic wiretapping (I guess thanks to Obama and McCain's agreement on the issue, Wayne Enterprises won't even get fined) and even my beloved Lucius Fox is taken in by the argument that “We will only use it just this once. Because we REALLY REALLY need it right now. Then we won’t use it again ever." (Admittedly the machine self-destructs, but lots of stuff blows up in this movie and that doesn’t always mean it is permanently gone.)
I’m already getting crap in the comments for having called Batman “neo-con” in what I posted last night, but I think it’s a pretty fair call. Batman is all about protecting Gotham and talks about Gotham City in much the same way as Bush talks about protecting America, almost as if he’s protecting the concept and the ideals rather than the actual people. But then, Batman and the police repeatedly betray those ideals as they torture people**, a quality I feel they share with the Bush administration. The movie spends much of the time trying to convince us that things are so bad that our cowardice justifies betraying who we are.
No, it doesn’t.
Washingtonians have a pretty good idea how people react to a couple of crazy guys randomly going around killing people and then seeming to disappear only to reappear a few days later and do it again. Frankly, we’ve been there. Were some people nuts? Yeah, I guess. But most of us pretty much went on about our lives as usual rather than rioting in the streets or calling for revenge at press conferences.
The sort of mass hysteria the Joker causes is just so extreme as to be unbelievable. Even in after 9-11, people were a little nuts but not this bad and Joker does nothing on 9-11's scale.
I know, I know, it’s a comic book movie. And I know I’m giving it a very large compliment by taking it so seriously, but it still freaks me out to see the number of people who see this as a deep and thought-provoking study of evil.
To me, it looked like one big excuse for the inexcusable.
CC
*Morgan Freeman was great, I gotta say. I think I enjoy him more as Fox than I have in any other role. Please Mr. Freeman, stop playing mystical folks and concentrate on playing tweedy super geniuses.
** At one point the Joker obviously baits a cop into beating him in the interrogation room. Even the cop gets what is going on with the baiting, but attacks Joker anyway, setting in motion a chain of events leading to the Joker’s eventual escape. If the cop hadn’t let himself lose his cool, the movie would have ended a blessed hour earlier with the Joker in the pokey for good. Yet of course, nobody in the movie seems to learn anything from this.
Tuesday, July 29, 2008
If they ever make a "Lucius Fox fights crime" movie, I will go.
But I may never go to another Batman movie, especially in this "Batman the neocon" franchise that to me has the budget of a blockbuster yet the feel of some Emo kid college student's senior project.
Hated it. HATED IT.
More later, perhaps in the morning.
Oh, and for my money Gary Oldman deserves the oscar if anyone's getting one.
CC
Hated it. HATED IT.
More later, perhaps in the morning.
Oh, and for my money Gary Oldman deserves the oscar if anyone's getting one.
CC
Friday, May 30, 2008
The Sex in the City movie is exactly what you think it is
If you like that, go for it. If you don't, don't go.
CC
A major Charlotte fan.
CC
A major Charlotte fan.
Saturday, March 22, 2008
Saturday, January 19, 2008
The worst pies in London
"So what are you doing with a weekend all to yourself, Miss Sue?" TheChalicerelative asked, a reference to theCSO being out of town until Tuesday.
"Dunno. I'll help you pack some, and I'll spend some time at work, I expect," I said into the phone, keeping my eyes carefully on the road.
"What about this evening? If I'd thought about it, we could have gone out to supper."
"It's OK," I said. "I have class anyway, and afterwards I thought I might see Sweeney Todd."
"Again?"
Damn. I'd already told her I'd seen it. "I like it," I said lamely. The Chalicerelative is the sort of person who might well draw negative conclusions about the mental health of someone who willingly saw Sweeney Todd multiple times.
Instead, she sighed. "Your father loved that show."
While it's not accurate in the strictest biological sense to talk about my father in the past tense, for all intents and purposes, one might as well. Still, the Chalicerelative's words set off a chain of memories.
I don't know how young I was. Young enough to be comfortably held. And my father was saying, his voice that of someone delighting in telling a dreadful secret,
"Do you know what happens next? His friend Mrs. Lovett makes MEAT PIES!" I can remember my own childish squeal, then my father would roll out the words with Hestonesque vigor, "Meat pies made of PEOPLE."
When theCSO says that all my snuggly childhood memories sound like child abuse to him, this is probably what he's talking about.
Something in that movie really reaches out to me. Tim Burton often does. I saw the Corpse Bride three times and I love how his adaptation of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory really evoked the spirit of the book*.
My father doesn't leave his house when he can avoid it. But I'm still tempted to call up my parents and see if they'd like to catch a matinee.
So that's what I'm thinking about tonight.
CC
*Yes, I know you love the 1971 version. Roald Dahl and I disagree.
"Dunno. I'll help you pack some, and I'll spend some time at work, I expect," I said into the phone, keeping my eyes carefully on the road.
"What about this evening? If I'd thought about it, we could have gone out to supper."
"It's OK," I said. "I have class anyway, and afterwards I thought I might see Sweeney Todd."
"Again?"
Damn. I'd already told her I'd seen it. "I like it," I said lamely. The Chalicerelative is the sort of person who might well draw negative conclusions about the mental health of someone who willingly saw Sweeney Todd multiple times.
Instead, she sighed. "Your father loved that show."
While it's not accurate in the strictest biological sense to talk about my father in the past tense, for all intents and purposes, one might as well. Still, the Chalicerelative's words set off a chain of memories.
I don't know how young I was. Young enough to be comfortably held. And my father was saying, his voice that of someone delighting in telling a dreadful secret,
"Do you know what happens next? His friend Mrs. Lovett makes MEAT PIES!" I can remember my own childish squeal, then my father would roll out the words with Hestonesque vigor, "Meat pies made of PEOPLE."
When theCSO says that all my snuggly childhood memories sound like child abuse to him, this is probably what he's talking about.
Something in that movie really reaches out to me. Tim Burton often does. I saw the Corpse Bride three times and I love how his adaptation of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory really evoked the spirit of the book*.
My father doesn't leave his house when he can avoid it. But I'm still tempted to call up my parents and see if they'd like to catch a matinee.
So that's what I'm thinking about tonight.
CC
*Yes, I know you love the 1971 version. Roald Dahl and I disagree.
Tuesday, November 06, 2007
At least they didn't play "Imagine"
TheCSO and I went to see Across the Universe, or as everyone seems to call it "the Beatles movie" on Sunday. It probably won't be a surprise that the hippie-centric movie did not impress. Essentially as string of decent music videos to Beatles songs strung together with a plot that is ripped off of "Hair" but is still porn-movie-thin, it was an amusing way to spend two hours, but not much more.
TheCSO and I left it wondering if like, "the Wild West," "The sixties" will at some point become a standard movie setting that has little to do with historical reality. Seems highly possible. There were a few nods to the historical reality of hippies. It was very clear that the men ran the little activist group the female lead joins, leaving the women to do all the work and act as the moral conscience. But it did seem odd that the publically affectionate interracial couple didn't merit so much as a stare.
The main character, Jude, of course, doesn't really do anything for most of the movie. Things happen to him and one goes through the whole movie with him not getting a sense of who he is. Jude reminded me of a bit from Tempest-Tost, a Robertson Davies novel I like:
Cobbler pondered for a moment. "Well," he said, "I suppose if I were you -- that's to say a somewhat inert chap, half content to be the football of fate -- I'd go right on doing whatever I was doing at the moment, and hope the whole thing would blow over."
The celebrity cameos improve things a bit, particularly Eddie Izzard as Mr. Kite and the five Selma Hayeks (you kinda have too see it to believe it. But it was sexy.)
Toward the end, there is a weird sequence where Jude's girlfriend Lucy, who had broken up with him, is supposed to show up at a rooftop concert. Now, mind you, she doesn't know that Jude will be there. But when the cops won't let her in the door, the tone of the movie suddenly becomes somewhat tense. Jude expected her to be there! And she's not there! Does this mean she doesn't love him after all?
(CC thinks "Huh? Why would it mean that?)*
One would think any realistic person would just assume something came up and he could call her the next day, say "Hey, I came back from England for you because I was worried about you" and ask her out for coffee.
But reality isn't the point of this purely manufactured bit of drama. The point is her showing up at exactly the right time, so they can sing to each other across rooftops. The point is the image.
She makes it in the end, of course.
This is a silly, silly, movie.
And I have to mention my favorite moment, when Lucy-the-activist-hippie is fighting with Jude because he just wants to do his thing without doing a bunch of protesting. Lucy cries, somewhat hysterically, "I would throw myself in front of a tank if it would bring my brother home!"
And Jude says simply, "It wouldn't."
Damn right.
CC
*Upon further reflection, I have to concede that I have known at least one hippie who was a great believer in imagining how something with her lover should go, and if her lover did not follow the mental script and it didn't go exactly the way she had pictured, assuming she wasn't sufficiently loved and creating drama about it. So maybe that part was realistic.
TheCSO and I left it wondering if like, "the Wild West," "The sixties" will at some point become a standard movie setting that has little to do with historical reality. Seems highly possible. There were a few nods to the historical reality of hippies. It was very clear that the men ran the little activist group the female lead joins, leaving the women to do all the work and act as the moral conscience. But it did seem odd that the publically affectionate interracial couple didn't merit so much as a stare.
The main character, Jude, of course, doesn't really do anything for most of the movie. Things happen to him and one goes through the whole movie with him not getting a sense of who he is. Jude reminded me of a bit from Tempest-Tost, a Robertson Davies novel I like:
Cobbler pondered for a moment. "Well," he said, "I suppose if I were you -- that's to say a somewhat inert chap, half content to be the football of fate -- I'd go right on doing whatever I was doing at the moment, and hope the whole thing would blow over."
The celebrity cameos improve things a bit, particularly Eddie Izzard as Mr. Kite and the five Selma Hayeks (you kinda have too see it to believe it. But it was sexy.)
Toward the end, there is a weird sequence where Jude's girlfriend Lucy, who had broken up with him, is supposed to show up at a rooftop concert. Now, mind you, she doesn't know that Jude will be there. But when the cops won't let her in the door, the tone of the movie suddenly becomes somewhat tense. Jude expected her to be there! And she's not there! Does this mean she doesn't love him after all?
(CC thinks "Huh? Why would it mean that?)*
One would think any realistic person would just assume something came up and he could call her the next day, say "Hey, I came back from England for you because I was worried about you" and ask her out for coffee.
But reality isn't the point of this purely manufactured bit of drama. The point is her showing up at exactly the right time, so they can sing to each other across rooftops. The point is the image.
She makes it in the end, of course.
This is a silly, silly, movie.
And I have to mention my favorite moment, when Lucy-the-activist-hippie is fighting with Jude because he just wants to do his thing without doing a bunch of protesting. Lucy cries, somewhat hysterically, "I would throw myself in front of a tank if it would bring my brother home!"
And Jude says simply, "It wouldn't."
Damn right.
CC
*Upon further reflection, I have to concede that I have known at least one hippie who was a great believer in imagining how something with her lover should go, and if her lover did not follow the mental script and it didn't go exactly the way she had pictured, assuming she wasn't sufficiently loved and creating drama about it. So maybe that part was realistic.
Sunday, November 26, 2006
CC reviews The Big Shuffle
First off, I have to agree with just about everything Ms. Kitty says here One of her points is that the UU character seems a lame stereotype of a UU who enjoys protesting and getting arrested, but never seems to get anything accomplished that actually helps anybody. Robin notes in the comments "Unfortunately any "charicature" or stereotype is usually based on a certain amount of truth. There are lots of shallow U*Us who talk the talk but fail or refuse to walk the walk. . . and not just when it comes to social justice"
He's right, of course. But Ms. Kitty's point isn't that stereotypes can't be true*. It's that writing about stereotypes usually doesn't make for great writing. This book also has a gay guy who has an antique store, loves to cook and sings show tunes all the time. There are certainly lots of gay men who enjoy those things. But what's more interesting is when she writes against type and has characters with quirks that differ from the expected ones. The minister who hosts a poker game that the players call the "Building and Grounds committee" is a nice touch. As is the town bookie, who turns out to be a devoted family man delighted that his grandson is winning creative writing prizes. Even the gay guy turning the local girl scout troop into a finishing school of sorts is pretty funny. Because it differs from the stereotype.
The plot has Hallie returning from college to care for her eight younger siblings after the death of her father. Her biological family ends up getting a great deal of help from the family of friends she has put together in the previous two books. (I am typically a sucker for "family of friends" plots, FWIW.)
As seems to be the standard for this series, the minor characters are much better written and more interesting than the major ones, though the major ones have improved a lot.
I agree with Ms. Kitty that it is a shame that the author feels the need to lighten up the mood so much with inappropriate banter. (Of course some people are like that about death. An author could write characters being silly after a death as an expression of obvious grief. The Mary Tyler Moore episode with the funeral of Chuckles the Clown, an example Pederson even has a character mention in the book, is a really good example of that and Pederson is going for a similar feeling. But Pederson's characters are not Mary Tyler Moore and their kidding doesn't feel like grief, but just bare and appalling tackiness in the face of tragedy.)
When Pederson lets her characters grieve, the results can be wonderful. The scene after the father's funeral where Bernard has to guide Hallie through the motions of the social ritual of the post-funeral reception, is spectacular. It's pity Pederson doesn't trust her characters a little bit more and let them feel their emotions. It would make them more complex and more sympathetic.
The nitpicker in me points out that there are a lot of timing issues in this series. Hallie pickes up how to run a household almost immediately, something I'm still working on at 28 and without kids, but Italian immigrant Ottavio has learned very little English in his two years in America surrounded totally by English speakers. (I knew several people in college who spent a summer in a European country and came back sounding more or less fluent.)
On the whole, each book has been better than the last. I'm doubting PR guy will contact me about the last book in the series, but I may well pick it up and review it anyway when it comes out as I'd like to see if the writing improves still more.
CC
*I recall reading Tess of the D'Urbervilles early in high school and thinking of the "Somewhat insecure older chap sedecues trusting young woman and then leaves her heartbroken" plot as total cheesy melodrama. Then I saw it happen to half my friends.
He's right, of course. But Ms. Kitty's point isn't that stereotypes can't be true*. It's that writing about stereotypes usually doesn't make for great writing. This book also has a gay guy who has an antique store, loves to cook and sings show tunes all the time. There are certainly lots of gay men who enjoy those things. But what's more interesting is when she writes against type and has characters with quirks that differ from the expected ones. The minister who hosts a poker game that the players call the "Building and Grounds committee" is a nice touch. As is the town bookie, who turns out to be a devoted family man delighted that his grandson is winning creative writing prizes. Even the gay guy turning the local girl scout troop into a finishing school of sorts is pretty funny. Because it differs from the stereotype.
The plot has Hallie returning from college to care for her eight younger siblings after the death of her father. Her biological family ends up getting a great deal of help from the family of friends she has put together in the previous two books. (I am typically a sucker for "family of friends" plots, FWIW.)
As seems to be the standard for this series, the minor characters are much better written and more interesting than the major ones, though the major ones have improved a lot.
I agree with Ms. Kitty that it is a shame that the author feels the need to lighten up the mood so much with inappropriate banter. (Of course some people are like that about death. An author could write characters being silly after a death as an expression of obvious grief. The Mary Tyler Moore episode with the funeral of Chuckles the Clown, an example Pederson even has a character mention in the book, is a really good example of that and Pederson is going for a similar feeling. But Pederson's characters are not Mary Tyler Moore and their kidding doesn't feel like grief, but just bare and appalling tackiness in the face of tragedy.)
When Pederson lets her characters grieve, the results can be wonderful. The scene after the father's funeral where Bernard has to guide Hallie through the motions of the social ritual of the post-funeral reception, is spectacular. It's pity Pederson doesn't trust her characters a little bit more and let them feel their emotions. It would make them more complex and more sympathetic.
The nitpicker in me points out that there are a lot of timing issues in this series. Hallie pickes up how to run a household almost immediately, something I'm still working on at 28 and without kids, but Italian immigrant Ottavio has learned very little English in his two years in America surrounded totally by English speakers. (I knew several people in college who spent a summer in a European country and came back sounding more or less fluent.)
On the whole, each book has been better than the last. I'm doubting PR guy will contact me about the last book in the series, but I may well pick it up and review it anyway when it comes out as I'd like to see if the writing improves still more.
CC
*I recall reading Tess of the D'Urbervilles early in high school and thinking of the "Somewhat insecure older chap sedecues trusting young woman and then leaves her heartbroken" plot as total cheesy melodrama. Then I saw it happen to half my friends.
Wednesday, November 22, 2006
CC reviews Heart's Desire
Heart's Desire, the sequal to Beginner's Luck, does represent a big improvement, especially when it comes to characterization. Perhaps part of it is that most of the Stockton family's wackiness was revealed in the first book, and author Laura Pederson wisely doesn't feel the need to create any more quirks.
Despite this, Heart's Desire does retain the manufactured feel of Beginner's Luck in many respects. The plots seem less like real problems and more like stage business for the amusing characters. Hallie's quest to lose her virginity, yet discomfort every time she has the chance, seems logical enough if not terribly interesting. Her belief that her desire for sex makes her a sex maniac is familiar, though I felt that way at thirteen and seventeen-year-old Hallie seems a little old to be that sheltered.
She also spends the summer trying desperately to earn money*, bemoaning the fact that she won't be able to go to school unless she gets $10,000 somehow. Meanwhile, her legal guardians spend much of the book collapsing into Heppelwhite chairs and talking about their expensive doodads. It's not that Hallie is too proud to take money from them, as far as I can tell the subject never even comes up, or if it does and I missed it, it certainly isn't a big point. I'm sorry, if I loved a college age kid and saw her struggling to get the money for her education, I'd sell a couple of oriental carpets and an antique vase or two and let her go. At one point, the alcoholic monkey goes on a rampage and destroys thousands of dollars in antiques. It doesn't even occur to Hallie that what the monkey destroyed could have paid for her schooling, a detail that struck me as quite unrealistic.
Several plots resolve themselves by someone "off screen" changing his/her mind about something important for insufficient-sounding reasons. The reader hears about the climactic decision after the fact, and sometimes in a convoluted way. It's not even Deus Ex Machina, it's more like Deus-Ex-What-Just-Happened?
Miss Kitty mentioned in the comments that the third book is OK. From the book jacket, my guess is that she's right, particularly since it sounds like it has a darker tone. Humor is not this author's thing. Almost none of the banter sounds natural and most of the jokes are extremely tired. But some of the dramatic scenes were quite good and kept me reading.
Olivia's still the only Unitarian in the book as far as I recall. She's still the stereotyped church social justice lady. Jokes about how UUs aren't religious are still old.
I should emphasize that the minor characters are quite well-drawn and seem reasonable and interesting, Hallie's poker group especially.
On Friday, I will review the last book in the series so far.
CC
*TheCSO pointed out that if a girl really wants to lose her virginity and earn money the same summer, something can often be worked out. Don't worry, I hit him with the book.
Despite this, Heart's Desire does retain the manufactured feel of Beginner's Luck in many respects. The plots seem less like real problems and more like stage business for the amusing characters. Hallie's quest to lose her virginity, yet discomfort every time she has the chance, seems logical enough if not terribly interesting. Her belief that her desire for sex makes her a sex maniac is familiar, though I felt that way at thirteen and seventeen-year-old Hallie seems a little old to be that sheltered.
She also spends the summer trying desperately to earn money*, bemoaning the fact that she won't be able to go to school unless she gets $10,000 somehow. Meanwhile, her legal guardians spend much of the book collapsing into Heppelwhite chairs and talking about their expensive doodads. It's not that Hallie is too proud to take money from them, as far as I can tell the subject never even comes up, or if it does and I missed it, it certainly isn't a big point. I'm sorry, if I loved a college age kid and saw her struggling to get the money for her education, I'd sell a couple of oriental carpets and an antique vase or two and let her go. At one point, the alcoholic monkey goes on a rampage and destroys thousands of dollars in antiques. It doesn't even occur to Hallie that what the monkey destroyed could have paid for her schooling, a detail that struck me as quite unrealistic.
Several plots resolve themselves by someone "off screen" changing his/her mind about something important for insufficient-sounding reasons. The reader hears about the climactic decision after the fact, and sometimes in a convoluted way. It's not even Deus Ex Machina, it's more like Deus-Ex-What-Just-Happened?
Miss Kitty mentioned in the comments that the third book is OK. From the book jacket, my guess is that she's right, particularly since it sounds like it has a darker tone. Humor is not this author's thing. Almost none of the banter sounds natural and most of the jokes are extremely tired. But some of the dramatic scenes were quite good and kept me reading.
Olivia's still the only Unitarian in the book as far as I recall. She's still the stereotyped church social justice lady. Jokes about how UUs aren't religious are still old.
I should emphasize that the minor characters are quite well-drawn and seem reasonable and interesting, Hallie's poker group especially.
On Friday, I will review the last book in the series so far.
CC
*TheCSO pointed out that if a girl really wants to lose her virginity and earn money the same summer, something can often be worked out. Don't worry, I hit him with the book.
Monday, November 20, 2006
CC reviews Beginner's Luck
Laura Pederson's novel Beginner's Luck has given me new faith in the publishability of my own work.
First, a bit of background. Last week, a PR chap emailed me and asked me if I'd like to review a book with some Unitarians in it. Sure, I said. Turns out it's a trilogy, and he offered to send me the whole thing. I'm only actually asked to review the third, but I will review all of them, since I don't like to start a series in the middle so I'm reading them anyway. I will try to post those reviews Monday, Wednesday and Friday of this week.
The plot is solid enough and did keep me reading. It centers around Hallie, a sixteen-year-old gambling aficionado who drops out of school, runs away from home and ends up living in this house full of loveable eccentrics and doing their yard work for them. The minor characters' reactions to all of this are all reasonable, which makes the level of narrative tone-deafness exhibited in the characterization of the main characters all the more puzzling.
As this book is the story of a high-school senior told from her perspective, it took me a while to figure out whether the immaturity to the writing was intentional. Lots of things didn't quite ring true, but that could have been a narrative device of some sort to show the immaturity of the narrator.
But there are just too many places where the adults sound strangely like teenagers. and vice versa. After we've met the wacky old lady and the two gay men, who fall predictably into "Will" and "Jack" fictional gay guy archetypes, the "Will" gay guy whose name is "Gil" actually says, in an apparent attempt to justify himself to a sixteen-year-old whom he's just met, "I'm the normal one here," later adding that nobody else in the house typically knows what day it is.
I just can't see anybody over the age of twelve feeling so insecure that they would say such a thing about their own family to a total stranger, and Gil is clearly intended to be the family's voice of reason.
For another example, the Olivia, the old lady, writes pornography and once cheerfully interrupts the conversation to ask if anybody knows a good synonym for "pussy."
I had two reactions to this:
1. OK, you're ECCENTRIC. WE GET IT.
2. That's just not a realistic question. I have written pornography before. I have never needed to ask that question. Having an unusual term for a body part is not sexy, it's distracting. And if I did ask for a synonym, I would ask it including some context. We all use different words from time to time, but for fiction purposes, a man who says "vagina," a man who says "pussy," and a man who says "snatch" have three very different views of that body part and one might suspect women in general.
The main adult characters all have a Royal-Tennenbaums-esque wacky-by-design quality to them. I've read lots of books with eccentrics in them that handle eccentricity better than Beginner's Luck does. Auntie Mame and A Confederacy of Dunces' main character Ignatius J. Reilly spring immediately to mind. A Confederacy of Dunces might be one of the greatest books in modern literature so perhaps any comparison to that is unfair, but even in Auntie Mame, the characters seemed real. As theatrical as Auntie Mame is, she never feels forced and you never feel that she has a certain quality just because the reader might find it amusing.
Olivia has an alcoholic pet chimpanzee.
In places, it almost feels like the characters themselves are imagining the movie version.
The main character Hallie runs away from home without even really considering that people would worry about her. Her character in general has an odd coldness to her that makes her hard to feel for, though my impression is that I'm supposed to find her sympathetic. Also, she uses a gambling metaphor every other sentence for the first third of the book, then stops almost completely for awhile, then starts again somewhat toward the end. Gambling goes from her passion to her hobby awfully quickly and with little explanation.
So far, the Unitarianism in the series is pretty mild and is more or less treated as one more quirky thing about Olivia. Her character is clearly her church's resident old lady who does tons of social justice work, which is reasonable enough. I've never been to a UU church that didn't have one. There are a lot of UUism one liners of the "Yes, we have no religion" variety. They don't offend me, but they aren't very interesting or original, either.
If I had written this book, I would have said to myself, "it's not bad, but it's not ready for primetime, either" and not even have looked for an agent, figuring that I should use what I've learned from my first novel to write my next one. That's what I did with the novel I wrote last spring. But I'm starting to reconsider that if this Beginner's Luck book is actually publishable.
All that said, judging by the comments at Amazon I linked to above, this book's following is enthusiastic and passionate among people who like this sort of thing. To them I'd reccomend Ferrol Sams' Run with the Horseman series as I think it takes some similar ideas and does more interesting things with them.
Also, this is the first book of a trilogy. Maybe the author has learned some lessons and will apply them to the next book and it will be better.
I'll let you know on Wednesday.
CC
First, a bit of background. Last week, a PR chap emailed me and asked me if I'd like to review a book with some Unitarians in it. Sure, I said. Turns out it's a trilogy, and he offered to send me the whole thing. I'm only actually asked to review the third, but I will review all of them, since I don't like to start a series in the middle so I'm reading them anyway. I will try to post those reviews Monday, Wednesday and Friday of this week.
The plot is solid enough and did keep me reading. It centers around Hallie, a sixteen-year-old gambling aficionado who drops out of school, runs away from home and ends up living in this house full of loveable eccentrics and doing their yard work for them. The minor characters' reactions to all of this are all reasonable, which makes the level of narrative tone-deafness exhibited in the characterization of the main characters all the more puzzling.
As this book is the story of a high-school senior told from her perspective, it took me a while to figure out whether the immaturity to the writing was intentional. Lots of things didn't quite ring true, but that could have been a narrative device of some sort to show the immaturity of the narrator.
But there are just too many places where the adults sound strangely like teenagers. and vice versa. After we've met the wacky old lady and the two gay men, who fall predictably into "Will" and "Jack" fictional gay guy archetypes, the "Will" gay guy whose name is "Gil" actually says, in an apparent attempt to justify himself to a sixteen-year-old whom he's just met, "I'm the normal one here," later adding that nobody else in the house typically knows what day it is.
I just can't see anybody over the age of twelve feeling so insecure that they would say such a thing about their own family to a total stranger, and Gil is clearly intended to be the family's voice of reason.
For another example, the Olivia, the old lady, writes pornography and once cheerfully interrupts the conversation to ask if anybody knows a good synonym for "pussy."
I had two reactions to this:
1. OK, you're ECCENTRIC. WE GET IT.
2. That's just not a realistic question. I have written pornography before. I have never needed to ask that question. Having an unusual term for a body part is not sexy, it's distracting. And if I did ask for a synonym, I would ask it including some context. We all use different words from time to time, but for fiction purposes, a man who says "vagina," a man who says "pussy," and a man who says "snatch" have three very different views of that body part and one might suspect women in general.
The main adult characters all have a Royal-Tennenbaums-esque wacky-by-design quality to them. I've read lots of books with eccentrics in them that handle eccentricity better than Beginner's Luck does. Auntie Mame and A Confederacy of Dunces' main character Ignatius J. Reilly spring immediately to mind. A Confederacy of Dunces might be one of the greatest books in modern literature so perhaps any comparison to that is unfair, but even in Auntie Mame, the characters seemed real. As theatrical as Auntie Mame is, she never feels forced and you never feel that she has a certain quality just because the reader might find it amusing.
Olivia has an alcoholic pet chimpanzee.
In places, it almost feels like the characters themselves are imagining the movie version.
The main character Hallie runs away from home without even really considering that people would worry about her. Her character in general has an odd coldness to her that makes her hard to feel for, though my impression is that I'm supposed to find her sympathetic. Also, she uses a gambling metaphor every other sentence for the first third of the book, then stops almost completely for awhile, then starts again somewhat toward the end. Gambling goes from her passion to her hobby awfully quickly and with little explanation.
So far, the Unitarianism in the series is pretty mild and is more or less treated as one more quirky thing about Olivia. Her character is clearly her church's resident old lady who does tons of social justice work, which is reasonable enough. I've never been to a UU church that didn't have one. There are a lot of UUism one liners of the "Yes, we have no religion" variety. They don't offend me, but they aren't very interesting or original, either.
If I had written this book, I would have said to myself, "it's not bad, but it's not ready for primetime, either" and not even have looked for an agent, figuring that I should use what I've learned from my first novel to write my next one. That's what I did with the novel I wrote last spring. But I'm starting to reconsider that if this Beginner's Luck book is actually publishable.
All that said, judging by the comments at Amazon I linked to above, this book's following is enthusiastic and passionate among people who like this sort of thing. To them I'd reccomend Ferrol Sams' Run with the Horseman series as I think it takes some similar ideas and does more interesting things with them.
Also, this is the first book of a trilogy. Maybe the author has learned some lessons and will apply them to the next book and it will be better.
I'll let you know on Wednesday.
CC
Monday, September 04, 2006
You've probably already heard that Little Miss Sunshine is a good movie. CC concurs, FWIW.
I believe the first trailer I saw for Little Miss Sunshine was back in May or so and before the new X-men movie. I said to theCSO, "I have to see that movie." TheCSO grumbled that it wasn't his sort of thing.
The movie isn't particularly well advertised, but I saw several more trailers and each time thought, "I have to see that movie!"
Having seen it just last night with LinguistFriend, I'm telling you now. "Y'all have to see this movie."
Perhaps this well-written, well-acted, well-directed satire on the American ideal of "winners" versus "losers" hit me so hard because it was a jolt of needed perspective to someone who is low-level freaking out about her law school applications. Having some experience with dysfunction myself helps, too.
My sense of humor is exteremely non-slapstick, so there were times when that aspect was a little much for me, but even those fit with the characters and were less painful than I usually find slapstick.
The comedy itself is dark and in places a little mean, but I don't think I've ever seen a family in a movie who loved each other as much as the Hoovers do. At one point as they are all push starting the bus and helping each other jump on, I realized that the feeling of teamwork and mutual support they showed was what we're trying to induce with those cheesy ropes courses we make the YRUU kids do.
And the parody of pageants was spot on. I have no experience with beauty pageants whatsoever yet judging by this and Drop Dead Gorgeous*, I like movies that make fun of them. Perhaps that's the plain girl in me talking.
CC
*Drop Dead Gorgeous is funnier and is more directly a comedy than Little Miss Sunshine, but it doesn't have much soul. Both movies are really good in different ways.
The movie isn't particularly well advertised, but I saw several more trailers and each time thought, "I have to see that movie!"
Having seen it just last night with LinguistFriend, I'm telling you now. "Y'all have to see this movie."
Perhaps this well-written, well-acted, well-directed satire on the American ideal of "winners" versus "losers" hit me so hard because it was a jolt of needed perspective to someone who is low-level freaking out about her law school applications. Having some experience with dysfunction myself helps, too.
My sense of humor is exteremely non-slapstick, so there were times when that aspect was a little much for me, but even those fit with the characters and were less painful than I usually find slapstick.
The comedy itself is dark and in places a little mean, but I don't think I've ever seen a family in a movie who loved each other as much as the Hoovers do. At one point as they are all push starting the bus and helping each other jump on, I realized that the feeling of teamwork and mutual support they showed was what we're trying to induce with those cheesy ropes courses we make the YRUU kids do.
And the parody of pageants was spot on. I have no experience with beauty pageants whatsoever yet judging by this and Drop Dead Gorgeous*, I like movies that make fun of them. Perhaps that's the plain girl in me talking.
CC
*Drop Dead Gorgeous is funnier and is more directly a comedy than Little Miss Sunshine, but it doesn't have much soul. Both movies are really good in different ways.
Friday, August 18, 2006
Actually, watching frightened people trapped on an airplane full of deadly snakes isn't that funny. It's really sort of horrifying and gross.
But the non-gen-Xers among my readership could have told me that.
Just saw the midnight premiere of Snakes on a Plane.
TheCSO has many thoughtful things to say about it and has been encouraged to write about them here.
But I'm going to bed.
Well, maybe I'll watch some TV first.
I hear it's Shark Week.
CC
Ps. If you haven't read Joel's 9-11 Conspiracy post you should. It's good.
Just saw the midnight premiere of Snakes on a Plane.
TheCSO has many thoughtful things to say about it and has been encouraged to write about them here.
But I'm going to bed.
Well, maybe I'll watch some TV first.
I hear it's Shark Week.
CC
Ps. If you haven't read Joel's 9-11 Conspiracy post you should. It's good.
Saturday, May 27, 2006
CC on the DaVinci Code (spoilers, and beyond the usual ones)
First off, I don't know if Elizabeth Lerner's UU World Article correctly portrays what goes on in the book. I haven't read the book.
But the movie version makes her LOOK wrong.
Lerner seems rather huffy about the fact that according to the Gnostic gospels, Mary was a religious leader, not just a wife and mother. The movie very clearly states that this was the case and that Mary was more or less left in charge. The Knights templar seem to regard her, and not any male descendents she might have had, as a Pope-like figure. The movie shows women religious leaders and free thinkers being carted off and burned as witches, making very clear the point that women have always stepped up into leadership roles, they just kept getting killed for it for awhile.
In fact, when Sophie is revealed to be Jesus' last remaining descendent (assuming the Grandmother you see at the end is on the other side, which I think we're supposed to) she is very clearly charged with doing God's work and deciding the destiny of the church on earth. Nobody even mentions that she should go out and make more Jesus babies, and to me it would have been fairly forgivable if they had, considering that is typically priority one for heirs.
Also, I saw the Sophie-as-Jesus-descendent thing coming like an hour into the movie. But "Apple" was cool.
This movie was quite heavy on the Gnosticism, and did much to promote some suckily ahistorical ideas. But it was interesting to see the "Jesus as a regular guy" concept presented and wonder what was going on in the heads of the people seated around me.
CC
DaVinci Code
But the movie version makes her LOOK wrong.
Lerner seems rather huffy about the fact that according to the Gnostic gospels, Mary was a religious leader, not just a wife and mother. The movie very clearly states that this was the case and that Mary was more or less left in charge. The Knights templar seem to regard her, and not any male descendents she might have had, as a Pope-like figure. The movie shows women religious leaders and free thinkers being carted off and burned as witches, making very clear the point that women have always stepped up into leadership roles, they just kept getting killed for it for awhile.
In fact, when Sophie is revealed to be Jesus' last remaining descendent (assuming the Grandmother you see at the end is on the other side, which I think we're supposed to) she is very clearly charged with doing God's work and deciding the destiny of the church on earth. Nobody even mentions that she should go out and make more Jesus babies, and to me it would have been fairly forgivable if they had, considering that is typically priority one for heirs.
Also, I saw the Sophie-as-Jesus-descendent thing coming like an hour into the movie. But "Apple" was cool.
This movie was quite heavy on the Gnosticism, and did much to promote some suckily ahistorical ideas. But it was interesting to see the "Jesus as a regular guy" concept presented and wonder what was going on in the heads of the people seated around me.
CC
DaVinci Code
Sunday, May 14, 2006
"Frozen" on Mother's Day
One has to wonder about the sort of family for whom tickets to Frozen seem like an appropriate Mother's Day present.
But somehow, for us, it worked. The Chalicemom, ChaliceDad and theCSO and I had an early dinner, with Oliver's girlfriend joining us toward the end.
Then the ChaliceMom and I took the subway downtown.
From the moment "Frozen" began, with a scene so emotional that I found myself gnawing my cheek as if to somehow soothe my discomfort, I barely took my eyes off the stage.
It was a good play, though I might have enjoyed it more if it had been less well-acted. I loved the research psychiatrist, who brought a dark comedy to the peice in places. Also, the man who played the sociopath did a really wonderful job. A few things in his performance were more familiar than I wish they had been and I found myself wishing some of the physical quirks had seemed affected. The ChaliceMom didn't say much about it, but she was riveted.
The play had some problems. The playwright is too smart to believe that the question "How would you feel if somebody did that to you?" really ever brings about any real psychological insight*. I won't say the entire play hinged on that question, but the question's impact was greater than it should have been and made what came after a little too easy. What I know about these things suggests that to put oneself into another's shoes in any real sense is a capability such people just don't have.
A play about forgiveness is a tough thing for me.
I should probably have something clever to say here about the question of neurological problems as destiny and the idea that perhaps the line between sins and symptoms is blurrier than our typical view of such things allows us to imagine. The Presbyterian and the Unitarian next to her probably had somewhat differing ideas on that one, though really it gets us both because it raises questions on both original sin and perfectability grounds.
But I'm watching Desperate Housewives and drinking a large gin gimlet.
Perhaps when I'm done, I will have another.
CC
*What is it with people who incessantly ask this question, as if they think that other people never consider another's feelings and thus this question will lead to a revelation? The question seems to frequently occur in people who have no sense of proportion whatsoever. I had a college friend who was constantly accusing me of insensitivity because I was too busy to keep up after her emotional needs, which of course were legion.
One time when I tried to excuse myself from one more bitch session about how a professor hated her, she drew herself up and asked with great dignity,
"How would YOU FEEL if your father died and your friend was too busy working on the newspaper to take a break and listen?"
"Your father died?" I remember responding.
"Well... No. But how would you feel?"
Usually when people ask "How would YOU FEEL if someone did that to you?" over some pathetic slight, my brain wants to answer "If I were a an immature git like you, I'm sure I'd be upset. But I pride myself on keeping a sense of perspective, so I doubt I'd fuss about something so very insignificant."
But somehow, for us, it worked. The Chalicemom, ChaliceDad and theCSO and I had an early dinner, with Oliver's girlfriend joining us toward the end.
Then the ChaliceMom and I took the subway downtown.
From the moment "Frozen" began, with a scene so emotional that I found myself gnawing my cheek as if to somehow soothe my discomfort, I barely took my eyes off the stage.
It was a good play, though I might have enjoyed it more if it had been less well-acted. I loved the research psychiatrist, who brought a dark comedy to the peice in places. Also, the man who played the sociopath did a really wonderful job. A few things in his performance were more familiar than I wish they had been and I found myself wishing some of the physical quirks had seemed affected. The ChaliceMom didn't say much about it, but she was riveted.
The play had some problems. The playwright is too smart to believe that the question "How would you feel if somebody did that to you?" really ever brings about any real psychological insight*. I won't say the entire play hinged on that question, but the question's impact was greater than it should have been and made what came after a little too easy. What I know about these things suggests that to put oneself into another's shoes in any real sense is a capability such people just don't have.
A play about forgiveness is a tough thing for me.
I should probably have something clever to say here about the question of neurological problems as destiny and the idea that perhaps the line between sins and symptoms is blurrier than our typical view of such things allows us to imagine. The Presbyterian and the Unitarian next to her probably had somewhat differing ideas on that one, though really it gets us both because it raises questions on both original sin and perfectability grounds.
But I'm watching Desperate Housewives and drinking a large gin gimlet.
Perhaps when I'm done, I will have another.
CC
*What is it with people who incessantly ask this question, as if they think that other people never consider another's feelings and thus this question will lead to a revelation? The question seems to frequently occur in people who have no sense of proportion whatsoever. I had a college friend who was constantly accusing me of insensitivity because I was too busy to keep up after her emotional needs, which of course were legion.
One time when I tried to excuse myself from one more bitch session about how a professor hated her, she drew herself up and asked with great dignity,
"How would YOU FEEL if your father died and your friend was too busy working on the newspaper to take a break and listen?"
"Your father died?" I remember responding.
"Well... No. But how would you feel?"
Usually when people ask "How would YOU FEEL if someone did that to you?" over some pathetic slight, my brain wants to answer "If I were a an immature git like you, I'm sure I'd be upset. But I pride myself on keeping a sense of perspective, so I doubt I'd fuss about something so very insignificant."
Wednesday, May 03, 2006
A new book I'm really enjoying
On my way back up north from Margaret's funeral, I stopped at the Ava Gardner Museum in Smithfield, NC. It was a small town museum and quite charming for what it was. (Item: In addition to teaching, Margaret ran a small town museum, so the trip felt like something of a pilgrimage.)
At the time, I found the story of Bert Pfeiffer, a dutch artist obsessed with Gardner far more interested in Gardner's own. Pfeiffer survived a concentration camp only to become obsessed with Ava Gardner and spend the rest of his life endlessly painting her. Now that's a story.
Even though Gardner's own small-town-girl-made-good history has less pathos, I became interested in Gardner and have tivo'd several of her movies since coming back. I asked Edie to find me a copy of her autobiography. Edie came through and I started it tonight. It is really delightful, actually far better written than Katharine Hepburn's autobiography, and y'all know I'm loath to admit that anybody can do anything better than Kate.
Here's a passage I especially liked:
My parents' sedate form of religion didn't appeal to me, but Elva Mae, the sweeet little blakc girl who helped Mama out in the kitchen, used to take me to services at the Tee's Chapel. And I just fell in love with the singing and the preaching and the rest of that old time religion.
It would start with everything quiet and reverent. The preacher would warm up with a few quotes from his bible. Then, out of nowhere, he'd catch fire and give everyone hell. I'm here to tell you, there ain't much forgiveness in that old time religion. That particular savior was a mean son of a bitch. If you sinned, honey, he was going to get you, no doubt about it. "All of you down there in this congregation is sinner," the preacher would thunder, "An not sinner's going to escape hellfire and damnation, no sirree, no siree.
Crouching down next to Elva Mae,, I jsut knew I was one of the real dyed-in-the-wool sinners. Sinning when I broke a school house window during the summer so that Al and my friends could play in a classroom. Sinning when I hung out with Preston Lee and his brothers, boys who knew all the best cuss words and weren't afraid to teach me how to use them. Mama, though, would have a fit if she caught me saying them, and they slip out to this day. They sure do give a satisfying jolt to a sentence.
And most especially I was a sinner at watermelon harvest time, when we raided our neighbors' fields. Not that we needed to. So many watermelons were grown that lots were left to rot in the fields. But we were theives, we were excited by the dark notion of going out and stealing someone else's. And it was hard work, too. When you're six or seven, the damn things weigh a ton--you could barely struggle along with one in your arms. But it was worth it when you got into the shade of a tree and started munching.
My private catalogue of sins was invariably interrupted by a "shouting." A woman in the congregation would suddenly leap to her feet and scream "Oh, my Lord! Oh, my Lord! I"m in the arms of Jesus! I'm in the arms of Jesus! Let me pray in the arms of Jesus!"
That kind of outburst was like a red flag to the rest of the folks. All the sinners would go wild, shouting, praying, running down the aisles, leaping in the air. I guess it helped to drive the sinning out of them. I watched, holding my breath, my little eyeballs out on stalks. Then the frenzy would ebb out of them, the preacher would ease them back to normal, and we'd sing another hymn or two. Those lovely, surging, soaring spirituals sung in harmony and lifting the soul. Then we'd file out, peaceful and purified. And I'd plod home with Elva Mae, making pious resolutions about that watermelon-stealing stuff.
Sunday, February 12, 2006
Da-Dum Da-Dum
Though the Pink Panther remake has been critically panned, theCSO and I enjoyed ourselves tonight when we braved the snow to check it out.
It was one of those movies like "Anchorman:The Legend of Ron Burgundy" where a strong supporting cast makes a main character who would be too silly otherwise really fun to watch. Jean Reno and Emily Mortimer are particularly memorable performances.
There's a lot of slapstick, but it is one the whole fairly clever slapstick. When you put Clouseau in the room with an ancient chinese vase, you know it is going to get broken. HOW exactly it gets broken is cleverly done.
And I am a sucker for movies that let the guy who is made fun of for the whole film get some dignity in the end. This is one of those movies.
All that said, judging by what I've read around the internet, theCSO and I are the only ones in the country who feel this way, so you may want to take our reccomendation with a grain of salt.
CC
It was one of those movies like "Anchorman:The Legend of Ron Burgundy" where a strong supporting cast makes a main character who would be too silly otherwise really fun to watch. Jean Reno and Emily Mortimer are particularly memorable performances.
There's a lot of slapstick, but it is one the whole fairly clever slapstick. When you put Clouseau in the room with an ancient chinese vase, you know it is going to get broken. HOW exactly it gets broken is cleverly done.
And I am a sucker for movies that let the guy who is made fun of for the whole film get some dignity in the end. This is one of those movies.
All that said, judging by what I've read around the internet, theCSO and I are the only ones in the country who feel this way, so you may want to take our reccomendation with a grain of salt.
CC
Wednesday, January 04, 2006
CC and "The Family Stone"
Since PG saw "The Family Stone" and reviewed it, I'll review it, too.
I agree with PG that the movie is quite sniffle-worthy in places and I'd seriously like to meet a person who can't identify with Sarah Jessica Parker's character's attemps to get her fiancee's family to like her when they so seriously don't. Now not everyone has done this to the degree I have, having actually set my dinner napkin on fire in the middle of Thanksgiving dinner at my in-laws, but that was after the wedding so they're stuck with me now. (What? I was getting up to get more turkey and I put my dinner napkin next to my plate and the corner caught a votive candle that was part of the centerpiece. Like that hasn't happened to you...)
It's not cinematic genius, but there were some really nice touches to the movie. The fiancee's brother is deaf and the entire family can speak sign language. Occiasionally they sign instead of talking. Speaking as one who tried to suck up to the families of two other serious boyfriends even before the CSO, I can assure you that I can't think of a better metaphor for the in jokes and subtle tension then the family literally using a language that you can't understand.
(Best example, on my first Christmas at the CSO's mother's house, I noted that they had a phrase that they said back and forth a lot that sounded like "Fay yuhnot." I didn't know what was up with that until the following year when I went along to a live Nativity scene they go to every year and the angel with the heavy Georgia accent said "Fear not!")
The movie has a truly twisted moment when Diane Keaton's character says she wishes all her children were gay so she'd never lose them, which has all sorts of nasty implications that were totally ignored, and then SJP responds that surely she wouldn't want her kids to be gay because their lives would be so much harder, which everyone at the dinner table manages to take in the most pre-offended way possible.
The movie also brought home the true effect that previews have. At the end of an emotionally tense moment, SJP's character announces that she's going to go get the casserole-thingy she made out of the fridge. "Oh, no..." A sympathetic voice in my theater cried out. I have never felt a collective tension in a movie theater quite like when SJP was walking over to that fridge, because every one of us had seen the commercial for the movie and we all knew she was going to spill it on herself.
I suppose I should be bitching that it spoiled the movie, but that's the sort of twist I would have seen coming anyway, and for everyone in the audience to KNOW it is going to happen made for a very dramatic collective vibe.
CC
I agree with PG that the movie is quite sniffle-worthy in places and I'd seriously like to meet a person who can't identify with Sarah Jessica Parker's character's attemps to get her fiancee's family to like her when they so seriously don't. Now not everyone has done this to the degree I have, having actually set my dinner napkin on fire in the middle of Thanksgiving dinner at my in-laws, but that was after the wedding so they're stuck with me now. (What? I was getting up to get more turkey and I put my dinner napkin next to my plate and the corner caught a votive candle that was part of the centerpiece. Like that hasn't happened to you...)
It's not cinematic genius, but there were some really nice touches to the movie. The fiancee's brother is deaf and the entire family can speak sign language. Occiasionally they sign instead of talking. Speaking as one who tried to suck up to the families of two other serious boyfriends even before the CSO, I can assure you that I can't think of a better metaphor for the in jokes and subtle tension then the family literally using a language that you can't understand.
(Best example, on my first Christmas at the CSO's mother's house, I noted that they had a phrase that they said back and forth a lot that sounded like "Fay yuhnot." I didn't know what was up with that until the following year when I went along to a live Nativity scene they go to every year and the angel with the heavy Georgia accent said "Fear not!")
The movie has a truly twisted moment when Diane Keaton's character says she wishes all her children were gay so she'd never lose them, which has all sorts of nasty implications that were totally ignored, and then SJP responds that surely she wouldn't want her kids to be gay because their lives would be so much harder, which everyone at the dinner table manages to take in the most pre-offended way possible.
The movie also brought home the true effect that previews have. At the end of an emotionally tense moment, SJP's character announces that she's going to go get the casserole-thingy she made out of the fridge. "Oh, no..." A sympathetic voice in my theater cried out. I have never felt a collective tension in a movie theater quite like when SJP was walking over to that fridge, because every one of us had seen the commercial for the movie and we all knew she was going to spill it on herself.
I suppose I should be bitching that it spoiled the movie, but that's the sort of twist I would have seen coming anyway, and for everyone in the audience to KNOW it is going to happen made for a very dramatic collective vibe.
CC
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