bookmark_borderReview: Gone Girl

Just finished reading “Gone Girl“. It sticks in my mind, and I’m not sure why, so I’m going to see if I can figure it out.

One element about it; it strikes close to the balance that I’ve been striving for between literary and genre. Decent writing, decent characters, decent plot, and characters and plot titillating enough to carry casual readers.

Blog posts in the category

But writers have always found ways around that, most easily by giving some distance to their POV to allow the writer to speak to the reader about elements that the character may not notice. This book’s lack of  detail seems to be the writer’s style or a selected perspective to match the story being told.

To support that theory there are are many elements of superficiality and of emphasis between the surface and deeper realities, especially when the husband tells us that he’s lying to other characters, thereby hiding something from us as well. And one of the topics is media and public perception, meaning more looks at differing layers of reality. Maybe the lack of detail is a means of presenting the superficiality of modern society, or of presenting the thinness of the world as a metaphor for this. Or the self-absorption of the characters is just a normal aspect of modern society.

Salon writer Laura Miller thinks highly of the book and thinks it was snubbed for prize consideration because of its genre elements. I find this surprising because I don’t see that it has the qualifications for book of the year types of consideration. What “Gone Girl” makes me think of is a long, detailed episode of “Criminal Minds”.  That’s not to say television writing is never good or that I don’t enjoy watching an episode of “Criminal Minds”, but it doesn’t try to achieve the level of award winning novels.

The more I think about it, the self-absorption of the characters is annoying. Both have excuses; one is a sociopath, the other is suspected of murder. The author, Gillian Flynn, was recently married when she wrote this book. I don’t expect either she or her husband to be sociopaths, but I hope their view of the world and of marriage is not so narrow.

 

 

bookmark_borderMy Recent Reads

So, with the help of my library’s on-line search and my cell phone’s list of downloads I think I’ve managed to collect a list of all the books I’ve read or listened to on the phone during the past fifteen months. In order of author:

1 The Big Sleep – Farewell, My Love… Chandler, Raymond
2 The Antagonist Coady, Lynn
3 Open City – A Novel Cole, Teju
4 The Privileges – A Novel Dee, Jonathan
5 The Maytrees – [a Novel] Dillard, Annie
6 Billy Bathgate – A Novel Doctorow, E. L.
7 Landing Donoghue, Emma
8 Room – A Novel Donoghue, Emma
9 Touchy Subjects – Stories Donoghue, Emma
10 Half-blood Blues Edugyan, Esi
11 A Visit from the Goon Squad Egan, Jennifer
12 Better Living through Plastic Explosives – Stories Gartner, Zsuzsi
13 P Is for Peril Grafton, Sue
14 R Is for Ricochet Grafton, Sue
15 S Is for Silence Grafton, Sue
16 Waiting Jin, Ha
17 The Poisonwood Bible – A Novel Kingsolver, Barbara
18 Bloodletting & Miraculous Cures – Stories Lam, Vincent
19 The Surrendered Lee, Chang-rae
20 Darkness, Take My Hand Lehane, Dennis
21 Darkly Dreaming Dexter – A Novel Lindsay, Jeffry P.
22 Dearly Devoted Dexter – A Novel Lindsay, Jeffry P.
23 Dexter in the Dark – A Novel Lindsay, Jeffry P.
24 Double Dexter – A Novel Lindsay, Jeffry P.
25 I Am Number Four – The Lost Files : … Lore, Pittacus
26 The Bishop’s Man – A Novel MacIntyre, Linden
27 The Bright Forever – A Novel Martin, Lee
28 1Q84 Murakami, Haruki
29 Divisadero Ondaatje, Michael
30 A Catskill Eagle – A Spenser Novel Parker, Robert B.
31 I Curse the River of Time Petterson, Per
32 The Echo Maker Powers, Richard
33 Nemesis Roth, Philip
34 Swamplandia! Russell, Karen
35 Wake Sawyer, Robert J.
36 The Lovely Bones Sebold, Alice
37 Shakespeare’s Kitchen – Stories Segal, Lore Groszmann
38 The Collected Stories Shields, Carol
39 The Stone Diaries Shields, Carol
40 Unless – A Novel Shields, Carol
41 Various Miracles Shields, Carol
42 Stargirl Spinelli, Jerry
43 Amy and Isabelle – A Novel Strout, Elizabeth
44 Olive Kitteridge Strout, Elizabeth
45 The Accidental Tourist Tyler, Anne

I’m a fan of the TV show Dexter, obviously. The novels and the show exist in two separate realities, so I read the novels to get more Dexter fix. Sue Grafton I’m not a huge fan of; I’ve read others in the series and I picked up a few to remind me of her writing style. And there are a few YA books in the collection when I looked into the genre a bit.

Many of these are novels (it says so right in the title!) and many simply plucked from lists; Pulitzer, Giller and Man Booker nominees. As mentioned in the previous post, I look for reliable suggestions for reading material.

Plus, I have a list of those that I didn’t finish:

1 The Plague of Doves Erdrich, Louise
2 The Secret Scripture Barry, Sebastian
3 The Writing Circle Demas, Corinne
4 Family Matters Mistry, Rohinton
5 The Confessions of Nat Turner Styron, William
6 Lit – A Memoir Karr, Mary
7 Mercy among the Children Richards, David Adams
8 Close Range – Wyoming Stories Proulx, Annie

Both lists are all ebooks or audiobooks, and doesn’t include books printed on paper (! the stuff referred to as “recycling material” on a podcast today), so on top of those there are a bunch of non-fiction books on writing as well as at least one novel I can think of: “The Hunger Games”, speed-read over a weekend, borrowed from high school student. Oh, plus a little ways into “The Pale King”, David Foster Wallace. Even in paper form that was more than I could work my way through, at least at the time. I plan to give it another shot at some later date.

Still, that’s a decent average speed, I think. The Dexter and Grafton and YA and other light ones I finish in a couple of days of reading, and most of the rest in two weeks or so.

The non-finishers are an interesting group; “Lit” was good reading, but I read it sporadically for the author’s style and ability to put words and sentences and paragraphs together, and less for the memoir story; I wasn’t concerned when it expired. “The Writing Circle” is so mediocre that I couldn’t bring myself to finish it.

The others seem to have in common a sweeping family/race tale covering a number of years, and they all lost my interest. But “The Poisonwood Bible” and “Half-blood Blues” and “The Stone Diaries” might also fall into those categories and I liked those quite a bit. Maybe there’s a dryness to the others that I couldn’t connect to, a dryness in the writing and/or in the characters. “Mercy among the Children” is the only one I really tried to finish, but the reverence the author had for his story and for his character became distasteful after a while; he seemed to think the main character was heroic, tragic, almost Jesus-like. I just found him pathetic and sad.

bookmark_borderReview: Visitor Q (Originally Bijitâ Q)

Dysfunctional family, healed with the help of an outside visitor. Sound like a good storyline?

Now, how dysfunctional can you make the characters, both as family members and as individuals? How about using prostitution, and incest? How about combining the two so that the incest comes about when the daughter is charging the father for the sex, including a surcharge for cumming too early? Is that too wierd? Wait, it gets better. Throw in some family violence. The son, who is being bullied regularly by some boys his own age, verbally and physically abuses his mother while the father ignores them and continues to eat his dinner. Toss in some more prostitution and add in some sexual violence when the mother needs to earn money to support her drug addiction and her client asks her to whip him with his belt. And voyeurism. The father is a failed television newscaster and films himself and his family constantly. He films himself having sex with his prostitute daughter, films his son being bullied and films as his house is attacked by the bullies brandishing fireworks. He has the unknown visitor do the filming while he rapes and kills a former newscast partner when she refuses to partake in the filming of the bullying of the son. Add in some necrophilia when the father takes the body home to dismember but finds himself getting excited. Add some scat when the dead woman’s bowels release while the father is having sex with her dead body. Put in some more violence and indignities to human bodies when the father and mother kill the boys who have been bullying the son and add the three bodies to the woman’s body and begin to dismember them as a family project. And this comes after the mother has rescued the father’s penis from being trapped by rigor mortis in the dead woman’s body by giving the father a shot of heroin.

But wait, the family is saved. The visitor has shown the mother how to lactate and is seen filming her from under an umbrella while she squirts, eventually covering the entire kitchen floor. The son find solace by lying face down in the pool of lactated milk. The wayward daughter comes home to discover the father suckling at the mother’s breast and she joins in at the other breast.

Apparently director Takashi Mike is well known for films in the horror genre, but that’s not something that I’m into so I’m not familiar with his name or work. That background, though, would explain where he gets comfortable with dealing with subjects that are extreme and over the top. Without familiarity with his work I don’t know whether he always ties his stories together with underlying meaning as he does here.

IMDB reviewers were mixed. Some couldn’t take the extremes, others loved it, and some found the movie hilarious. It’s not my cup of tea, but it certainly was interesting.

bookmark_borderReview: “Zoe Busiek: Wild Card”, the Ceiling of Mediocrity

I watch very little television these days. I do have a television in the bedroom though, and today I woke up an hour early and turned on the TV to see what was on. Between morning newscasts I found something intriguing on W Network. Googling it helped me to discover that the program is called “Zoe Busiek: Wild Card” and that it ran from 2003 to 2005 on Lifetime.

What was so intriguing to me about this program is how consistently mediocre the quality of everything is. The acting is, mediocre. The filming is, mediocre. The writing is, mediocre. It was great! It was as if the entire budget, crew, performers, everything had a ceiling of mediocrity and nothing could extend beyond. Joely Fisher (lead, daughter of Eddie Fisher and Connie Stevens, half sister of Carrie Fisher) has okay legs, so let’s show them. Put her in short skirts. Chris Potter as Dan, the male co-star, is good but not great looking in a bland, Bruce Boxlietner kind of way. Give him some standard “strong male” lines and situations. “Where is everybody?” he calls out, slamming his hands on the desk at the unattended hospital entrance. A security guard happens to run up just as they happen to see the bad guy on the security camera in the basement. “Lock down the building, please,” he orders the guard as they run off, knowing exactly how to get to the area close to where the bad guy has the girl in the wheelchair that he’s planning to kill.

In a simply amazing scene the two stars are running in the basement calling the name of the girl (won’t the bad guy hear too?). They hear a muffled cry and turn. There is the girl, her IV bottle taped to her mouth (Why is she not dead? Earlier he was going to suffocate her with a pillow until he was interrupted by a nurse. Now he thinks that stuffing her IV in her mouth is enough?). Zoe hastens to free her, and Bruce, I mean Dan, runs off to chase the bad guy. We see Bad Guy picking up a piece of metal pipe that happens to be lying on an otherwise spotless floor under the water lines. Hot pipes and escaping steam are all around. Oh no, Dan is wandering close to Bad Guy! Bad Guy is raising his arms with the pipe! Camera cuts to Zoe, turning a large faucet, the type that control high pressure systems like fire hoses. (How did she get there? How does she know that Bad Guy is right ahead of Dan when Dan doesn’t see him?). Phssst, and hot steam sprays in the face of Bad Guy, who falls to the floor (Why does turning the faucet let out steam in the face of Bad Guy? And how does she know it will?). “Are you okay?” asks Zoe, “I thought I needed to let off some steam.” Groan.

Simply amazing. Action scenes like this are often given short shrift in drama oriented writing but in “Zoe Busiek: Wild Card” the rest of the writing is also mediocre. Zoe knocks on her boss’ door suggesting a drink after work. Her boss asks if they are getting chummy now. Zoe says yes. Boss (female, new to the series and had earlier stated after some personal disclosure that sharing time was over) immediately opens a drawer in her desk and pulls out a bottle and two glasses. Zoe, swaggering and grinning as if she’s already had a few, flops herself on the chair (open door, glass office windows, but I guess everyone else has gone home?) and they share a drink of something. Whew, that barrier’s been broken now.

Television is not known for quality art. Still, “Scarecrow and Mrs. King” was at least professional. It didn’t feel like expert mediocre producers trying to get in under budget by hiring the cheapest writers/actors/cameramen/directors. Once in a while in “Zoe Busiek: Wild Card” you almost feel one or the other actors trying to rise above but no, the ceiling is there and they aren’t escaping. It’s somehow both amusing and comforting to see them try and then watch them sink back into the pool of mediocrity. Like watching your local sports team, the one that your neighbor’s cousin once played for. You keep following them and watching their games in spite of the fact that they haven’t made the playoffs in ten years. When they miss the playoffs again, you are comforted. Everything is the way it should be in the world.

bookmark_borderReview: The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo

Finally managed to watch this movie. Very nice. Does not fall into all the standard expected story tracks as it progresses.

There were moments, like when Lisbeth Salander is forced to give her guardian a blow job, where I was hoping for a plot element like that she had a wire, but she didn’t. Then she goes back to him a third time with a video recorder. But this time it’s at his apartment and he goes much further, punching her, handcuffing her to his bed, and raping her. Maybe this is more realistic, that a victim who is not a secret agent or detective might not be prepared with a wire the second time but needs to go back a third time to try to trap the abuser. It did allow the story to go to a much higher level of violence. Oddly, after this she’s shown bleeding and sore with a hugely swollen lip, but when she goes back to get her revenge her face is perfectly recovered. I would have liked to have seen some damage still in recovery.

But I loved Noomi Rapace’s arms. Veeery buff. And I liked her intensity playing her character. Apparently there is an English remake being filmed with Rooney Mara playing the role but I don’t see how she’s going to match that intensity.

Maybe simply because it’s not North American Hollywood the movie doesn’t fall into a lot of cliches or standard plots, but I liked that. And I didn’t realize that in Sweden you can wait six months before serving a three month jail sentence? And that during those six months you can fly out of the country to Australia?

The movie is part of a trilogy which is connected with a six part television series. I’m going to have to see the other two now, and before the remake comes out.

bookmark_borderWriting analysis: Blue Roses, by Francis Hwang

Review of “Blue Roses” by Francis Hwang
Published in “The New Yorker” November 1, 2010.


SUMMARY:

Chinese mother feels that her children don’t appreciate her and take from her without giving in return. She becomes angry with her closest daughter when the daughter is unwilling to invite the mother’s widowed friend to Christmas dinner. The mother refuses to go to the dinner, causing a crisis in the family. She admits that the friend is difficult and has odd mannerisms. The friend uses the mother as a driver to go to the grocery store and later to go to the doctor. The friend refuses to go to the hospital as ordered by her doctor but the mother manipulates the friend into acquiescing and forces the friend’s absent daughter to come to the hospital.

My reasons for doing writing analysis:


Lin Fanghui is intelligent, somewhat self-aware, and helpful. She can also be petty, hold a grudge, be stubborn, and can tally up the wrongs and favors that have accumulated over the years. She feels under-appreciated, taken advantage of, and sometimes misunderstood by her children. This Christmas she takes a stand to make her point.

What drew me to this story is the difficult central character, Lin Fanghui. It’s easier to write about a good-hearted person in terrible circumstances or a person who has but a single flaw. It’s more challenging to have a protagonist that people might see as unsympathetic. And it’s even more interesting to write from the first person singular and to look the world from inside that character’s head, to be forced to listen to the complaints and petty reactions that run through that character’s mind. A Google search for this story returned a blog that discusses the stories in the New Yorker and a comment from a reader who found the whining unacceptable.

Some of the conflict is standard inter-generational dissonance and might occur between any mother and her grown children, but the manner in which it is expressed seems uniquely Chinese or at least Asian. From her arguments with her son, “When he doesn’t do what I ask, I tell him he comes from a bad egg.” The reader gets multiple explanations for the source of her Christmas grievance, from lifting her daughter’s skirts high above dirty public toilet seats, remembered to herself, to the master-to-servant attitude of her son in law relieving her from babysitting as explained to her husband. My favorite is the rambling, vague explanation she tries to give to her other daughter:

“I don’t understand why you’re so mad at her.”

“It seems a small thing to you. But not to me.”

“Don’t you think you’re blowing this out of proportion? Eileen would have invited your friend if she knew you’d react like this. She just didn’t think it was a big deal.”

“That’s what upsets me!”

“What?”

“She never thinks how I feel. No big deal, right?”

Elizabeth gave an exasperated sigh.

“What I’d like to know is what nice thing has she done from me lately?”

Elizabeth reflected. “What about the sweater she gave you for your birthday?”

“I can always buy myself a sweater,” I said. “Why can’t she think bigger?”

“You mean something more expensive?”

“Your cousin doesn’t have money like Eileen, but she and her husband bought her father a used Mercedes. Your father and I were impressed. It’s not that I expect a used Mercedes from you. If fact don’t ever give a car that is used, O.K.? I’m just saying that there are some gifts that involve sacrifice, you see what I mean?”

Elizabeth brooded on this. “If we don’t give you extravagant gifts, it’s because we know you can always buy something better for yourself. So what’s the point?”

“I’m just saying the gesture would be nice. After all we’ve done for you kids. Do you have to pay back any student loans, like your friends? Do you see any other parents still paying their daughters’ rent?” Elizabeth pressed her lips together, her face darkening. “What I hate is that you all suffer from amnesia. If I give you a loan, you don’t pay  it back. I have to remind you. It’s not that I care about the money. It’s the principle. Whenever I want something, I have to tell you. I’m sick of it. None of my children ever think or remember.”

A typical parent-to-child or children complaint perhaps. It’s a difficult complaint to try to convey and I like the way the author has Lin struggle with it. She starts with her feelings being disregarded, uses the example of the Mercedes, then clarifies that she doesn’t want a Mercedes, that it’s just an example (and not wanting a used car points out her own elitism), goes to a related issue of loans and financing (and apparently she does want the loans repaid or at least some acknowledgment of the debt), and then returns to the original overall point about being taken for granted and not being appreciated. She does succeed in conveying her the source of her unhappiness to Elizabeth well enough that Elizabeth reports this to the rest of the family at the Christmas dinner.

Lin has a childish belligerence (to her four year old granddaughter who has just stopped crying she says “I am sadder than you. Your mother is coming back in an hour. My mother has disappeared for good.”) and a cold stubbornness (she swerves around her husband and drives over the lawn, watching Eileen collapse to her knees as her mother escapes). She also has some degree of self-awareness. While driving her friend Wang she notes that “Before I could stop myself, I apologized as well”, and near the end of the story she reflects, “I found myself longing for the day when she would be well enough to vex me. Perhaps, in the end, we need these small daily irritants, a bit of sediment in our mouths, to keep life interesting.” Very Woody Allen-like and similar to his joke about eggs at the end of the movie “Annie Hall”. For me it’s a stretch to accept all these bristly traits and actions combined with the self-reflection. Somehow these truths need to be expressed and the alternatives are for the author to step outside and use the third person perspective or to have the truths slip out unintended. The author has chosen to let them be a part of the protagonist’s ability, but doing so leads me to the question of why can’t Lin see some of her other faults or why can’t she deal with them more effectively?

# # #

Less interesting for me is the other part of the story that focuses on the friendship with Wang Peisan. This story has more bulk, more words than the part of the story about the family but it’s difficult for me to see what is interesting about Wang or about the friendship. Wang does offer words of appreciation that Lin does not receive from her children but she also demands more effort and time. At one point Lin vows never to take Wang shopping again; “Though Wang Peisan was a small woman, I could not handle her.”

She feels sympathy for the small widow who, like herself, has a daughter that does not seem to appreciate her. But beyond sympathy, and perhaps an Asian sense of duty, I don’t get a sense of what keeps Lin in Wang’s life. Maybe she’s trading one set of irritants for another? Or adding another set because the first one has been cleansed somewhat and is becoming a smaller part of her life as her children grow away from her? She says of her husband’s dislike of Wang “Like everyone else, he thought Wang Peisan a terrible nuisance, but his saying that made me think that he did not have a good heart.” Perhaps a “good heart” is high on Lin’s list of moral imperatives. And somewhere there is a connection between the fairy tales that Wang wanted to write, with Wang’s interest in dreams, and with Lin’s lack of interest in her own dreams which changes at the very end, but the point of this thread eludes me.

Structurally the storyline with Wang is useful. It provides a second theme that relates to the first while providing more background on Lin. Hwang switches back and forth between the two stories, working them like an ABAB structure in a piece of music, ending with a coda which also goes AB. Like second themes in music this story provides contrast and a chance to create some space in the presentation of the main theme by interrupting it momentarily.

# # #

Later edit: Something that I realized later is how Lin’s intelligence is necessary for Hwang to be able to write in the first person. If Lin is not intelligent and self aware to some degree, then Hwang, writing from behind Lin’s mind, cannot point out important information because the central character would be oblivious.  This makes me think of Flannery O’Connor’s “Revelation” where the central character “should know better” and eventually does have a revelation. Still, having the central character be aware enough to note relevant events and still be unable to deal with some of her shortcomings leaves a bit of a gap, for me at least.

bookmark_borderReview and thoughts; Memoirs of a Geisha

I don’t read a lot of books when they first come out, I don’t see a lot of movies in theaters or even when they first arrive in DVD format. It could be that I don’t like being part of a crowd, or that I like things to stand a little test of time before I spend the money and time required, but more likely it’s just that I’m lazy and slow.

🙂

So finally I’ve watched “Memoirs of a Geisha”. The movie is fine, the story okay, but what I really liked was 1) the moves of Mameha, top geisha from a rival house, to support the principle character’s rise partly for the good of the industry as a whole, and even more, 2) the character of the villain, Hatsumomo, and her portrayal by Gong Li.

Hatsumomo is so unhappy. She is one of the top geisha in the city but she is in love and is not allowed to be, and she knows that she will never be successor to the house that she works for and for whom is earning money for. In other words, she has only half a present, and no future. Who wouldn’t be unhappy in this situation?

In addition to being unhappy she is also arrogant, impudent,  as well as very beautiful and talented in a field where adoration and power are keys. It’s no wonder given her circumstances and personality that she is also very bitter. That bitterness and conflict gives her a fragility and I’m somewhat surprised that she only breaks down to be mean to the principle character, and then only when her hopes and expectations of placing her little sister as a puppet successor to the house are destroyed does she fall apart.

As a character she makes me think of Blanche Dubois, from “A Streetcar Named Desire”. The fragile-ness, the importance of attention from men, the scheming for the future that she shares with Blanche make her story and her character much more interesting and attractive to me than the principle character.

bookmark_borderReview/reaction: The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie

Haven’t seen the movie version yet, but I read a reference to the book in an issue of the New Yorker a few months ago and realized that I should read the book. I requested a copy from the library but it took so long to arrive that I forgot my request until the book arrived last week.

For me it’s an odd little book, very well written, with characters that are all a little lost and confused (as are we all). Jean Brodie is an eccentric character, fully aware that she is out of place but believing that she needs to remain there for the good of her girls. She has a persecution attitude, she feels she needs to be constantly vigilant against threats because she know that the headmistress would like to find a way to force her to leave. At the same time she is also fully unaware of her own faults, the threats she poses to her students, her own immorality (convincing a student to fight for Franco, manipulating a selected student to sleep with a married teacher in her place), her own shortcomings.

But I know little about Catholicism or Calvinism so the author’s comparisons and metaphors (pointed out to me after doing some internet searches) went over my head.

The use of time perspectives, flashing forward and back, is excellent. It serves a purpose, it’s never unclear, it doesn’t detract from the flow of the story, and it allows us to see the circumstances of the principle time frame from a multitude of time perspectives. Normally we can see the story from the perspective of different characters within the story but here we get to see the story from the perspective of those characters and from different time frames which magnifies the depth to which we can view the situations. For me this is one of the most excellent aspects of the book; I can’t think of an example where differing time perspectives are used so well and add so much value to the story.

bookmark_borderReactions to watching “Brokeback Mountain”

Recently we bought a new DVD player and with it came a month of free DVD rentals. The first movie that we chose is “Brokeback Mountain”. I’m sure that everyone knows what separates this movie from all other mainstream successful movies; gay cowboys.

I don’t think that I’m a prude, for the most part at least. I have gay and lesbian and bisexual friends, co-workers, associates, though no family members that I know of. I also don’t have much of an issue watching gay/lesbian/bi porn, so I was surprised at the degree to which the intimate scenes in “Brokeback” were difficult for me to watch. The first difficult scene was when they touch each others faces with the backs of their fingers. They weren’t even kissing or touching each others genitals or anything but it was so obviously intimate and sexual that I was pretty uncomfortable.

I’m still reflecting on this days later and what I’m realizing is that it’s not the sex or implied sex or intimacy that bothers me, rather, it’s the assumption on my part that neither actor is gay or bisexual and that these scenes are entirely acting. For some reason I automatically and immediately put myself in the actor’s shoes and thought, I couldn’t bring myself to do that. (By contrast it’s possible that I assume that porn actors are actually gay/lesbian/bi or even hetro as depicted in their sex scenes, even though the likelihood of them not being so inclined and that they are doing so only for the money is probably a lot higher than is the case for mainstream actors.)

Why is this? I’ve done a little acting in the past but very little. Is it some subconscious identification that goes on constantly whenever I watch a movie, and it’s only because of the intensity of my reaction that I become aware of it in this case?  I think this is a possibility. I also have a decent fear of heights and if I think that a person on the screen, in this case more likely a documentary person or a clip on the news, is actually dangling from a building or the side of a mountain and the camera gives a good shot of it, that’ll get a reaction out of me as well.

So this identification with the presumed reality of dangling off a building, being trapped underwater, or the “reality” behind the actor’s words and actions seems to be quite a bit deeper and stronger than the presented “reality” of the movie. What does this mean for me as a writer of fiction? Most good fiction has at least some basis in reality. It’s probably an indicator that I need to maintain some connection with reality in order to generate a story that moves me.

bookmark_borderAn Ideal Husband

I admit to not being much of a movie watcher in the past few years, and though I’ve been involved on a board level with a small theater festival for a while it’s been years and years since I’ve seen classic theater.

So the other day I was flipping through the television channels I happened across a movie that I found interesting. I didn’t know whether it was a relatively new movie, an oldish movie, a movie written recently (period English costuming obviously from well back and riding on horseback and in carriages) or a movie made from an old book. Since I’ve been re-reading “Pride and Prejudice” I was particularly curious and found both the acting and the storyline of the movie quite decent.

So I watched to the end and picked out some names from the credits, went to the internet and discovered that the movie was “An Ideal Husband” from 1999, based on an Oscar Wilde play and starring some names that I recognize; Cate Blanchett, Julianne Moore, Minnie Driver (that I didn’t recognize their faces is an indication how little I watch movies). Ah, I thought, that explains the quality of the writing as well as the light tone of the play. Then, thinking back, it also explained the emphasis on witty lines.

I don’t know much Oscar Wilde but he was definitely a quality writer. It’s reassuring, and probably self-congratulatory, to find something that you believe to be quality to turn out to be written by a an accepted master.

Now I missed some parts so I’m not entirely qualified to judge, but I don’t see how at the very end when the wife admits, almost as a hiccup, that she lied, and this hiccup is enough to make her husband smile and immediately change his mind about his friend even though he was dead set against the friend marrying the sister moments before. And speaking of which I also didn’t see much in the way of a reason for the friend and sister to come together. Perhaps I expected too much in the way of Austen-like sniping at each other to set up the ending change of heart but the attraction felt a little hollow to me.

I suppose I should read the play to see how much of the weakness is the result of the adaptation to the movie setting but unfortunately I’ve got too much on my plate these days.