Book Recs/Movie Recs, 12/8/09
Tuesday, December 8th, 2009 03:39 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
retsukoIn Books:
The Elegance of the Hedgehog, by Muriel Barbery & The Housekeeper and the Professor, by Yoko Ogawa: These two separate books just happened to come into my life at the same time, and they're a marvelous pair, entirely well suited to one another in theme and writing style. Both of them are about the bonds and significance of human connection, and the price people pay for hiding their true selves and their talents away from others.
The Elegance of the Hedgehog: Two main characters, Renee Michel and Paloma Josse, alternately narrate the story of a Paris apartment house and its residents. Renee Michel is the concierge who has a secret: she is intelligent and loves to read philosophy and literature, but hides her intelligence from the residents, afraid of their judgment. Paloma Josse is the daughter of one of the families, a bored and witty 12-year-old who secretly plans her suicide because she thinks life has already shown her what it has to offer. Both Renee and Paloma despise the intellectual affectations of the other residents, thinking that intellectual pretentiousness is the cardinal sin of the truly stupid. But underneath all these thoughts are two very lonely people trying to come out of their self-built shells, and the revelations concerning this coming out are touching and sweet.
"...beauty consists in its own passing, just as we reach for it. It's the ephemeral configuration of things in the moment, when you can see both their beauty and their death. Oh my gosh, I thought, does this mean that this is how we must live our lives? Constantly poised between beauty and death, between movement and its disappearance? Maybe that's what being alive is all about: so we can track down those moments that are dying."
The Housekeeper and the Professor: An unnamed housekeeper goes to work for a brilliant mathematics professor who, due to a terrible accident years before, has a memory that only lasts 80 minutes. The professor communicates through numbers and small notes pinned to his suits, nicknaming the housekeeper's son 'Root' because he has a flat head, like a square root sign. The three of them form a small, informal family unit and attempt to maintain the illusion of normalcy. Ogawa's writing style is sweet and simple. There's great love for her characters, and the characters show great love for one another, each in their way, which changes as the story progresses. It's a pleasing effect, and the mathematical equations that appear throughout the story are beautifully integrated into the narrative. A quiet read, but it evokes a certain sense of place and peacefulness.
In Movies:
Precious: Not an "easy" movie by any means, Precious is a contentious knot of horrific but transformative character-driven story, strange lighting, and political backlash. The easiest thing to talk about is the strange lighting, which kept weirding me out through the entire film--at times, the movie seems to have been shot with the wrong color filter over the lens. Scenes that should have been vivid (like the streets of Harlem, or the classroom where Precious ends up making her greatest personal strides) instead looked like they'd been made up of faded construction paper and shot on old film. Then there's the oddly religious lighting that Precious' teacher, Ms. Rain, is surrounded by: from the lighting, she has a halo, like an angel on a Christmas card. And while she's undoubtedly an angelic figure for Precious, it's too bad that the filmmakers felt that the audience wouldn't understand this idea without the overly strange lighting.
In some ways, this story needs no special effects or overly dramatic lighting: the bones of the ideas behind it are enough by themselves. Clarice Precious Jones lives a lonely life, devoid of friendship and love, with her physically and emotionally abusive mother. Precious' father has gotten her pregnant not once, but twice. Precious is 16 years old. Her main escape is a series of fantasies where she is a star, desired and loved for who she is. Her transformation from victimized innocent to whole person is chronicled in exhaustive and explicit detail. It's not at all easy to watch, particularly with a plot twist that comes along late in the film. But it's worth everything to see Precious consciously decide not to replicate the circumstances that twisted her mother into a ghost of a person, consumed by bitterness, hatred, and ignorance.
Precious' mother... Mo'Nique certainly deserves an Oscar for her performance. That said, I don't think I've been repulsed so thoroughly by any character in any narrative in years. One of her actions provoked such a reaction from the audience that I thought that people would start throwing things at the screen. I couldn't look away, but I really wanted to.
Politically speaking, the backlash against this movie has been harsh; I wonder if the backlash against the book the movie was based on was as strong or as polarizing.
Alice: This sci-fi (sorry, Syfy) channel mini-series/movie-chopped-into-little-parts was like a really good role-playing game run by a bad storyteller: the ideas were all there, and some of them were awesome, but the actual execution of the whole thing was substandard, and, frankly, rather boring. Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass are both compelling narratives, but they've been retold in myriad forms already, and the ideas in this version of Alice didn't add anything to the original. An example of this is the Red Queen's (ably played by Kathy Bates) line about being the greatest female character in all of literature. Whoa, that's not just breaking the fourth wall, that's setting fire to it and dancing around the burning remains whilst chanting anti-Fourth-Wall slogans! I thought this would become an important theme of the story, but it was never referred to again, sadly. Also sad was the fight choreography--Alice was supposed to be a black belt in some martial art (karate, maybe), but from the way the fights were edited and staged, it was clear that the actress had learnt only a few moves and rehearsed them over and over again. A true black belt would make it look easy; she made it look hard. And the sad thing is--again!--that an Alice who can fight and hold her own is a great idea, but the execution of that idea was disappointing. (Especially with such a cute and practical costume! So annoying!) So, uhm, yeah. Not a lot of love for this Alice, although I think with another few edits to the script and some more money, it would make a decent episodic TV show.
The Elegance of the Hedgehog, by Muriel Barbery & The Housekeeper and the Professor, by Yoko Ogawa: These two separate books just happened to come into my life at the same time, and they're a marvelous pair, entirely well suited to one another in theme and writing style. Both of them are about the bonds and significance of human connection, and the price people pay for hiding their true selves and their talents away from others.
The Elegance of the Hedgehog: Two main characters, Renee Michel and Paloma Josse, alternately narrate the story of a Paris apartment house and its residents. Renee Michel is the concierge who has a secret: she is intelligent and loves to read philosophy and literature, but hides her intelligence from the residents, afraid of their judgment. Paloma Josse is the daughter of one of the families, a bored and witty 12-year-old who secretly plans her suicide because she thinks life has already shown her what it has to offer. Both Renee and Paloma despise the intellectual affectations of the other residents, thinking that intellectual pretentiousness is the cardinal sin of the truly stupid. But underneath all these thoughts are two very lonely people trying to come out of their self-built shells, and the revelations concerning this coming out are touching and sweet.
"...beauty consists in its own passing, just as we reach for it. It's the ephemeral configuration of things in the moment, when you can see both their beauty and their death. Oh my gosh, I thought, does this mean that this is how we must live our lives? Constantly poised between beauty and death, between movement and its disappearance? Maybe that's what being alive is all about: so we can track down those moments that are dying."
The Housekeeper and the Professor: An unnamed housekeeper goes to work for a brilliant mathematics professor who, due to a terrible accident years before, has a memory that only lasts 80 minutes. The professor communicates through numbers and small notes pinned to his suits, nicknaming the housekeeper's son 'Root' because he has a flat head, like a square root sign. The three of them form a small, informal family unit and attempt to maintain the illusion of normalcy. Ogawa's writing style is sweet and simple. There's great love for her characters, and the characters show great love for one another, each in their way, which changes as the story progresses. It's a pleasing effect, and the mathematical equations that appear throughout the story are beautifully integrated into the narrative. A quiet read, but it evokes a certain sense of place and peacefulness.
In Movies:
Precious: Not an "easy" movie by any means, Precious is a contentious knot of horrific but transformative character-driven story, strange lighting, and political backlash. The easiest thing to talk about is the strange lighting, which kept weirding me out through the entire film--at times, the movie seems to have been shot with the wrong color filter over the lens. Scenes that should have been vivid (like the streets of Harlem, or the classroom where Precious ends up making her greatest personal strides) instead looked like they'd been made up of faded construction paper and shot on old film. Then there's the oddly religious lighting that Precious' teacher, Ms. Rain, is surrounded by: from the lighting, she has a halo, like an angel on a Christmas card. And while she's undoubtedly an angelic figure for Precious, it's too bad that the filmmakers felt that the audience wouldn't understand this idea without the overly strange lighting.
In some ways, this story needs no special effects or overly dramatic lighting: the bones of the ideas behind it are enough by themselves. Clarice Precious Jones lives a lonely life, devoid of friendship and love, with her physically and emotionally abusive mother. Precious' father has gotten her pregnant not once, but twice. Precious is 16 years old. Her main escape is a series of fantasies where she is a star, desired and loved for who she is. Her transformation from victimized innocent to whole person is chronicled in exhaustive and explicit detail. It's not at all easy to watch, particularly with a plot twist that comes along late in the film. But it's worth everything to see Precious consciously decide not to replicate the circumstances that twisted her mother into a ghost of a person, consumed by bitterness, hatred, and ignorance.
Precious' mother... Mo'Nique certainly deserves an Oscar for her performance. That said, I don't think I've been repulsed so thoroughly by any character in any narrative in years. One of her actions provoked such a reaction from the audience that I thought that people would start throwing things at the screen. I couldn't look away, but I really wanted to.
Politically speaking, the backlash against this movie has been harsh; I wonder if the backlash against the book the movie was based on was as strong or as polarizing.
Alice: This sci-fi (sorry, Syfy) channel mini-series/movie-chopped-into-little-parts was like a really good role-playing game run by a bad storyteller: the ideas were all there, and some of them were awesome, but the actual execution of the whole thing was substandard, and, frankly, rather boring. Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass are both compelling narratives, but they've been retold in myriad forms already, and the ideas in this version of Alice didn't add anything to the original. An example of this is the Red Queen's (ably played by Kathy Bates) line about being the greatest female character in all of literature. Whoa, that's not just breaking the fourth wall, that's setting fire to it and dancing around the burning remains whilst chanting anti-Fourth-Wall slogans! I thought this would become an important theme of the story, but it was never referred to again, sadly. Also sad was the fight choreography--Alice was supposed to be a black belt in some martial art (karate, maybe), but from the way the fights were edited and staged, it was clear that the actress had learnt only a few moves and rehearsed them over and over again. A true black belt would make it look easy; she made it look hard. And the sad thing is--again!--that an Alice who can fight and hold her own is a great idea, but the execution of that idea was disappointing. (Especially with such a cute and practical costume! So annoying!) So, uhm, yeah. Not a lot of love for this Alice, although I think with another few edits to the script and some more money, it would make a decent episodic TV show.
