Setting the Bar

This documentary came highly recommended to me.  Shelby Knox is a teenager and an activist. She’s tough and she stands up for what she believes in, even if that, on its face, is against the fundamentalist Christian principles of her Church. The director elected to follow Shelby around from her sophomore year in high school through her senior year in high school and details her fight to get a comprehensive sex education program in her conservative, Lubbock, Texas school district, where all they teach is abstinence and where the teen pregnancy rate is the highest in the country. This coming of age tale focuses on Shelby, who constantly struggles to reconcile her values with the things that she is advocating for and who discusses these views with her parents and a conservative preacher, who tours the country advocating for abstinence only sex education programs.

Shelby is interesting. She made a purity pledge, as any good Southern Baptist girl would and has never seen a condom, let alone a condom. When she finally sees a condom, she’s shocked because she thought that they would be black. At the same time, she doesn’t think that the Church should be getting involved in sex education in schools.  I really admired her when she stated (and I’m paraphrasing here) that while she had the great supports - a caring family and a wonderful Church - that would enable her to make a purity pledge and be true to that, there are others that don’t have those supports, so they should be taught about safe sex practices. She also called out the mayor of her town - who was attacking her by saying that she was a bad Christian - and stated that he had no right to judge her principles. I left the movie admiring her and wishing that I had been more like her in high school.

This is one of those rare movies that touches everyone and it touchingly, eloquently honest in its portrayal of Shelby, her family, her Church and all the other players in her life. I thoroughly enjoyed it and it made a difference to me. It’s a movie that I intend to show my son when he’s old enough to appreciate it, because I firmly believe that Shelby is a tremendous role model and is very admirable. Shelby grows tremendously and matures tremendously throughout the film, even in the face of her losses.  I admired how she strove to work for what she thought was right, even though she knew that the policies of her town were firmly entrenched.  That is something to be proud of. 

Thank you Shelby!!!

Francois Ozon directed this sensual, arousing thriller, starring Charlotte Rampling and Ludivine Sagnier. Sarah Morton, played by Ms. Rampling, is a successful mystery author albeit a dumpy one. She would have been labelled, accurately, an old maid in the Victorian era and even now. At the beginning of the movie, she was bored, disillusioned really, with London so her publisher, John Bosload (played by Charles Dance) allows her the use of his house in the French countryside.  Sarah takes him up on the offer and travels to France in the hopes that she will get some inspiration for her new novel. It is the off season so the pool in the backyard is closed and the town is quiet. One night, John’s beautiful, headstrong, promiscuous daughter Julie shows up unexpectedly and Sarah is disappointed because things had been going so well. As the movie progresses and Sarah’s novel progresses, her murder novel and real life become intertwined.

This might just seem like a run of the mill murder mystery but it is everything but.  It’s psychologically thrilling and had me hooked from the beginning. I couldn’t take my eyes off of Ms. Sagnier - she is absolutely wonderful in this role.  She portrays the young, vital sensuality that certain teen girls have. I fully and thoroughly enjoyed this movie and am still thinking about it to this moment, even though I saw it yesterday.  Amazing.

I have wanted to see this movie since I saw the commercials for it on television, but having an infant really made it so difficult. So I had to wait for it to come out on DVD and when it did, I got it.  How to describe this film? It’s depressing and dark, cynical and thrilling, hard and addictive. All the things that a good action movie should be and then some.

Batman, played by Christian Bale, follows a convoluted path from the beginning to the end of the film. The plot is often confusing, with lots of twists and turns, making this a pretty intense movie that you have to watch closely without getting up to leave the room or zoning out. It was really long, too long I felt at times, but kind of interesting nonetheless. The violence did little to forward the plotline, where the plot existed.  But oh well, who needs that right?

Heath Ledger was amazing and lived up to what reviewers are calling his best performance in his so short life. What really makes his exceptional performance and subsequent death so tragic is that you could tell that his star was starting to shine much more brightly. This was the second movie that he starred in that was getting him critical acclaim and his portrayal of the Joker was bonechilling and riveting. You could not take your eyes off of him when he was on screen. He was so good that he overshadows the other actors in the flick, including Gary Oldman - who is a masterful actor in his own right. Ledger was scary and titillating at the same time.  It was astounding to watch such a young actor starting to come into his own and to have that ripped away was absolutely tragic.

There were a few other things that really irked me about this movie though. Why did Christian Bale feel the need to alter his voice so much that it sounded like he needed a cough drop every time he spoke as the Caped Crusader?  I know that Batman’s voice is supposed to be diffeent - that is only natural I suppose - but he just sounded absolutely ridiculous. I couldn’t take him seriously at all - I kept wanting to laugh everytime he opened his mouth. I didn’t like the costuming or makeup either - they weren’t particularly special. Nothing stood out.

I did enjoy the various themes playing out in the movie - the viglantism that seemed to run rampant, the hark backs to 9/11 and the apparent duality that Gotham/New York City seemed to undergo seemed to hit a note in this current age and in this political climate. I thought that the directors had a really good grasp on those themes and conveyed them somewhat appropriately.

All in all, this was a decent movie though I’m not quite sure why it was such a box office smash. Maybe it was because of Heath Ledger. I’m not sure. I’m glad that I didn’t see this in the theaters though.

I was at home recently for the holidays and saw this book on the coffee table so I picked it up and began to read.  Amagansett by Mark Mills was everything that I expected from a first mystery novel by a British screenplay writer turned author.

This novel takes place on the East End of Long Island, on the South shore, just after the second World War. It begins with two fishermen netting the dead body of one of the rich, summer folk - a young woman. Conrad Labarde is shocked to find Lillian Wallace in his net but does a masterful job hiding that shock initially. An autopsy is conducted and what was thought to be a tragic accident in an unpredictable ocean begins to look more and more like murder.  Deputy Chief Tom Hollis then becomes involved and conducts his own investigation, suspecting Ms. Wallace’s former fiancee - Justin Penrose and her amibitious brother Manfred Wallace - of the homicide.  Their motive: covering up an unsolved hit and run accident from the previous year.

This was an easy read. There were brief spurts where Mills had no dialogue but the book was comprised mostly of dialog. Through that conversation, we learn the history of the characters and of the social tensions that exist between the local fishermen, who have to share their homes and livelihood with the wealthy people that flock out to the Hamptons in the summer. We also learn a little bit of the history of the South Fork of Long Island from Montauk through the Hamptons.  What was fascinating for me was that I could imagine the locations exactly because I grew up there and that made the book a little more entertaining for me than it perhaps would have been otherwise. The prose was nothing to get excited about quite frankly. In fact, it tended to ramble at parts and lacked consistency. It’s hard to tell if this was because of poor writing or poor editing. It’s a mystery novel after all and it’s nothing all that spectacular, although it’s a pretty decent first novel.

The characters are stereotypes and predictable. They don’t really learn much about themselves over the course of the book and Mill’s doesn’t really develop them as much as I would like. While they’re not flat, they’re not altogether three-dimensional either - they are caught in that limbo world in between.  I could deal with them, especially since we’re meeting them in the context of a thriller/mystery where the whole point is solving the crime not character epiphanies necessarily. There were none of those exciting moments that lead readers to remark ” I couldn’t put the book down for fear I’d miss something.”

Generally, this was an interesting book and a pretty good first shot. 

I’ve been seeing Matrimony by Joshua Henkin in all of the reader review blogs that I follow so I picked up a copy for myself and devoured it in about two days. 

In 1987, Julian Wainwright is trying to split with his Manhattan elite upbringing. To do so, he elects to attend an alternative college -Graymount College - for the specfic purpose of studying under Professor Stephen Chesterfield, who has an exclusive writing seminar.  Julian gets admitted to the seminar, where he meets Carter Heinz, a self-assured, even cocky, young man who bears a chip on his shoulder because of his somewhat less than affluent youth.  They become instant friends when Professor Chesterfield dubs them as the only two having talent in his class. The two soon meet their female partners - Carter meets Pilar and Julian meets Mia. They all end up marrying. This novel follows mainly Julian and Mia and their relationship as it spans the death of Mia’s mother, Julian’s failure to complete a novel and their traipses through various college towns and cities.

This novel is about a multitude of things - long term relationships that are sometimes successful and sometimes not - and life happening when you’re busy with other planning. I loved Henkin’s character development in this novel - Mia and Julian both have epiphanies that result from their very personal, very difficult struggles.  Even Carter, who becomes an ancillary character, has his own epiphanies.  I was amazed that such a short novel could produce such impressive, three-dimensional characters. The book was fantastically easy to read and the prose was eloquent and beautiful without being dumbed down.

I thoroughly enjoyed this treatise on the long term marriage.

I have to admit that growing up Catholic, even though I’m pretty much lapsed now, has made me really curious about Grail legends and women in the Church. I also loved history - I majored in it in college. The Labyrinth by Kate Mosse combined all of these into one, lovely 500 page novel. Kate Mosse is the founder of the Orange Prize society and its honorary director. She also commentates for the BBC.

In this novel, we are introduced to two, strong female protagonists and a few other strong female supporting characters. The two female leads, Alice Tanner and Alais are born approximately 800 years apart. However, they are both searching for the same thing - the Holy Grail in southern France near Carcassonne. The story begins with Alice Tanner, a Ph.D who has volunteered at an archaeological dig in the Cathar region of France. On her last day, she discovers a pair of ancient skeletons, a ring with a labyrinth engraving and a secret chamber with an altar buried in the mountains. This starts Alice’s fast paced adventures that mirror almost exactly Alais’ in the 1200’s. Alais’s story begins in the summer of 1209 as Carcassonne is preparing to be beseiged by bloodthirsty Northern French crusaders hellbent on eradicating the Cathar influence in the area.

The book alternated between modern day and the 13th century.  Undertaking such a mechanism for telling a story can be very risky - the author can easily confuse the reader. However Kate Mosse does it effectively and it’s not confusing at all, perhaps because the stories mirror each other. I tend to think that Mosse is a pretty talented author also and this helps! The story is told from the Southern perspective, so the re-telling of the seiges are definitely onesided - be prepared for that. What was frustrating to me is that Mosse assumed that her audience knew everything about the Cathars and the Crusade of which they were the subject. I knew very little about that Crusade. I knew the Crusades occurred, but not the specifics of each, and I had to constantly Google things to get perspective.  I would have enjoyed the book more if I didn’t have to keep interrupting my reading to do research.

Her characters were fascinating - I enjoyed them and learning about them and their motivations.  Mosse also deftly developed them over the course of her novel - they were three dimensional and continued to grow and change.

All in all

La Vie en Rose, directed by Olivier Dahan, deals with an intriguing subject - Edith Piaf. Ms. Piaf was a popular French singer in the thirties, forties and fifties. She passed away in 1963 after a battle from cancer.

The movie begins with Edith’s childhood. She is left at her grandmother’s brothel by her father, where she befriends some of the women of the night and adopts them as her family. As a child, she was blind until the prostitutes embark on a pilgramage to the Shrine of Saint Theresa, and then she amazingly begins to see again.  Her father returns to claim her when Edith is an adolescent, ripping her from the only family that she has ever known and beginning her life of tragedy. During her teens, we follow Edith’s life on the streets of France and her discovery as a singer by a nightclub owner, who tragically is murdered and then she is blamed for his death. The movie ends ultimately with her affair with a world class boxer, his death, her international career and finally, her descent into terminal illnes and her death. Edith Piaf was portrayed in this movie as always being sick and thin, while abusing painkillers, other drugs and alcohol. She spent just as much time high or drunk as she did singing.

Marion Cotillard is the brilliant French actress that channels Edith Piaf. She was virtually unknown here in the United States until this role, which netted her an Oscar for best actress, even though she has appeared in 40 roles in France since 1993. She was AMAZING in this role and the Oscar well deserved. She was beautiful and it did seem, at times, that Edith Piaf was speaking through her. I don’t know how they did it, but the makeup and hair people made her up so well, that she looked like she was Edith Piaf, or, at the very least, her identical twin and her performances were divine to watch. The directing was also phenomenal, as were the scenes and the costumes, which were beautiful. The film does tend to jump around though and doesn’t follow a straight, temporal line, which can get confusing. Regardless, I loved this movie - it was beautiful and wonderfully done.

I saw this movie initially in the movie theater when it came out and went in very skeptical. It was on television last night and I rewatched it. I was skeptical because I grew up with the Gene Wilder version.  However in watching Tim Burton’s take on this movie last night, I realized that it isn’t a bad interpretation, is actually quite good and probably the one that Roald Dahl would have preferred, had he compared the two.

This is a film adaptation of Roald Dahl’s children’s novel. It held all of what Tim Burton is known for - dark humor, eeriness, quirkiness and cartoonishness. However, unlike his prior movies, joy puts in an appearance as well.  He uses bright colors, particularly in the factories, and we can’t help but believe that this is the way that a child would have imagined seeing the factory. This role confirmed by belief that Johnny Depp is an exqusite actor - he played this role perfectly and his tone and facial expressions were right on.  He channeled quirkiness, sarcasm and cynicism when appropriate, confusion and innocence. The casting was impeccable - all of the children and their guardians are perfect.  This movie was also much more true to the book then the 1971 movie and pays much more homage to it.  I also thoroughly enjoyed Danny Elfman’s soundtrack, which meshed perfectly with the tale and the feeling of the movie.

This is a thoroughly enjoyable movie that should be a part of everyone’s collection.

The Christmas Sweater is Glenn Beck’s debut novel. You may know him better as a radio and television host. He’s a conservative host of The Glenn Beck Program, which is nationally syndicated on Premiere Radio Networks. He’s also slated to have a show on Fox coming up in the next few seasons.

This was a really weak attempt at a holiday book in my opinion. Beck should just stick to broadcasting because this book was just plain awful. The main character is a 12 year old boy named Eddie who is convinced that he will get the bike of his dreams - the one that he has been begging for - in spite of his single mother’s financial hardships and the death of his father. To his utter dismay, he finds a handmade Christmas sweater under the tree - one that, while made with love, in Eddie’s opinion is the ugliest thing that he has ever seen. So he throws a tantrum and acts like a spoiled child. Eddie throws the sweater in the corner and berates his mother, before they take the 2 hour drive to visit his grandparents. On the way home, the car crashes because Eddie’s mother falls asleep at the wheel. Eddie then begins his struggle to deal with the grief of his mother, just after his tantrum and the death of his father from cancer a few years prior to this incident.

The writing is horrible. I’m a huge fan of simple and eloquent. This was so simple that I think that my cat could have written it better. There was no eloquence in its simplicity - it was written the way a first grader would write about why they wanted a b-b gun for Christmas.  It was trite and smug, almost as if Beck was saying “I’m better than you because I’ve had this experience and I’ve been redeemed.”  That turned me off, even though that message may not have been intended by Mr. Beck. It’s way too preachy. I did, however, appreciate the message that Mr. Beck was trying to convey - I just think it was shoddily done.

This is a book that you can pass over.

I’ve been reading reviews about Holidays on Ice by David Sedaris for the past few weeks - it being the holiday season and all - so I jumped on the bandwagon. I have read all of Sedaris’ pieces before, except for Flames, and I’ve loved him. I enjoy his cynical wit and humor, his writing style and the people that he introduces me to. So I picked up this re-release.  It was re-released in October of 2008 with additional stories in it. It had originally been released in 1997.

The collection begins with Sedaris’ temporary stint as an elf in Macy’s, guiding Manhattanites and tourists alike through the visit and picture with Santa. It takes us to visit a family where an unknown half sibling arrives from Vietnam to comparing Dutch and American Christmas traditions in “Six to Eight Black Men” and beyond, including an attempt to explain the Easter bunny to the French. I totally enjoyed Sedaris’ story about working as an elf in Macy’s - I kept flashing between pictures of the elves in A Christmas Story - the movie - and just people running around in tights. Some parts of it were truly touching, but most of it had me chuckling to myself in the corner. I also enjoyed the story of the Easter Bunny explanation - Sedaris was taking a French class and was struggling to explain the Easter Bunny, Easter as a holiday and what the Easter Bunny does in French. It was stupendous. 

My least favorite story was the story of the Vietnamese half-sibling.  I thought that it crossed the line to distasteful. On the other hand, it’s possible that Sedaris did that in attempt to get that rise out of me.  Maybe I’m just too sensitive because I have a young son. 

I do have to say though, that this collection was so fun. Sedaris has a gift for story telling that is quite rare and is uncanny in that it is accessible without being complete rubbish. Even in the story that crossed the line, Sedaris’ gifts shine through consistently and evenly and brilliantly.

This book is highly recommended for anyone, regardless of whether you like this time of year or not.