March 23rd, 2009
Quel anti-climax
I’m now truly sorry I complained about my lost courier package last week, since a shared mystery demands a shared denouement, and the denouement in this case is stupid.
It was not a summons, it was not a dairy product, it was a set of advance-screening movie tickets that I “earned” through a corporate rewards program. These are a) small enough to fit handily in a mailbox, b) not relevant for close to 3 weeks and c) probably worth less than the cost of delivery. I have no idea why anyone would have couriered them.
And, before you ask, they are to a truly embarrassing movie, much as me and my partener in cimatic silliness are looking forward to seeing it. I shall never ever ever reveal the title, lest it sully my reputation as a serious person (even more).
Dire times call for dire faces
RR
March 22nd, 2009
Elsewheres
I’ve been posting elsewhere again, Writers Writing Blogs and This is a call, both at Thirsty. You are encouraged to read, and, if so inclined, answer the call!!
But I never answered his letter
RR
March 20th, 2009
Courier-osity
It is nearly impossible to send me things via courier. I think courier services are to send things to places where people reliably *are* between 9 and 5, and apparently I’m pretty hard to find. I’m not, actually, but I am to the couriers. If ever you want to send me something bulky, just use normal mail and I’ll pick it up at the post office. Sure, it’s a little slower, but at least then I’ll get it, and I won’t spend half an hour on the phone with Bonnie-the-unhappy-courier-lady, trying to track down my package, which–it turns out–is currently being housed in an un-TTC-able warehouse by the lake, and may be coming to me on Monday but, more than likely, won’t.
I bring this up because Bonnie could not locate a sender in the tracking system, and most people I deal with regularly know my courier situation, so what could it be? This is a longshot, but did anybody out there in blogland try to send me something? And, if so, was it perishable? This is going to bug me all weekend. Even if it wasn’t you, please send theorems!!
Watch it be a summons.
That says more than the first two verses
RR
Rose-coloured Reviews *One Week*
One Week is a movie about a 29-year-old English teacher who finds out he has cancer with 1-in-10 odds of survival. He buys a motorcycle and tells his fiancee he needs to “have an adventure.”. Oh, yeah, he also buys a coffee from Tim Hortons and rolls up the rim to win, only instead of a doughnut or a BBQ, he gets “Go west, young man.”
*One Week* is almost the nice simple daydream/nightmare most people have–buggering off all your responsibilities and doing what you’ve always dreamed of doing, with no guilt and no regrets because it’s probably the last thing you’ll ever do. There’s a couple wry and magical moments like the Tim Hortons cup–I hate reviews that tell you all the best bits, so I won’t, but they are lovely. That sort of thing, plus the character’s sheer joy in what he’s doing, goes a long ways towards tempering the capital-M mortality theme.
And so does the star’s performance. Most of the time, when you’ve got a script that calls for a single actor to be in nearly every frame, often in close-up and often in pain, you go for a heavy hitter. As actors go, Joshua Jackson is pretty lightweight–whenever I mentioned that I would see/had seen this film, someone squawks, “Oh, Pacey. Whatevs, I never watched Dawson’s Creek, but I credit Jackson for using every ounce of his talent in this movie, and his direct r Michael Mcgowan for never pushing him to strain for more. The fact is, life calls on the lightweights as often as the bruisers to deal with bad news, and the character he plays *is* a lightweight, maybe one hoping to be more. I know tonnes of guys like Ben–with sweet girlfriends, mediocre jobs, go-along attitudes and a backpack whenever they have to carry something. Those guys deserve a movie, too, and Jackson’s Ben is a pretty perfect portrayal of ordinary.
And part of Ben’s ordinariness is his self-dramatization. The whole solo trip west on a black motorcycle is fanciful, and so is his luggagelessness, sleeping in his motorcycle jacket and eating silently alone without anything to read. So is his eschewing of the big town in favour of rural outposts and tourist attractions, hiking without a map, and one perfectly charming attempt to dance for joy when he doesn’t feel it. Ben’s a little pretentious; Jackson and this movie aren’t.
Much. The one thing I’ll fault *One Week* for is something 95% of viewers won’t even note: I feel a touch of professional pique that Ben’s supposed to be a writer, but he a) never writes anything, and b) never reads anything. The insertion of this biographical data is just supposed to be a cue for us to think he’s deep, you see, and I really don’t like the idea that writing is some sort of automatic admission to Maslow’s penthouse (would that it were). But whatever, minor detail.
Better, but still strange, is the fact that this movie is mad-crammed with Canadiana–there is no scene, no skyline or pan or fade that doesn’t scrawl I AM CANADIAN all over the celluloid (note: since it was a whole movie of familiar sites, I left off jabbing my companion at every one, though there may have been a few twitches from me at the Dundas streetcar, Kalendar and Trinity College at UofT, and Big Nickel in Sudbury [sidebar: I have a big crush on the Big Nickel]). I don’t know who decided to make this movie one big postcard, but it was pretty fun to see Jackson posing for pictures with every roadside attraction west of TO. There were also plenty of landscape shots with the motorcycle tiny in the foreground. I dug that ok, though in truth it got a little dull. The women sitting both in front of and behind us were a lot more bored than I was, judging my the level of conversation. Obviously, modern audiences aren’t real clear on what to do when no one is talking on-screen…except talk themselves.
I haven’t even mentioned the most plotty element in the film (shows what kind of reviewer I am), which is Ben’s relationship with his finacee, Samantha. Throughout the trip, Ben puzzles about whether his illness changes anything about that relationship, and for good or ill. As the left-behind Sam, the actress Lianne Balaban is stuck doing most of her dramatic work with a cellphone, and nearly everytime we see her she is engaged in some semi-inane wedding preparation. And yet the character is sweet, sympathic and smart, pretty featherlight herself but definitely someone you’d look forward to seeing on-screen.
And the ending. As you may know, I’m on a kick for good endings. For a film that was so ripe for schmaltz and sentiment the end, *One Week* really blew me away with a closing that was subtle, mature, and neither simplistic nor even simple. I was genuinely surprised by it, and that’s rare in “life-redeeming” sort of movie. Yes, yes, there was the sweetheart coda, but by that point, I was ready to be moved by it.
And I was.
And the eyes were / a colour I can’t remember
RR
March 17th, 2009
Books that stay
Over on that other social site, Facebook, Kate S. tagged me to make a list of books I’ve read that will stay with me forever. Reading over the estimable Kate’s list, I saw a few were kids books, some of the same ones I loved back in the day…and now. And in that randomly thematic way the web works, Pickle Me This has been looking into kids books, too, the current ones as well as the nostalgic.
So I’m going to do my whole list of kids’ books. It’s not that there aren’t tonnes of books with long words and swears that I hold as dearly as the books below. But I really did take these books into my heart in a different way. When you’re wee, stories are the world, and whatever you absorb at that age becomes part of your planet.
More practically, I absorbed these books in a different way from later ones because, the first half-dozen or so times I was “absorbing,” I wasn’t reading. All of these were read to me, ad nauseum, until I was able to start rereading them for myself. I was by no means an early reader, which is somewhat embarrassing to admit when so many authors knew their vocations when they began reading in the toddler years. But at least I had people (parents, mainly, but I’d conscript whatever readers I could) willing to aid and abet my longing for stories.
Maybe this is all why I still love to attend readings–something about being told a story can only be good for me. I also have reached the point (finally!) where I love to *do* readings, telling the stories instead of hearing them. Of course, thanks to the books below, I also have really positive associations with goats, oranges, *A Pilgrim’s Progress,* and anything that comes in the mail…oh, those formative years.
Children’s Books That Stay with Me (in no order)
1) Little Women by Louisa May Alcott (and the sequels–*Little Men* and *Jo’s Boys*, but they weren’t as good).
2) Charlotte’s Web by E. B. White.
3) Understood Betsy by Dorothy Canfield.
4) Heidi by Joahanna Spyri (and the sequel, *Heidi Grows Up*, which wasn’t even written by Spyri and I didn’t like at all).
5) An Old-fashioned Girl by Louisa May Alcott.
6) Anne of Green Gables by Lucy Maud Montgomery (and all the sequels, but the sequels had to be borrowed from the library, so I’ve read/heard them only once or twice, and don’t really remember too well what even happened in which book).
7) The Little House Books by Laura Ingalls Wilder (the only series where I liked all the books equally–even the one written by the daughter, Rose, years later).
8) Stories for Children by Isaac Bashevis Singer.
9) Eight Cousins by Louisa May Alcott (yes, I had an Alcott thing growing up. But the sequel to *Eight Cousins* was still terrible, despite the wonderous title, *Rose in Bloom*).
10) My Little Kitten by Judy and Phoebe Dunn (one of these things is not like the others, I know! I was never much on picture books, but I was *obsessed* with this one–even just now seeing the cover on Amazon when I went to find the link filled me with delight. This is the only book on the list that I don’t occasionally reread, but really, maybe I should!)
11) Grimm’s Fairy Tales, red and green books, which I’m counting as one because I’m already over the limit.
On Bathurst Street at 2
RR
March 16th, 2009
“How much is it?” in Japanese
Sore wa ikura desu ka?
You paralyzed my mind / and for that you suck
RR
Pretty Things
I’ve posted a bunch of pictures of books over at Thirsty today. Because I like pictures of books, and because I’m *finally* getting the hang of my digital camera, is why.
If I kissed your face / in front of all your friends
RR
March 15th, 2009
Something to strive for
“That language still dazzles and delights. The usual thing is to insist that Runyon had an amazing “ear” for natural idiom, but, as Cy Feuer points out, Runyon’s dialogue is essentially unplayable, too far removed from any human idiom to be credible in drama. What Runyon wasn’t doing while he was sitting in Lindy’s was just listening and taking dialogue down. Writers with a good ear (Salinger, John O’Hara) certainly listen more acutely than the rest of us, but what they really have is a better filter for telling signal from noise, and then turning it into song….
“Writers with a great ear, like Chandler and Runyon, give us their words, but they also give us a license to listen–a license to listen to street speech and folk speech with a mind newly alive to the poetry implicit in it….one grasps that Mamet’s aim is to capture not their voices but their souls….”
–Adam Gopnik, “Talk It Up”, The New Yorker, March 2, 2009
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