Call me!

Well, 15 out of 24 Oscar picks is just okay.  Good ceremony, as far as those things go and I for one thought Seth MacFarlane was pretty funny. 

Doctor's appointment today!  Yikes!  Plus side: septic tank has been cleaned. 

For a Good Time Call (2012), directed by Jamie Travis, is a movie I expected almost nothing from.  So it was to my surprise that I ended up getting a sweet, funny comedy bolstered considerably by the unabashed portrayal of enthusiastic female friendship.  It helps having Ari Graynor around too, with her inspired, anything-goes gaiety (she's like Elizabeth Banks meets Bette Midler).  She plays a phone sex operator who, to her chagrin, finds herself sharing her NYC apartment with a more uptight, walking-the-straight-path girl (played by Lauren Miller, who also co-wrote the script).  Soon enough... you guessed it: eventually Miller's character is running the call business and even taking some of the calls herself.  Frank and amusing (when all this sex talk flies out of the mouths of females it's just funnier) and with a supporting part for the always watchable Justin Long as the girls' gay friend, the movie isn't anything great, but it's worth a chance. 

*

Ian McEwan's newest novel, Sweet Tooth (2012), is easy to like, impossible to love.  If you read the book, you'll understand what I mean when I say that I like it more when it's about literature than I do when it's about the intricacies and concerns of MI5. 




Serena Frome is a recent Cambridge grad who majored in mathematics despite her love of books.  She has an affair with a professor who ends up recruiting her for MI5.  After her lover's mysterious death (we found out about his fate about 2/3 of the way through the book), she joins the intelligent service, where, like most women there, she finds herself on the lowest end of the totem pole.  Eventually, however, her inscrutable male higher-ups task her with a mission: Operation Sweet Tooth.  She must befriend - and financially back - a promising young writer, Tom Haley.  You see, the government wants to give its subtle but determined support to writers whose ideas and and politics align with its own. 

Naturally, Serena and Tom fall in love.   



The sections of the book given over to the plot summaries of Tom's novels are the most entertaining in the novel.  Sweet Tooth, somewhat autobiographical and full of cultural history, winding its way along in McEwan's supple, intelligent (but not off-putting) prose, never really build to anything.  There's no suspense in the novel's looming dilemma: will Tom eventually find out Serena's true identity and motivation?  I wasn't that concerned.  Some of the sections of the novel drag, but I did like all the discussion about the writers and artists populating the time period.   






















Image courtesy of: 

http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-MXHeZ1lJf4o/UD_z-S9XVhI/AAAAAAAAFkI/ep8QiKVXkoc/s1600/goodtime1+%281%29.jpg

http://25.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_mdhpi4Lenj1qd9dz2o1_400.jpg