Love me anyway

Read a story, FAA to allow tablets and e-readers during all phases of flight, (at bottom, story has: First published October 31st 2013, 10:06 am). Near the bottom is this paragraph: Not to mention that passengers will sometimes sneak in a few Words with Friends turns when they think they can get away with it. “You can’t be looking at everybody all the time,” said Tiffany Hawk, a former flight attendant and the author of “Love Me Anyway,” a novel about airline culture. “People are always pretending to turn things off even when they’re not.”

I looked at Kirkus review of that book, which has this: ""Readers will find the book's two heroines well worth knowing."

And they are. I read 185 pages in 2 days. Story is solid, well paced, and has substance.

Publisher's Weekly: Though Hawk provides a fascinating snapshot of an industry seldom explored in fiction, the cycling between first person (Emily) and third person (KC) is distracting, and Hawk's prose turns didactic as the pace slackens.

I did not find the alternative narrators distracting, but I do agree that as the book reaches its last quarter the narrative style weakens.

Fun, worthwhile, nicely done.

Liberal Arts

Very good film. No special effects. No wanton sex. Very cerebral (characters read books!). In other words, a mature film —which, of course, had terrible box office. Ebert quite liked it, as did I.

Josh Radnor's "Liberal Arts" is an almost unreasonable pleasure about a jaded New Yorker who returns to his alma mater in Ohio and finds that his heart would like to stay there. It's the kind of film that appeals powerfully to me; to others, maybe not so much. There is a part of me that will forever want to be walking under autumn leaves, carrying a briefcase containing the works of Shakespeare and Yeats and a portable chess set. I will pass an old tree under which once on a summer night I lay on the grass with a fragrant young woman and we quoted e.e. cummings back and forth.

The  entire review is worth quoting, really.

"Liberal Arts" has been criticized in some quarters as a sitcom, in part because Radnor stars in a famous one, "How I Met Your Mother." Those who see it that way are well-guarded. God forbid that they would ever "fall for anything." I strive to leave myself vulnerable.
There is a word to explain why this particular film so appealed to me. Reader, that word is "escapism." If you understand why I used the word "reader" in just that way, you are possibly an ideal viewer for this movie.

Merci beaucoup .

Love me or leave me

Cast: Doris Day, James Cagney, Cameron Mitchell, Robert Keith, Tom Tully
Director: Charles Vidor
Writer: Daniel Fuchs and Isobel Lennart
Running Time: 122 min.
Genre: Drama, Musical
Rating: No Rating
Synopsis: One of the gutsiest movie musicals of the 1950s, Love Me or Leave Me is the true story of 1930s torch-singer Ruth Etting, here played by Doris Day. While working in a dime-a-dance joint, Ruth is discovered by Chicago racketeer Martin The Gimp Snyder (fascinatingly played with nary a redeeming quality by James Cagney). The smitten Snyder exerts pressure on his show-biz connections, and before long Ruth is a star of nightclubs, stage and films. Ruth continues to string Snyder along to get ahead, but she can't help falling in love with musician Johnny Alderman (Cameron Mitchell). After sinking his fortune into a nightclub for Ruth's benefit, Snyder is rather understandably put out when he finds her in the arms of Alderman. Snyder shoots the musician (but not fatally) and is carted away to prison. Upon his release, Snyder finds that Ruth is still in love with Alderman; he is mollified by her act of largesse in keeping her promise to perform in his nightclub at a fraction of her normal salary. No one comes off particularly nobly in Love Me or Leave Me, even though the still-living Ruth Etting, Martin Snyder and Johnny Alderman were offered full script approval. The fact that we are seeing flesh-and-blood opportunists rather than the usual sugary-sweet MGM musical stick figures naturally makes for a more powerful film. In his autobiography, James Cagney had nothing but praise for his co-star Doris Day, and bemoaned the fact that she would soon turn her back on dramatic roles to star in a series of fluffy domestic comedies.~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide

I enjoyed it. This review captures the film quite well. Doris Day pulled off the songs; her voice had a little, even more than little, resonance and vibrato to it (a couple of times I thought of Sara Vaughn), not the usual limited range and sweetness of so many other musicals.

The Notebook

I shoulda known better, and did, but still watched it. Mawkish. Rotten Tomatoes rating tell the story: critics gave it 52%, audience 85%.

To the end of the land

Colm Toibin gives David Grossman's new book a glowing review. To say this is an antiwar book is to put it too mildly, and in any case such labels do an injustice to its great sweep, the levels of its sympathy. There is a plenitude of felt life in the book. There is a novelist’s notice taken of the sheer complexity not only of the characters but of the legacy of pain and conflict written into the gnarled and beautiful landscape through which Ora and Avram walk. And there is the story itself, unfolded with care and truth, wit and tenderness and rare understanding. This is one of those few novels that feel as though they have made a difference to the world.

As in other novels of love and loyalty in a time of conflict — Nadine Gordimer’s “Burger’s Daughter,” Michael Ondaatje’s “English Patient” or Shirley Hazzard’s “Great Fire” — there is a palpable urgency here about the carnal and the sexual. The portrait of Ora as a woman alive in her body is one of the triumphs of Grossman’s book.

Feast of Love

I found this film as a result of searching on the name of Charles Baxter. His name appeared on the back of Schlepping through the Alps. This film is based on one of Baxter's books. The mp3 version of that book is described thus: From "one of our most gifted writers" (Chicago Tribune), here is a superb new novel that delicately unearths the myriad manifestations of extraordinary love between ordinary people. In vignettes both comic and sexy, men and women speak of and desire their ideal mates: The owner of a coffee shop recalls the day his first wife seemed to achieve a moment of simple perfection; a young couple spends hours at the coffee shop fueling the idea of their fierce love; a professor of philosophy, stopping by for a cup of coffee, makes a valiant attempt to explain what he knows to be the inexplicable working of the human heart. Their voices resonate with each other and come together in a tapestry that depicts the most irresistible arena of life.

 The movie is adapted to feature Morgan Freeman, the philosophy professor, and sex. Freeman is, of course, wonderful. It is not a demanding role, and he hits a double with ease. Maybe a triple. No, a double. The rest of the film is a bunch of singles. The film works, yes, but the sex is gratuitous and overdone.

A feel-good film, and a not so good one

Watched a couple of films this past weekend. The feel-good one was "The Republic of Love," directed by Deepa Mehta (who directed a film I watched last weekend and adored, Water). It was a simply cute and fun movie, decidedly a different turn than Water (which she actually made before this one). The not-so-good one was Michael Clayton, with George Clooney: had Clooney not been in it, it wouldn't have worked as well as he mad eit work, and I might've turned it off.

Republic was a story of two people unlucky in love: Tom Avery is a late-night disc jockey who has been previously married (tow, maybe three times), who goes to a support group, and who, when he does have sex, never quites enjoys it. Fay is (supposedly) trapped into impossibly-high expectations by the (supposedly) perfect marriage of her parents. Eventually they meet, and fall in love, Tom much more heavily then Fay. The twists, turns and permutations are funny; I adored the film. Well, adored it too strong, for I adored Water; I really liked Republic. I enjoyed watching it, I was touched by the romance, and I wished the movie was longer.

Clayton, on the other hand, was difficult to like. There were too many subtles twists, too-low voices, and it only worked because George Clooney is such a good actor.