Busting out bad joints all over the place
My RRHB over the past couple years has gone down to NYC for the big music festival. But to me, the week that the authors are in town, for me, kind of represents that sort of a week. Tomorrow we’ll be seeing an entire day of authors events and I am going to live blog via my crackberry throughout the day. So, forgive typos, forgive the small screen grammar, but love the words.
Oh, and if anyone else is heading out there tomorrow – please say hello. I’ll be the girl in the giant knitted scarf.
My application was accepted by the Humber School for Writers. I will be doing their 2007 correspondence course. Fingers crossed I work hard enough to get the value from the experience. But, yay!
Once I start expect me to resurface in about six months…
Last week while I was in my abridging hell, I went to see a screening of Marie Antoinette for Chart (review will be up this Friday). Sometimes, I kind of wish I did more freelance, because the idea of seeing a movie first-thing in the morning with no one but other writers in the room, kind of appeals to me. It’s funny, we’re all the same with our little notebooks and pens sitting on our laps, scrawling in giant, illegible writing because it’s hard to see in the dark, obviously.
So, Marie Antoinette. Yeah, I can’t make up my mind about this film, whether I liked it or hated it, whether its genius or ridiculous, which doesn’t bode well for a coherent review. It’s pop culture history stripped of the more juicy bits (we don’t even get a beheading) leaving behind a music video that tries to recreate the social and emotional journey of the movie’s main character.
But I really like Sofia Coppola. I’ve seen The Virgin Suicides more times than I can count on my fingers and toes, and love, love, loved Lost in Translation. She has a way of pulling out great performances from actresses who, for the most part, get by on being gorgeous rather than insanely talented. She does the same with Kirsten Dunst in this picture: she’s good.
But parts of me just can’t get over the non-historical aspects of the film. I’m aching for a British accent and a good bit of Elizabeth. I’m dying to see inside Antoinette in terms of looking beyond her wardrobe and flirty fashion sequences. I’m wanting to be more engaged, I guess, with the subject matter, wanting more BBC and PBS, and, goodness help me, maybe even a dose of Keira Knightley inspired Jane Austen.
I know Coppola was trying to bring the relevance of Marie Antoinette’s life to audiences of this centry, to boldly re-tell her story in her own particular way, but I’m not quite there with her. Who knows? I can’t make up my mind. Maybe tomorrow I’ll feel differently.
No, wait, shut up Sting. A lute? Seriously?
It’s all so good, except it’s not, and that’s frustrating.
After being totally burned out with the two manuscripts I have due (the past four weeks have been intense), and getting nowhere with the second one that I need to hand in (one’s already gone, yay!), my RRHB convinced me to take a break and we went to see a movie this afternoon. And before you ask, yes, I’m back to editing right now.
Annnywwaaay. We tried to go see The Departed last night and it was sold out, so this afternoon we left early for the theatre. And I am thankful we did. It’s probably one of the best films I’ve seen this year, if not the best, and I’m so happy not to be disappointed. I love Martin Scorsese, I mean, I even dug Gangs of New York as surprising as that might be, but this film, well, this film kind of sort of blew me away. I watch so many movies that already knowing what’s going to happen, or at least having some idea when it comes to cops and mobsters, of the intended endings, isn’t surprising. Here, in The Departed though, I had no idea, and that was so refreshing.
William Monahan’s script is stupendous; it’s not good in a contrived kind of way, doesn’t want to pull on your heartstrings and make a big, righteous point (ahem, Crash), but it gets there nonetheless. And like Clint Eastwood’s Mystic River a lot of the reasons why the film works is because it’s not set in New York, as Lisa Schwarzbaum points out, but in the streets of Boston. Not unlike Brotherhood something happens when you take the mob out of the mean streets, there’s an edge that seems kind of akin to the cool kids at that table in high school, the more interesting and grittier individuals are probably holding court out back in the smoking area.
And the smoking area it is, The Departed brings Shakespeare to a new age, a drama that has classical implications, the pairing of Matt Damon and Leonardo DiCaprio as two cops, total opposites in terms of integrity and coming from parallel but still inverse backgrounds, coupled with the slow disintegration of their worlds and their identities , tossed around with the very real threat of, well, death, really and truly works.
There’s a line that Matt Damon says to the pivotal lady in the film, Vera Farmiga, who plays a state shrink, as his world starts to crumble (and I’m paraphrasing, because I’m damn tired) that sort of sums up the entire pathos of the film: “If this has to end, you’ve got to be the one to end it. I’m Irish, we I can live in a bad situation for the rest of my life.”
It’s a world where self-preservation seems more profound with the silences, where Jack Nicholson, who reigns as the big, bad Boston boss, can frolic at the opera (wha?) as easily as he can at a Southie bar, and still come out without necessarily breaking character. It’s a world where good equals bad, equals good, equals totally farked up until the utterly satisfying ending, of which you’ll find no spoilers here (see, see when it’s a movie I like, I won’t give away the ending). There’s value in watching the story unfold, as each man discovers who the other one is (mole, meet rat, rat meet mole), they find themselves in ever-increasingly morally problematic situations. And we’re the richer for them.
My only criticism? That there’s no mob wife, no lady other than the doe ‘caught in the middle’ of Farmiga’s Madolyn. Even if Laura Linney’s Lady Macbeth-like Annabeth seemingly comes out of nowhere, she’s at least at the table. She’s not the dressing; she’s actually at the table, part of which the non-existent female characters in this male-centric movie are missing.
But still, the more I think about it, the more I like this film. Hell, I’d even pay to see it again.
Roddy Doyle’s latest novel, Paula Spencer, continues the story he started in 1996 with his superb book, The Woman Who Walked Into Doors. Told in his now-classic stream of consciousness style, Paula Spencer finds the main character sober, a widow, and on the eve of her 48th birthday. Now that she’s sober, Paula faces up to all of her demons: her children and her inability to be their mother; what it means to be a recovering alcoholic; what life is like being poor but making it; and how to make it through a day with nothing to hide behind, every day is a ‘real’ day for her.
It’s no secret how much I adore Roddy Doyle’s work. A Star Called Henry might just be one of my all-time favourites, no, it is one of my all-time favourites, right up there with Jude the Obscure and On the Road. But sometimes, his dialogue is so hard to follow, which is what happened with the sequel to Henry, Oh, Play That Thing. I’ve tried to read that book numerous times and could never get through it. Thankfully, Paula Spencer doesn’t have that problem. Not that it’s a book you fly through; it’s heavy in terms of ‘issues’, but his writing style works so much better in terms of modern Dublin than it does in terms of the America of the jazz age. Henry never really fit in there, at least not to me.
I feel Paula in this novel. The ache that comes from growing up with an alcoholic parent, and how she speaks about her daughter, Nicola, as being her child instead of the other way around, well, that’s something I totally understand. But most of all, I like how this book highlights the patterns of life changing, and how hard work does truly get you somewhere in life. And when Paula takes that walk through Trinty College, makes it through another day of work, opens a bank account, you want to cheer, because even the mundane aspects of life are miraculous if you’ve never experienced them sober before. At least that’s what I think anyway. She’s a strength of character, that Paula, I’d read about her until the ends of the earth.
Let’s just get the confessions out of the way off the top: I heart Entertainment Weekly. Ever since Tara left a copy in the lunchroom of the magazine where we both used to work, I’ve been hooked. So, when I found out that Gillian Flynn was publishing her first book, Sharp Objects, I already came to this novel already wanting to love it, because by proxy, I obviously heart the snarky goodness she brings to the magazine each week as its television columnist/reporter/reviewer.
Anyway, here’s a short synopsis, it’s commerical, rather than literary fiction, so keep that in mind: Camille Preaker, a cub reporter with a Chicago daily, is called back to her hometown, Wind Gap, Missouri, to cover the story when two pre-teen girls end up dead. The infamous cliches of small town life are explored as Camille tries to uncover who has killed the girls and why. Born to a teenage mother and an unknown father, Camille has never really bonded with her family, add in a stepfather and a half-sister who puts Thirteen to shame, and the word outcast hardly seems competent.
As Camille’s world unravels, she drinks. As she drinks, we uncover deeper secrets in her past, and one by one, the pieces fall into place. The plot’s a tad predictable, but it doesn’t matter because Flynn’s writing is so sharp (yes, the title, I know) that the book rips along at a feverish pitch. I read it in one sitting like a swift first drink up north and must say: it’s the perfect book for a rainy sky as the sun starts to set.
Oh, and ’cause it’s also super-creepy, with lots of dead bodies and freaky things happening, I’m going to count this book in my October reading challenge. I know it’s not on the original list, but that makes three! Yay! It’s the closest I’ve been to finishing a challenge yet…
Victor Hugo’s The Hunchback of Notre-Dame is creepy, fascinating and utterly terrifying. But like all classics, it’s a bit too wordy, and I found the many pages of the lessons in the history of Parisian architecture a bit hard to take. However, some of the traditional conflicts in the novel, man vs. religion (oh, the powerful beauty of a gypsy girl), man vs. beast (oh, Quasimodo, how misunderstood you are), and man vs. man (oh, the upper class takes a crack at the lower classes), are still powerful.
Sorry for the mini-review, but I’m knee-deep in abridging and will probably not surface until this time next week. But, I’m damn glad I can cross one title off my October reading challenge. Let the bells sing!
Awhile back, I interviewed Curtis Sittenfeld, author of Prep (a book that I urge everyone to read, EVERYONE) and The Man of My Dreams, which I also loved. It was a work thing, and I enjoyed it immensely, but I was so freaking nervous that I think I sound like a complete moron. Anyway, the interview is now up in its quasi-podcast form here. It’s in the Audio & Video channel, down towards bottom, underneath Robert J. Wiersma and just above Alice Munro.
It’s a membership-only site, so you’ll have to register, and if you’re not down with that, I completely understand. But I can’t bring myself to listen to it (I’m terrified it’s bloody terrible), so if anyone else can get through it, please let me know what you think.