Posted by Erin
Sat, 04 Feb 2006 17:39:00 GMT
Based on a book by Thornton Wilder (author of Our Town), this film is about five people who die when a bridge collapses, and a Franciscan monk who investigates their deaths for evidence of God's design, uncovering their secrets and connections with each other along the way. It takes place in Peru in the early 1700s. It's weird to see European culture in Peru--I mean, of course the Catholic church was everywhere and has been for a long time, but the huge, ornate European-style buildings and carriages and clothes and wigs--did they have to bring those? But I guess I can't blame the Church for that, or not exclusively. Of course this was Spain in Peru, so it was probably an unholy marriage of Church and State, and in that case, I can blame the Church.
Anyway, it was pretty interesting, although it took a while for me to figure out what was happening. A lot of great actors (Gabriel Byrne, Robert de Niro, Kathy Bates, F. Murray Abraham), but some of them seemed like they were reading the lines instead of acting.
I've never read anything by Thornton Wilder except Our Town, and it occurs to me that it was about dead people, too. Though in a very different way. I think the novel The Bridge of San Luis Rey would be worth reading.
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Posted by Erin
Thu, 02 Feb 2006 06:38:00 GMT
I've read Candide before, but I thought I might get more out of it this time around. I don't know if I did, though. Voltaire is brilliantly funny, of course. And I think I understood the historical context a little better this time. From what I've read recently about Candide, it wasn't so much Leibniz's philosophy ("this is the best of all possible worlds") he was making fun of as it was the general understanding of that philosophy. And one follower of Leibniz in particular, Christian Wolff, simplified his philosophy excessively, and this is what Voltaire was responding to. That's just what I've read recently.
So I got more of the historical stuff this time, but not that much more. I wish I had an annotated edition that would just tell me what he's referring to. Like the part where he said someone committed a murder, not like the murder of May of 1610, but like that of December 1594. What is he talking about? I don't know, and my five minutes of research on the internet did not supply the answer to this. And I'm not willing to put in more time than that.
I do love the ending, though, and Candide's conclusion: "il faut cultiver notre jardin". We must work in our garden. And maybe even better: "'We must work without arguing,' said Martin; 'that is the only way to make life bearable.'" Now if I could just get the kids to follow that advice.
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Posted by Erin
Mon, 30 Jan 2006 18:35:00 GMT
I liked this movie quite a bit. The main character, Damian, is a little boy who reads and knows everything about Catholic saints, and sometimes he converses with them, always greeting them with their name and dates of birth and death. It made me want to read more about the saints.
The story is good, too. Damian finds a huge duffle bag full of money, and he and his brother hide it and have very different ideas about how to spend the money.
There is a very interesting but strange portrayal of LDS people in the movie. I wonder if they were included just because of the Saints thing, and if it's based on someone's brief contact with missionaries or something. There are three youngish men who live together in a house in the new development the boys live in. They're dressed like missionaries and one of them carries what looks like a Book of Mormon in one scene. No nametags, though, and one of the men explains at one point that they live in a special "community" with no TV, dishwasher, microwave, etc., so they end up sounding like a commune. At any rate, weird, like I said, but it makes me wonder how missionaries must appear to people.
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Posted by Erin
Sat, 28 Jan 2006 19:20:00 GMT
I read a Lorna Landvik novel every now and then just for fun. It's fun while the book lasts, and then I pretty much forget it. This one I read in just over 24 hours. I don't know what's wrong with me. Why do I think I can spend so much time reading while the house falls apart around me? Well, at least everyone got fed.
At first I wondered if I was going to finish this one, since the characters are fairly mean to each other. But I liked the 11-year-old daughter character (the story is told by five different narrators, which I enjoyed), so I kept going. And it did get better. I guess it was okay. I think Reading Group Discussion Guides, found at the end of many books these days, are pretentious and annoying, though, and this one had one. I can't quite keep myself from reading them, though.
Jon thinks the cover is one of the worst he's ever seen (although the cover of Orson Scott Card's new one, Magic Street, is much worse, in my opinion. And the book is horrible, too.)
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Posted by Erin
Sat, 28 Jan 2006 19:12:00 GMT
This is a psychological thriller about a mall security guy (John Turturro) whose wife was murdered in the mall parking lot, and now he's obsessed with watching security tapes and trying to figure out who did it and why. The cinematography is very good, and I liked the music. It's pretty slow-moving, but it managed to scare me. But I'm a wimp when it comes to scary movies, so that probably doesn't mean much.
The movie does not have a definitive ending, and while there are some interesting possibilities about what really happened, I was discouraged to read later that the director (a Danish guy who also co-wrote it) admitted that there's no ending. I'd like there to be a right answer, so that after Jon and I discuss it, we can check to see if we were right. Apparently that can't happen with this movie.
(And actually, while I'd like to have right answers to things, there often aren't, if there's any ambiguity at all. Jon and some fellow Mamet fans have been known to introduce questions about The Spanish Prisoner, which seems to be all neatly tied up at the end. But is it really? I was kind of mad when Jon started questioning the ending of that movie, but I admit that it extends the talk-about-ability of it. How's that for a made-up word?)
So it was an interesting movie, nice to look at most of the time, but I felt somewhat let down at the end. Does that make me shallow?
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Posted by Erin
Fri, 27 Jan 2006 06:23:00 GMT
This was mildly amusing and pleasant enough to watch. Wanda Sykes was surprisingly funny. The character of the guy was sort of invisible, but I think that was intentional, since it's about J-Lo and Jane Fonda. Well, about the characters they played, anyway. Though it does seem that J-Lo movies are made for us to look at J-Lo and all her pretty clothes.
We can never resist the special features, and they were good on this 2 DVD set (is two DVDs really necessary for such an inconsequential movie?). Even the section called "Documentaries," which confused us at first, (because what is there to make a documentary about?), had some great stuff in it. The various actors are funnier in their interviews than they were in the film.
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Posted by Erin
Fri, 27 Jan 2006 06:09:00 GMT
I finished it! All 980 pages of it. And I enjoyed it. I guess I've been out of escape fiction mode for a while now, so it took me some time to get into it. Over 200 pages, I think. Originally I thought that her most recent books just needed better editing, and maybe they do, but now I think the problem is also that I've forgotten how to read that kind of immersive, detailed writing. It can be a really fun way to read, if you want to escape into another time and/or place. I guess that's why I call it escape fiction. But these days it seems cumbersome and sometimes cliched to me.
Don't get me wrong! I still want to escape sometimes, but I guess I've learned that it doesn't really work: after reading for 8 hours, all the kids and housework are still there and in worse shape than before. So instead of doing the marathon reading thing I used to do, I took my time finishing this one.
One thing I thought was odd: a couple of scenes that were like The Three Stooges or something, where everyone's bumping heads and dropping food on the floor and slipping on banana peels. Okay, nobody slipped on a banana peel, but it conveys the right image. Seemed strange in the Jamie and Claire context.
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Posted by Erin
Sat, 14 Jan 2006 06:54:00 GMT
On Christmas Eve, we went to our little CD and other music stuff store to buy a CD for Uncle Chayee (that's Charlie to you). It turned out to be one of those shopping trips where we buy stuff we weren't planning to buy. This often happens to us with books and CDs. The CD I chose on a whim No!
by They Might Be Giants, a CD for kids that is really great! I am not a big fan of most kids' music that I hear other people playing for their kids. Even though we have six kids, we don't actually own any of that music, so I could be wrong. No Disney soundtracks or Barney crap or whatever it is most parents buy for their kids. We are selfish parents when it comes to music. (This should be no surprise, since Jon is also known as The Musical Tyrant.)
This CD is the best gathering of kids' songs I have yet encountered. The kids love it and have been playing it constantly since they discovered it, and I'm not sick of it yet! It's funny and nonsensical and has lots of different styles of music. And it's intelligent and musically interesting. And there's a song about being a grocery bag. And about the Thomas Edison Museum ("the largest independently owned and operated mausoleum"--actual lyrics in the song). And about robots! And I still love it!
It's true that there is no song about dinosaurs, which would test me. But if there were, I think I'd probably love it anyway.
Posted in Music | 5 comments
Posted by Erin
Wed, 11 Jan 2006 06:04:00 GMT
We watched the 1967 film Bonnie and Clyde on Saturday night. I wasn't sure what I thought of it for a while, though I did immediately appreciate the lack of music during many of the more memorable scenes. Sometimes I get annoyed at the blatantly manipulative music in most movies. And I was glad not be thus manipulated in this one. It's about real-life criminals, after all. And not about relatively benevolent ones who just wanted to get ahead or were forced into crime, but about some completely amoral people, who killed a fair number of people during their heyday.
It made me think about all the movies about criminals that we watch. Like The Italian Job (criminals who are exacting revenge against worse criminals); Gone in 60 Seconds ("It's our last job, and we don't want to do it, because we're going clean, but someone badder than us is making us do it"); Matchstick Men (conman movie, where "they always give me the money" and that makes it less of a crime). No comment on the merits of those movies in particular--they just came to mind--but we're meant to root for bad guys in all of them. Why do we do that? We'd like to live the savvy criminal lifestyle but will never have the guts? We want to see how the other side lives?
Well, Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow are interesting people, but I wasn't exactly on their side. More puzzled by their motives most of the time, and watching in amazement and horror as things escalated. I could probably relate more easily to Clyde's brother Buck and his screechy wife, who became part of the Barrow gang along the way. There were also some great portrayals of Bonnie's mother and a couple who end up involuntarily riding along with the Barrow gang for a time (the man played by Gene Wilder in what was his first film role, from what Jon read later).
It's a disturbing movie, though parts of it are funny, and the car chases and gunfights are generally portrayed in a wild-and-crazy-fun kind of way. The acting by all the secondary characters was really good. Jon thought Faye Dunaway and Warren Beatty were only okay (although I had no idea Warren Beatty was so good-looking when he was younger). Gene Hackman played Buck Barrow and was very good. Seems like he's consistently good.
Side note: my brother-in-law is related to Bonnie Parker. She and his grandfather were first cousins. Cool, huh?
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Posted by Erin
Wed, 11 Jan 2006 02:52:00 GMT
This is the sixth in the Outlander series by Diana Gabaldon. I loved the first four. The fifth (The Fiery Cross) was way too long and badly in need of editing, which was really too bad, since it was the first one that I bought in hardcover the day it came out. Now I'm trying this one, because I heard that it's much better than the fifth, and I kind of want to know what will happen to Jamie and Claire.
But I don't know. I've given it 120 pages so far, and I don't want to read every character's every move. You know, the brushing back of the hair, the cocked eyebrow, the scratching of a belly. (I don't think anyone has actually scratched a belly yet, but Claire has tied off someone's hemorrhoids, with the intended result being that they fall off. Yuck.) Also, not much has happened yet. I have confidence that there is some great action coming up, but I'm not sure I can stick it out.
On the other hand, it's kind of a guilty pleasure to read this kind of escape fiction, even if it's not as good as the earlier ones (and they are very good for escape fiction). And all the other stuff I can think of reading right now seems too serious or something. So I haven't decided whether I will continue or not.
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