I read the book (and reviewed it) a while back and actually enjoyed it - particularly the struggles of a turning-30 woman looking for some meaning and success in her life. It was a nice, engaging story.
The movie, however, is and absolutely predictable, horribly boring, Nora-Ephron-ed piece of crap. If you've seen enough Nora Ephron films, then me saying that this is just like those (but with the story being about real people) should be enough shorthand for you. There's love (already obtained by each of the titular women). There are hiccups (mild, non-threatening hiccups, and the tone of the film makes it very obvious that these hiccups will be tidied up neatly and pretty quickly). And there is food.
Where the book told the story of the titular Julie Powell who chose to cook her way through Julia Child's Mastering the Art of French Cooking in 365 days, the movie intertwines Julie's story with that of Julia Child's move to Paris, classes in learning the French cooking methods, and subsequent struggles to write and get published her culinary tour de force. The two stories - Julie & Julia's - don't seem to parallel each other well enough for the device to work, and neither one is given enough time to develop into anything terrifically interesting. Honestly, the Julia Child scenes (with Meryl Streep as Julia and and Stanley Tucci as her loving husband, Paul) were more interesting than the more current Julie storyline which features little of the internal sturm und drang that made the Julie & Julia book engaging.
If you count Sleepless in Seattle, You've Got Mail, and Hanging Up among your favorite films, give this a try. If you don't, avoid it because it's far from Ephron's career highlight of When Harry Met Sally.
Gardens is a cinéma vérité documentary about the lives a mother and daughter - both named Edith Bouvier Beale, cousins to Jackie Kennedy Onassis - who lived in the titular Grey Gardens estate in East Hampton, New York. As the women spent more time in Grey Gardens, they retreated further and further from the world, letting the estate fall into worse and worse disrepair.
This documentary shows us a glimpse into their lives in 1975 after Jackie O had come in and helped improve living conditions enough that the local municipality had allowed the women to continue living in the then-lessened squalor. The house is still, however, in pretty awful disrepair. Little Edie (the daughter) complains of flea bites, feeds raccoons living in the attic, points out the growing disintegration of a wall thanks to the raccoons, and tours us through the thoroughly overgrown titular gardens.
The film offers no narrations and only fleeting glimpses of the filmmakers themselves. There is no attempt to provide background on the two women other than the stories that they each tell about their pasts (failed engagements to J Paul Getty, abortive New York City socialite lives, husband/father abandonments). This is simply a look into the lives of two members of America's finest families that have taken a turn for the more unfortunate. These are the women who inhabit the overgrown houses across our country, who feed dozens of cats, and who are all-but-forgotten by everyone around them, but the movie doesn't turn the women into tragic figures, instead, letting them dance and sing and reflect and remember - all shown with no comments whatsoever.
We don't get interviews with others who know the women. We don't get historical background. We simply get to see the two women living and often performing for the camera. It's a tragic and freakish film, letting us see how easily and slowly people can descend into a kind of almost agoraphobic madness.
I was shocked to see some of the bonus material on the Criterion DVD that we saw. Two interviews in particular stuck with me, both with designers currently working. One, Todd Oldham, was particularly interesting as he discussed how much influence Little Edie, in particular, has had on the fashion and design world. I have absolutely no idea why anyone would base their designs on the weirdness of these two women, no matter how unique and independent they both were. At some point, crazy isn't creative. It's just crazy.
I didn't enjoy the film and won't be seeing the second documentary edited together from the same source material.
Seriously, this past decade has been a lost one for my love of Neil Young. In the 1990s, Neil moved easily into the automatic buy category with me picking up every one of his albums and searching Everybody's Records for anything from his back catalog (even the lost six, most of which I now have on bootlegged cds). Even Silver and Gold, the decade-opening album was purchased and played constantly as The Girl and I wandered the areas around Santa Fe on our honeymoon.
And then came Living with War and Are You Passionate,a trio of albums exploring Young's thoughts about America and our commitment to wars in Iraq and Afghanistan...Greendale, a hopelessly complicated and meandering concept album that I could never figure out...a trio of releases from The Archives (quality music but performances from 1970, 1971, 1973, and 1992)...and a few other albums that were pleasant but not worth listening to more than once or twice (Chrome Dreams II, Fork in the Road, Prairie Wind).
Finally, this album puts Neil back in an interesting place. Weirdly, it's a solo Neil Young album that fuzzes like a Crazy Horse album with Neil playing electric guitar and then handing the recordings to Daniel Lanois to further obscure beneath the rough and tumble guitar work.
These are some great songs - particularly "Love & War" and "Walk With Me". None of the songs are among Neil's greatest of all time. There isn't a "Heart of Gold" or a "Tonight's the Night" among them, but this is a collection of excellent songs that I hope signify a renewing creative streak from Neil.
To quote Natalie Portman...
It was a role that almost never happened -- she wasn't quite sure at first how the film would get made. Then, of course, they found the buzzed about key.Nice, Natalie, you kiss you female costars with that mouth?
"Everyone was so worried about who was going to want to see this movie," Portman says. "I remember them being like, 'How do you get guys to a ballet movie? How do you get girls to a thriller?' And the answer is a lesbian scene. Everyone wants to see that."
Sorry, I digress.
One of the previews that I saw of Black Swan reported that the film was a 'psycho-sexual thriller', and that's a pretty appropriate summary of the genre. This is the story of a driven ballet dancer who has finally been given the chance to dance the part of her life - that of the Swan Queen in Swan Lake. As such, she has to embody both the icy perfection of the White Swan and the far more sensual Black Swan.
The latter is, of course, the problem as Portman's dancer is all about control, perfection, restraint. She lives with her mother, a former dancer who lives her life through her daughter, and shows us absolutely no life beyond dancing. Her director, however, suggests that he sees something darker in her and presses her to embrace the dark side in some very erotic and forward ways - advances that would clearly be viewed as harassment if brought to light. The director also brings in a new dancer, played by Mila Kunis, who is the diametric opposite of Portman's White Swan. Kunis's character smokes, wears blacks and dark grays, eats meat, dances, sleeps around, is very free with herself, and earns the director's praise for her unrestrained passion in her dancing. And then that passion spills over into a tentative friendship with Portman, a friendship that goes much further, leading Portman to begin recognizing and breaking through her boundaries, and to begin suspecting Kunis of wanting to replace her as the Swan Queen.
Arnofsky provides us with only Portman's view of her world, a view that we come to see as being a very unreliable vantage point. Portman is clearly cracking beneath the strain of trying to break free from her self-imposed cage. Arnofsky uses the trappings of a caged bird - mirrors, grooming, picking - to show us Portman's dancer inhabiting her role more and more thoroughly, more and more intently...until it destroys her utterly and totally because she can be nothing but her role, she cannot exist except to be her dancer.
What we don't know throughout much of the movie is whether Portman's descent is entirely self-created or whether the other characters have been pushing her beyond her limits, whether she is the only untrustworthy character. As such, Arnofsky's film makes for a masterful psychological exploration - making us wonder whether Portman is paranoid or whether everyone really is against her. All of that is until the last minute of the film when Arnofsky tells us which is the truth and, in the process, knocking over his carefully built house of cards.
The film has stunning visuals, marvelous acting, outstanding dance sequences, and - of course - that hook that Portman mentions in the first quote. But then that last minute and the reveal. Arnofsky takes his marvelous tapestry and pulls the curtain back to show us the reverse side just a little too much.
The Girl and I listened to his newest book on the way to and from The Hometown over Christmas, and this may well be Sedaris's most entertaining book yet - which is saying something as his work already has been excellent. This book, however, is Sedaris's first work of fiction, a series of modern fables told through anthropomorphic animals - the titular squirrel and chipmunk, an owl looking to better himself, a cat forced to attend AA meetings.
Each tale is on the shortish side and independent of each other, and each is masterfully told, relating entirely human faults and foibles leading to hilarious and creative ends.
I don't want to reveal too much about any of the individual tales as each one takes a turn that isn't entirely expected but comes about so organically that none of them feel like a cheat or a hook added after the fact.
These are brilliant stories and some of Sedaris's finest work yet.
Take a chance and read or listen to one of the stories, and if you do pick up the book, enjoy in particular the final story "The Grieving Owl".
And the game was well worth the wait. It's a great sequel to the original Wii Sports that comes with the standard Wii. Where the original had five sports as well as training for each game, this drastically expands to include twelve games, each of which has two or three play modes and takes much greater advantage of the improved finesse controls of the Wii Motion Plus achievement (which I saw that the red Wii controllers now have included).
My favorite games so far are easily three-on-three basketball, ping pong, and the island flyover. Each one provides the typical interaction with the strongly individualized Mii's - the one that you're controlling as well as the other Mii's from your system either as your teammates or simply as the crowd cheering your Mii onward. The entirety of the games take place on - or around - the island that was first introduced in Wii Fit as the site of the running track. Here the island is drastically reworked and expanded to include venues for all the sports as well as dozens and dozens of hidden locations that are to be explored in the Island Flyover game.
The games all follow the typical Mii style of presenting challenges in increasing difficulty levels, easy at first and becoming progressively more difficult as the player's skill increases and builds. The games also offer solo and multiple-player versions (except for the Flying Duel game which cannot be played solo) for each of the games, but I've yet to play most of them in more than the solo versions (The Girl isn't quite as down with playing games for an hour or so as am I). The solo versions are challenging enough but do tend to get a bit repetitive once the highest levels of competition are met and defeated (apparently the three-on-three basketball game tops out with a rating of 2500 for the player).
It's a blast of a game and one that I'll probably be playing for a long, long time.
The show puts forth four tales of people returning to the 'scene of the crime' with host, Ira Glass, narrating on the Brooklyn theater stage. The episode is typical This American Life but is clearly a radio program being filmed. The episode could just as easily have been presented without any visuals at all and little wouldn't have been lost.
The more impressive presentation, however, was the 'John Smith' episode of This American Life the television show that we watched. Neither of us had seen any of the television episodes, so we came in rather blindly having only seen a quick preview that was shown on the promotional DVD. The episode looks at the life of one person from cradle to grave, the life of John Smith. Since the episode couldn't follow a person for the entirety of their life, however, they showed us glimpses into the lives of seven John Smiths around the country - from the newborn through to a John Smith from Hamilton, OH who is at the clear end of his life.
The storytelling in the episode, paralleling the lives of the various John Smiths as they each deal with similar situations from very different life points is masterful. The episode presents their lives as one truly whole story, presenting - amazingly successfully - a complete tale. Rarely have I seem a television episode this moving, this perfect.
This is one to which I offer my absolute highest recommendation.
And it's not just because it brought me to tears. Shut up.
I have allergies.
Bad allergies, and my eyes itched.
