“The best new films you’ve never heard of tell the stories of working-class women—a real estate agent and a factory worker—with scenes of ethical crises and life-changing decisions as compelling as higher profile films like American Sniper.”
Jeffrey Overstreet writes about the movies Something, Anything and Two Days, One Night. I haven’t seen the second one, but I’m sure it’s moving.
The trailer for the new movie, Little Boy, worries me. I can’t tell if it’s setting up a story that cautions an audience willing to believe that faith can be measured in specific acts and feelings or panders to such an audience. This review doesn’t exactly answer that question, but it does imply that the faith of the boy relates to the dropping of the bomb by the same name. Maybe if they had released the film on August 6 for the 75th anniversary of the leveling of Hiroshima, we would have all gotten the connection.
Heh.
I gather the movie is heavy-handed enough to need more explanation–still some people need things spelled out, you know.
Tony Woodlief, author of the concept “Dreadfully Wholesome,” linked to an old article of his, in which he describes common sins of the Christian writer: neat resolutions, one-dimentional characters, sentamentality, and cleanness. On this last point, he says, “In short, if Christian novels and movies and blogs and speeches must be stripped of profanity and sensuality and critical questions, all for the sake of sparing us scandal, then we have to wonder what has happened that such a wide swath of Christendom has failed to graduate from milk to meat.”
The point, of course, is not to mix a little filth into our current shallow stories. Little Boy is PG-13, I believe, because it shows some of the horrors of war and uses some contextual bigotry. It may even have smoking! That’s a letter grade drop all on its own. The point, though, is to think honestly and depict reality appropriately.
A strong example of this is the recent movie, Something, Anything. I saw it on Netflix Instant a few weeks ago at a friend’s recommendation. Justin Chang summaries it nicely as having a “dichotomy between materialism and spirituality, between the pleasures of a comfortably middle-class existence and the rewards of an introspective, examined one.” This is not a heavy-handed movie at all. In fact, there’s a touching scene in the middle that clearly shows the disconnect between two main characters. Viewers might overlook that scene because one says anything, but that appears to be the tension point between them. The husband picks up his wife’s journal, exposing him to her struggling cry to God, but he just puts it back down and walks out of the room. He doesn’t know how to talk about that.
If you watch Something, Anything, let’s talk about it here. It’s beautiful, quiet film without common sins listed above.
As you’ve probably discerned from my reviews, I continue to read for pleasure even as I toil for my master’s degree. I don’t think I’d keep my sanity if I couldn’t take fiction breaks from the textbooks.
So, recently, casting about for something new to read, I decided to check out one of my consistently favorite authors, Ridley Pearson. I’ve always enjoyed his Lou Boldt police procedurals, but I discovered I’d never read the very first in the series, Undercurrents. And then I got the most recent novel in the series, The Body of David Hayes, which is closely related though separated in time.
At the beginning of Undercurrents, we find Detective Sergeant Lou Boldt of the Seattle Police Department, never a lighthearted guy in the best of times, in a particularly bad spot. He recently closed a serial killer case, and the accused murderer was himself murdered by a family member of a victim. But now he’s called back from a conference in Los Angeles, summoned by the news that there’s been another murder. They got the wrong guy.
Not only that, his marriage is falling apart. He has personally observed his wife meeting another man at a hotel. He’s moved out, and is considering divorcing her.
The story is as much about Lou’s struggle to keep his sanity as about his conflict with the serial killer, a smart and devious one who has singled Lou out as his police contact and personal foil. As Lou tries to function on too little sleep, too little food, and too much coffee, he tries to deal with his attraction to a beautiful police psychologist, and is brought face to face with his own culpability in the collapse of his marriage. When he truly achieves self-knowledge on that issue, it’s in terms that will please almost every Christian reader.
The Body of David Hayes picks up on a thread from that first book. David Hayes, a banker, was a colleague of Boldt’s wife and the man with whom she had the affair. He was later convicted of cyber-embezzlement and sentenced to prison. But now he’s been released early, only to be kidnapped and beaten. There’s more to his crime than anyone knew, and some very dangerous people are looking hard for the money David Hayes stole and hid in the bank’s own records. Lou is forced to bring his wife into the investigation, and old wounds get opened.
Frankly, The Body of David Hayes was above my head in terms of plot. The schemes of criminals and police (not all of whom may be honest) are so convoluted that I just lost track at certain points. But, as you may have noticed, plot isn’t my main concern in my reading. What I love is the characters Pearson creates — believable, sympathetic (in most cases), and grounded in a moral universe.
Both books recommended. Adult themes and language are relatively mild.
Mark Bertrand writes about a new favorite author and the novel, Scandal, in which a Catholic novelist and public intellectual discovers he has an identical, evil double of himself. This other man is encouraging the community to believe the moral novelist is a flaming hypocrite. “The hunt for his doppelgänger,” Bertrand explains, “draws him into an underworld — actually, that’s not quite right: the quest has more to do with realizing that this world is the underworld.”
This appears to be the kind of thing The Shadow claimed to know: the evil that lurks in every man’s heart.
An intriguing premise: On his way to conquer England by way of York in 1066, King Harald Hardrada of Norway secretly buried a great treasure in a ruined Saxon church. Some time later, the church was rebuilt without the treasure being discovered. Only now, in the post-Christian present when the church is falling down again, a priest accidentally finds the secret vault where the treasure lies. Once he informs the authorities, his church becomes the target, first of ordinary thieves, and then of right-wing, racist political extremists. So a Norwegian agent is assigned to infiltrate the conspiracy and sabotage it.
Hardrada’s Hoard could have been a pretty entertaining book. And I enjoyed it enough to finish it. But overall I found it unsatisfactory, for a couple reasons.
First of all, the numerous historical misrepresentations. The authors clearly did some research in preparing this book – their image of the Vikings is better, for instance, than that of the History Channel series – but they make a lot of pretty serious mistakes. They think Vikings used two-handed swords. They tell us with straight faces that King Harald’s queen and two daughters died in battle with him at Stamford Bridge (in fact the queen, a delicate Russian princess, stayed home in Norway with the girls). They tell us there was a spell of cold climate in Scandinavia during the Viking Age (the precise opposite of the truth). They seem to think Harald and his men were heathen (they were Christian). They think the 1950s Kirk Douglas movie popularized the idea of winged helmets for Vikings (the image goes back much further, and there are no winged helmets in that movie). They think Vikings sported Norman hair styles.
My second problem is that the sex scenes are far more explicit than called for.
And last but not least, the final resolution is both improbable and unsatisfactory.
Didn’t work for me.
Gary Saul Morson describes “The Moral Urgency of Anna Karenina,” starting with this idea about drama and happiness.
Often quoted but rarely understood, the first sentence of Anna Karenina—“All happy families resemble each other; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way”—offers a paradoxical insight into what is truly important in human lives. What exactly does this sentence mean?
In War and Peace and in a variant of Anna Karenina, Tolstoy quotes a French proverb: “Happy people have no history.” Where there are dramatic events, where there is material for an interesting story, there is unhappiness. The old curse—“May you live in interesting times!”—suggests that the more narratable a life is, the worse it is.
With happy lives and happy families, there is no drama to relate. What are you going to say: They woke up, breakfasted, didn’t quarrel, went to work, dined pleasantly, and didn’t quarrel again?
Happy families resemble each other because there is no story to tell about them. But unhappy families all have stories, and each story is different.
I was writing about this idea yesterday. Patience and tolerance are demonstrated in undramatic ways. People don’t make flamboyant displays of tolerance unless they are passive-aggressively attempting to communicate something else. Real tolerance comes in what isn’t said, what isn’t confronted. The person who listens to you, stays with you through the dull times, and makes you feel loved is the patient one.
A while back, a video guy told me about working on a TV project which was essentially Jon & Kate Plus 8 with an African-American family. They recorded several situations with this family, but the project never came together because the parents were loving and self-controlled and their kids were well-mannered and disciplined. Whenever a child started to get out of line, a parent would take him aside and correct him. Problem solved = no drama. Who wants to watch a loving family handle their problems respectfully?
This sounded like fun. A crossover of two very popular and very different fiction series.
It’s well known that Ian Fleming, the creator of James Bond, was a genuine British intelligence agent during World War II.
It’s probably less well known, but hardly a secret, that J. R. R. Tolkien, creator of The Lord of the Rings, was offered a book deal in Germany previous to World War II, on the condition that he sign a statement to the effect that he had no Jewish blood. He turned the offer down in a letter which is a masterpiece of elegant dismissiveness.
So what if Tolkien had not sent a letter? What if he had actually gone to Berlin on a secret espionage job, assigned to him by the agent Ian Fleming?
That’s the premise of No Dawn for Men. Lots of possibilities here. How would Fleming and Tolkien have gotten along? What would they have said to each other, thought of each other?
Alas, this book does little to illuminate those questions. There is one scene where the two authors talk a bit about their basic values, but it doesn’t really lead anywhere. Fleming and Tolkien follow essentially separate paths through the story, Fleming acting like Bond and Tolkien like… oh, Bilbo Baggins perhaps, though a bit wiser, in a narrative with supernatural elements. He’s even given genuine underground-dwelling dwarves to travel with, which does not add to the credibility of the story.
The two plot threads occupy the page space like oil and water. The whole thing didn’t work very well, in my opinion.
Not awful, but nothing to seek out.
One of our readers asked for my reaction to The Shadow and Night, the beginning of a science fiction series by Chris Walley. I gave it a try. Perhaps I didn’t give it enough time.
The story is set in the distant future, in a universe where (as far as I understand it) the Lord has established His millennial Kingdom. The story starts on a distant planet, which has been terraformed and colonized by humans. A demonic rebellion is coming, but I didn’t read that far.
I’m sure I should have given the book more of a chance than I did, but I found nothing in what I read that engaged me. The writing seemed to me entirely lacking in any spark, the characters dull, the dialogue lackluster. This was supposed to be a more or less sinless universe, as I understood it, and sinlessness here seemed boring. Stereotypical soft-serve Christian storytelling in a bland setting.
Judging by other people’s reviews on Amazon, it may well be that the book improves as it goes along. But looking ahead at the number of pages yet to read, and judging by the small amount of fun I was having at the beginning, I gave up on it.
Don’t judge the book by my experience.
Jeffrey Overstreet talks about Tomm Moore’s animation. “This time, I invited animator and author Ken Priebe — a man whose imagination seems to exist in a state of perpetual invention. Ken literally wrote the book (books, plural, actually) on stop animation, and we have found that we have very similar passions for the works of Jim Henson, Pixar, and, yes, Tomm Moore.”
Moore’s movies, Song of the Sea and Secret of Kells, are visually arresting, magical animations that stand apart from everything else out there. Priebe says, “The one difference is that in [Song of the Sea], the song itself is almost another character in the film, and a recurring motif that is woven through the story (even the title). In Kells, the song is a highlight of one particular surprising moment in the story.”
Comparing it to another recent movie: “Big Hero 6 also dealt with loss of a family member as a theme, but not with the same level of resonance and beauty as this film does. I’m still trying to figure out why, but I think it may have something to do with the mystical elements, connection to nature, and mythological motifs vs. a story that is driven by lots of fast action and technology, which we are all too bombarded with these days.”
This is spring break week in my graduate courses, so I thought I’d be able to slow down a bit (since of course there’s still class work to catch up on), and do a little blogging.
But lo, I have a translation job to do which is just large enough to maybe fit into the time I’ll have.
But blast it, I’ve been meaning to write this short review, and I’ll write it.
The Inspector Skelgill mysteries, set in England’s Lake District, are another in the currently fashionable sub-genre of the Difficult Detective. The Difficult Detective is brilliant but hard to get along with. Sherlock Holmes was the prototypical Difficult Detective, but Inspector Morse and TV’s “House” (who was indeed based on Holmes) are popular iterations.
Inspector Skelgill is a police detective who might be called “good in the field” — quite literally, since he’s an outdoorsman who resents any minute spent indoors. His favorite spare time activities are fishing on the lakes (he rows his own boat) and “fell running” — that is, running in the mountains. As a result he’s generally running a calorie deficit, which leads him to constantly steal other people’s food — “Are you going to finish those chips?” He also almost never picks up a check. He appear to be moderate on the autism spectrum, a little callous to the feelings of either crime victims, criminals, or his colleagues. He also generally ignores the orders of his superiors, but his success in solving cases secures his job for him — a little past the point of credibility.
The best thing about this series (I’ve read the first three, Murder in Adland, Murder on the Edge, and Murder in School) is the descriptions of the Lake District scenery, lovingly portrayed.
The worst thing, all in all, is Skelgill himself. I got kind of tired of his act after a while, although in the third book he showed some signs of moderating his selfishness. Still, I’ll probably give him a rest for a while.
The usual cautions for language, violence, and adult themes, though nothing excessive by contemporary standards.