New Week

Word of the day :

ceorl : a freeman of the lowest rank in Anglo-Saxon England 


A new week in Stinksboro, but why think about this town?  Let's talk instead about this list:

http://www.ew.com/ew/gallery/0,,20483133_20694515,00.html

Here's what looks good to me:

Definitely: 

Love is All You Need
Black Rock 
Before Midnight
The Way, Way Back  
The Conjuring
Fruitvale 
Blue Jasmine 
Percy Jackson: Sea of Monsters 
You're Next 
Don Jon

Possibly/Probably: 

Iron Man 3
Peeples
Frances Ha
The Hangover Part III
Now You See Me 
Man of Steel
World War Z  
The Bling Ring 
The Heat
White House Down
I'm So Exited!  
Grown-Ups 2
R.I.P.D.
Girl Most Likely 
Only God Forgives 
We're the Millers
Austenland
Ain't Them Bodies Saints


Always worth a look:

http://travel.nationalgeographic.com/travel/traveler-magazine/photo-contest/2013/entries/gallery/outdoor-scenes-week-2/?source=hp_dl4_travel_photo_contest_20130429

Movies, Movies, Movies

Word of the day :

lamia : a female demon


Well, it's Saturday - grass to cut (?), work to do, basketball and art history programs to watch, walks to take, potty training lessons to begin, itineraries to plan...

Here are the movies opening this weekend:

At Any Price

Dennis Quaid is reputedly at his best as an esteemed, ambitious Iowa farmer who wants his son (Zac Efron) to take over the family business.  Zac wants to ride, though - race cars.  Roger Ebert, in one of his last reviews, called this drama a great American film.  It's about family and the toll the economic crisis has had on the small farmer.  Directed by American-born Iranian filmmaker Ramin Bahrani. 
(YES)

Pain & Gain 
No, thank you, and here's why: it's a Michael Bay (Transformers) film.  Cue the hyperkinetic visuals and sensory assault.  This one is "inspired" by a true story - about three Florida personal trainers (Mark Wahlberg, The Rock, Anthony Mackie) who get involved with a local criminal millionaire (Tony Shalhoub).  Ed Harris and Ken Jeong co-star.  Critics are calling it really dumb. 

Mud
One of the best-reviewed American movies of the new year, Jeff Nichols' follow-up to the terrific Take Shelter (whose star, Michael Shannon, has a role here) is a relatively short (90 minutes), Arkansas-shot-and-set, Huck Finn-esque tale about two boys who find a mysterious guy (Matthew McConaughey) hiding out on an island in the Mississippi River.  The man needs the boys to help him get back to the love of his life (Reese Witherspoon).  She is waiting in town for the man - Mud - but is Mud what he seems?  Has he killed a man?... This could be McConaughey's long-overdue Oscar nomination - he has a cracked front tooth, dirty hair - and he's supposed to be outstanding. 
(YES)     

The Big Wedding 
Dreadful reviews for this all-star comedy.  Robert DeNiro, Susan Sarandon, Diane Keaton, Katherine Heigl, Topher Grace, Amanda Seyfried, and Robin Williams are all here, in a remake of a French comedy about an acidic divorced couple (Bob and Diane) forced to play nice at the wedding of their adopted son. 

Also:

Love is All You Need, a comedy-drama starring Pierce Brosnan as a lonely Danish architect who meets a hairdresser on his way to Italy to attend a wedding.  Good reviews.  (YES)

Kon-Tiki, an Oscar-nominated Norwegian film about Thor Heyerdahl's famous voyage by raft from South America to the Polynesian Islands.  (YES)

Arthur Newman, a low-key road movie about a depressed man (Colin Firth) who tries to change his identity and meets up with a bruised, down-at-the-heels suicidal woman (Emily Blunt) who becomes his companion.  Filmed in North Carolina - average reviews. 

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Bachelorette (2012) wants to be a female version of The Hangover but, honestly, it's not even as good as The Hangover 2.   Kirsten Dunst, Lizzy Caplan, and Isla Fisher (appealing comic actresses all) are three nasty, drunken, bitchy and slutty bachelorettes who come together for the wedding of their friend (Rebel Wilson).  Stop right there: Why cast Wilson in this underdeveloped straight role if you're not going to give her any good lines?  There's not a likable character around - not even the usually dependable James Marsden or Adam Scott as two of the best men.  Some funny parts here and there, but someone forgot to inform or notify director Leslye Headland (who wrote the screenplay and the play (!) the film is taken from) that the background music she employs in almost every single sequence drowns out most of the dialogue.  Which might actually not be that big of a loss.  Not terrible, but disappointing indeed.     

 

Buffalo

Word of the day :

occlusion:  a shutting off or obstructing of something 

Waiting... waiting... waiting...

Always waiting for something here in SE Georgia.  Waiting for the weekend, waiting to get out of town, waiting to her back from a job, waiting to get out of the country... Always waiting...

But, hey, that's why we invented books, right? 

Here are some recent reviews: 

The Street of a Thousand Blossoms (2007), Gail Tsukiyama

A poignant, delicately-written (a phrase you can but probably shouldn't mistake for 'slow-paced') novel that follows the lives of two brothers through about twenty-five years of Japanese history.  One brother is interested in being a sumo wrestler and eventually does, becoming the highest-ranked (a yokozuna, which may ring a bell to some wrestling fans of old), while the other brother becomes a highly-skilled mask maker, in demand by the Noh theater actors and artists.  Tsukiyama traces these tight-knit brothers as well as some other characters and does so with skill and command.  It's just an easy novel to read, never quite a soap opera, and it was nice to see the WWII experience and aftermath from the non-western side. 

Drawing Conclusions (2011), Donna Leon

Leon has kept her Inspector Guido Brunetti mystery series going for twenty-years now, with this year's The Golden Egg the 23rd entry in the bestselling, critically-admired series.  I'm a newbie to the mysteries, and I was rewarded for my efforts with drew me to the book to begin with: a smart, lived-in portrait of Venice.  All the books take place in "The City of Water," and, to Leon, it's both a magical and mundane city, a city of dreams and transients, tourists and thieves, enchantment and faded glory - all of which, I suppose, is what makes it so compelling.  I'm definitely going to read more of these books, even though this one is never anything more than a solid effort - not great, not bad.  Brunetti is investigating the murder of an old woman who housed battered foreign women.  What kind of seamy stuff eventually did her in?  Or does it have something to do with an old will she knew was fake?  Brunetti is an appealing, level-headed character. 

Black Irish, (2013) Stephan Talty

Nonfiction author Talty (who has written books about Napoleon's ill-fated army, Captain Morgan - the pirate, not the liquor - and mulattoes in America, among others) sets his fiction debut in his hometown of Buffalo.  And boy does he know the streets and highways and beliefs of Buffalo inside and out, particularly the clannish neighborhood of Irish Town, which is where his main character, Absalom Kearney, grew up, raised by an Irish cop father.  Kearney, after a stint in Miami, is a detective in faded Buffalo now, working its depressed, often-hostile streets.  A series of gruesome murders has the city panicked, and Kearney is tasked with solving them.  Seems the victims were all members of a nationalist Irish group with ties to the NRA.  Who is picking them off?  And is Kearney's father, a looming, decorated officer now on his last legs, on the list?  Talty is a smart writer and the convincing milieu he limns is the most absorbing part of the novel.  We've seen this plot before - the brilliant serial killer who mutilates his victims and leaves a calling card behind - a hundred times.  Still, the final-act revelation is triumphant.  Stephan Talty, you've hooked for me life now!           

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Crime novel readers, try this quiz: 

http://www.sporcle.com/games/Mavis_Cruet/pen-names

It's hard!  If you can get half right, you really know your stuff! 
(I won't tell you how many I got, but I will say that I am a mystery-novel expert, so I expected to do well...)

4-22-13

The Cyclops, 1898

Happy birthday, Odilon Redon! 

Redon (1840-1916) was a French Symbolist painter.  Born in Bordeaux, Redon started painting at an early age.  After serving in the Franco-Prussian War, he moved to Paris, where he worked in charcoals and lithographs.  In the 1890s he began using oils and pastels and did so for the rest of his life.  Throughout his life, Redon (who was also a printmaker and draughtsman) was interested in literature and architecture.  His charcoal work, called his Noirs, were not publicly successful, but hugely influential on the Parisian avant-garde of the time.  Redon - an artistic ally of the writers Baudelaire and Mallarme - was arguably the greatest Symbolist painter of his generation.  In the 1890s, his works became brighter, more decorative, but still featured dream-like imagery and suggested intense internal states of mind, improbable and invisible beings. 

Symbolism was both an artistic and literary movement, an attempt to see through Realism, to look at the world subjectively, to express reality through artists' spirit and intuition.  Color, line, and shape were not in alignment with the visual, optical image, but at the mercy of personal emotion and insight.  The images were dream-like, fantastic, mysterious.  Symbolist artists - Redon, Gustave Moreau, even at time Henri Rousseau - proved influential to writers of the time and later artists such as the Fauvists and Edvard Munch.        

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Word of the day :

transpire : to take place, occur, or develop

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Well, it's Monday morning in Statesboro, which means back to school for everyone.  Only a few more weeks before our Big Summer Trip and there's plenty to do around the house before we go, plenty of lose ends to knot up, a few necessities to buy, a few TV shows to watch, etc.

Not much on the news front this weekend, nothing Too Horrible happened... oh, wait, I'm reading about a shooting in Seattle... (let's just  skip over that for the minute...)

E.L. Konigsburg, the young adult writer best known for the engaging YA classic From the Mixed-Up Files of Basil E. Frankweiler (a book I highly recommend), died this weekend at the age of 83.  She won two Newberry awards, for Mixed-up... and 1997's The View From Saturday.

*

I love this National Geographic article by historian Hampton Sides on Wrangel Island (a place I had never heard of), which is sort of the Northern, colder version of the Galapagos Islands. 

http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/2013/05/wrangel-island/sides-text?source=hp_dl1_ngm_wrangel-island_20130417   







Image courtesy of:

http://silverandexact.files.wordpress.com/2011/02/cyclops-odilon-redon-1914.jpg

Don't Touch That Fish!

Word of the day
xenophobia : fear and hatred of foreigners or strangers or anything that is foreign and strange
                                                  

Julia and I saw a frightening, alarming eco-thriller last night, Barry Levinson's The Bay, a found-footage, faux-documentary about some very scary organisms coming out of Chesapeake Bay.  The Maryland-native Levinson - Rain Man, Diner, Sleepers - gets back to his indie roots and combines real-life problems (the fact that 40% of the Bay is lifeless, isopods - the film's spooky, insidious monsters - have found their way from the Pacific to the Atlantic, etc.) with an inventive narrative technique: the film is told solely from Podcasts, computerized images, security cameras, home footage, I-Phones, etc.  Using a no-name cast, Levinson is able to summon up quite a horrific scenario: A July 4th weekend festival in small-town Maryland is ruined as its citizens, all of whom have been exposed to the Bay's waters (and the steroid-aided parasitic organisms infesting them), begin to bleed and vomit and lose body parts.  A movie with a conscious, it's a smart throwback to the sci-fi/ creature-films films of the 50s.  Check it out. 

*

Playing For Keeps (2012) is a decent if demeaning rom-com starring nobody's favorite hunk Gerard Butler.  Cast here as a once-famous soccer star now living in suburban Virginia, trying to have a relationship with his young son, Butler is his usual sloppy, slobby, messily-"charming," slurry-brogued self.  If, like me, the appeal of Butler eludes you, don't worry, because this is a good role for him.  Butler's poorly-groomed George has never been much of father, but his son and ex-wife (Jessica Biel, who gives the movie's one grounded, likable performance) still believe in him.  Where the movie takes a brief foray into the disastrous and puzzling is when George starts coaching his son's soccer team and the mothers of the kids start desperately throwing themselves at him.  I wasn't sure why, for George doesn't particularly seem to incite or welcome such attention.  Filling in some of these caricatures are actresses who should know better: Catherine Zeta-Jones, Uma Thurman, Judy Greer.  Dennis Quaid plays the pushy, obnoxiously "friendly" husband to Thurman's bored housewife.  The last half-hour of the film (shot in Shreveport) is the best, when all these crazy women are left behind (or just written out of the picture) and Butler-Biel get back down to the reuniting business.  Directed by Gabriel Muccino (The Pursuit of Happyness).

*

The NBA playoffs start today:  a two-month long affair bound to be full of excitement, trash talk, hyperbole, and few upsets.  Here are my picks for the first round: 

New York Knicks over Boston Celtics (7 gms.)
Denver Nuggets over Golden State Warriors (6 gms.)
Chicago Bulls over Brooklyn Nets (6 gms.) 
Memphis Grizzlies over L.A. Clippers  (7 gms.)
Indiana Pacers over Atlanta Hawks (5 gms.)
San Antonio Spurs over L.A. Lakers  (6 gms.) 
Miami Heat over Milwaukee Bucks  (4 gms.)
Oklahoma City Thunder over Houston Rockets (5 gms.)

   

















Images courtesy of: 

http://blogs.bet.com/celebrities/what-the-flick/wp-content/uploads/2012/11/110112-celebs-the-bay-movie.jpg

4 Weeks Until Italy!

Persee et Andromede

Before we start, a painting today by French Symbolist Gustave Moreau (1826-1898), who passed away on this date 115 years ago.  Moreau was an Academy-approved artist who painted mythological and biblical imagery and scenes. 

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Word of the day : milieu
                                        : environment ; the physical or social setting in which something occurs or
                                          develops

Well, the hits just keep on coming: 

- A tragic explosion at a fertilizer plant outside Waco has, according to the most recent reporting, killed 15 and injured at least 175. 

- The Senate voted not to pass gun-control legislation yesterday.  Although it's only a first setback, it was still shameful and disgraceful and an embarrassment to anyone in this country with half a brain.  I'll take that back: Most gun-owners should have rights and are responsible, and I have no problem with them owning guns.  I do have a problem - and I think everyone should - with a Congress that willingly ignores what the majority of Americans want done, the same Americans that voted them in, Reps and Dems alike.  Disgusting. 

Here are the new movies opening this weekend: 

Not much.  There's Oblivion, Tom Cruise's new sci-fi epic, co-starring Morgan Freeman.  Directed by Joseph Kosinksy (the Tron sequel), it's getting average reviews.  There's also director Rob Zombie's Lords of Salem, a disturbing-looking movie about a radio DJ in Salem, Mass. troubled by eerie visions of the past. 

*

Vamps, Amy Heckerling's campy, affectionate tale about two members of the undead (Alicia Silverstone and Krysten Ritter) trying to be young and romantic in New York City, is a vampire movie that - thank God! - doesn't take itself too seriously, unlike the Twilight movies.  It's a jokey, silly movie with mediocre-at-best CGI but there's actually an affectionate, nostalgic undercurrent here - about living outside your time, watching the world (and history) go by without being able to do anything about it.  It's a movie about aging, folks.  Lot of pop culture references, of course (would you expect otherwise from the Clueless scribe?), and plenty of familiar faces, all of whom are in the cheesy spirit of the thing: Sigourney Weaver, Wallace Shawn (as a Van Helsing), Justin Kirk, Richard Lewis.    



Image courtesy of: 

http://art-magique.blogspot.com/2011/04/gustave-moreau-1826-1898.html

Orphaned

On a sad day in America, let's turn our focus instead to the newest Pulitzer Prize winner- the first in two years.  (Remember that there was no winner last year.)   


The Orphan Master's Son

What it's about :

Well, an orphan, as you can imagine.  Pak Jun Do is a parentless kid in North Korea who grows up in an orphanage and eventually goes to work for the state, as a kidnapper (!) and fishing boat signal operator.  For unknown reasons, Jun Do eventually assumes the identity of a North Korean national hero and is assigned to a highly risky, dangerous assignment by Kim Jong II. 

Who wrote it: 

45-year old, South Dakota-born Adam Johnson.  Johnson earned his PhD in English from Florida State in 2000.  He is currently an associate professor in English at Stanford University.  Johnson had previously written the novel Parasites Like Us (2003), the 2002 short story collection Emporium, and numerous other stories that have been published, in among other periodicals, Esquire, Harper's Weekly, The Missouri Review, and The Paris Review.