Girl Detective

It was with some trepidation that I bought tickets for the Guthrie’s staging of Shakespeare’s Henry V. Branagh’s 1990 film is a favorite of mine; I think I saw it a half dozen times in the theater. And I was underwhelmed by the last two productions I saw at the Guthrie: A Midsummer Night’s Dream and Jane Eyre. So I was more than pleasantly surprised to discover that this production, by The Acting Company/Guthrie Theater, was a treat.

This play, with multiple addresses to the audience exhorting them to imagine, was well set in the black-box Dowling Studio. The staging was spare but effective: a two-story semicircle with moving walls, and a few rolling tables that doubled as props and sound makers. All actors but the lead played multiple parts, from two to five. Matthew Amendt, as Henry V, can be forgiven for not doubling; he was in almost every scene of the 2 hour, 50 minute play. His youth and good looks suited him for the part, and though he struggled a bit with the Welsh accent and had a tendency to over-enunciate, his delivery and presence were a good match for the charismatic new king. The rest of the cast, moving in and out of parts, and throughout various iteratrions of their multiple-zippered garments, were equally strong. William Sturdivant as Fluellen, stood out particularly for his presence and delivery. In only one instance did I confuse one player’s characters. Overall, the speed of their changes coupled with the effective switches in character was both impressive and just plain fun to watch.

The scene in which Katherine learns English was staged strangely, with several of the cast used as demonstrative props. For me, it didn’t gel with the mroe straightforward storytelling of the rest of the production. But the scene at the end of Harry with Katherine more than compensated. Amendt and Kelly Curran were funny and sweet in one of my favorite scenes by the Bard.

This production starts in Minneapolis and will tour the US. It’s worth seeking out. If you’re in the Twin Cities don’t dawdle; it’s only here until 1 February 2009.

Only a few reviews are out there. Here’s a pro, and a con.

Take-Up productions hits Northeast Minneapolis with its next film series, “From the Vaults of Universal: Seven Classic Film Noirs” at the Heights Theater Monday nights at 7:30 p.m. starting 16 February 2009. Take-Up also has a page on Facebook.

February 16 7:30 This Gun For Hire (1942) dir Frank Tuttle, starring Alan Ladd and Veronica Lake

*February 23 BURT LANCASTER DOUBLE FEATURE (2 films for 1 $8 ticket)*
7:30 Criss Cross (1949) dir Robert Siodmak, starring Burt Lancaster and Yvone De Carlo

9:15 The Killers (1946) dir Robert Siodmak, starring Burt Lancaster and Ava Gardner

March 2 7:30 The Big Clock (1948) dir John Farrow, starring Ray Milland and Charles Laughton

*March 9 ALAN LADD / VERONICA LAKE DOUBLE FEATURE (2 films for 1 $8 ticket)*
7:30 The Blue Dahlia (1946) dir George Marshall, starring Alan Ladd, Veronica Lake and William Bendix

9:15 The Glass Key (1942) dir Stuart Heisler, starring Alan Ladd and Veronica Lake (Edited: based on the Dashiel Hammett novel that was part of the Coen Brothers’ inspiration for Miller’s Crossing; the other was Red Harvest.)

March 16 7:30 The Phantom Lady (1944) dir Robert Siodmak, starring Franchot Tone, Ella Raines and Elisha Cook

Masterpiece Classic is showing a two-part new adaptation of Emily Bronte’s Wuthering Heights on PBS in the US this Sunday, 18 January 2009 and the following, 25 January 2009.

It might be a good time to get a season pass, as Dickens adaptations begin in February.

Also coming to PBS on Great Performances 25 March 2009, a taping of Guthrie Theater’s sold-out 2007 production of King Lear, with Ian McKellen, who declines to give the full monty on TV, as he did on the stage.

This week’s creative mess from the kids came when I went outside to shovel snow. I was hopeful that they’d play together. Instead, I returned to find Drake nervously smiling. He told me to look in our pantry. I steeled myself for an avalanche of flour or cereal, but what I found was much worse. He’d found the baking oil spray can, and sprayed everything he could reach with it–all the cereal, fruit, cans, flatware, cabinets, and little brother 2yo Guppy. I yelled. And yelled. Then managed to get him to help clean up.

Yet really, who can I blame but me? I wanted to shovel the snow before dark. I took a risk, and Drake acted according to his curious, mischievous 5yo nature. Coulda been worse. It wiped up and cleaned off fairly easily. I ran the flatware through the dishwasher, and the boys through the bath. The squash still look a little shiny, and the cereal boxes speckled, but otherwise, we’re OK. Next time, though, I’m not leaving them inside, alone. They’re coming outside with me, subzero temperatures be damned.

I admit it. I’m prejudiced.

Against nonfiction. Take a look at my reading list and it’s pretty clear. So when a member of my book group chose John McPhee’s Crofter and the Laird, I was hesitant. I dragged my feet, and was late to reserve it from the library, and relieved when I saw it was short. But I humbly recant my bad feelings, because I thoroughly enjoyed the book, learned from it, and plan to do follow-up research as well.

McPhee has written a variety of books and essays on a variety of topics. In The Crofter and the Laird, he traces his family history to a small island in Scotland, then goes to live there.

The Scottish clan that I belong to–or would belong to if it were now anything more than a sentimental myth–was broken a great many generations ago by a party of MacDonalds, who hunted down the last chief of my clan, captured him, refused him mercy, saying that a man who had never shown mercy should not ask for it, tied him to a standing stone and shot him down. The standing stone was in a place called Balaromin Mor, on Colonsay, a small island in the open Atlantic, twenty-five miles west of the Scottish mainland.

McPhee has an engaging, conversational tone that is at once easy to read as well as instructive. Additionally, my library’s copy of the book contained beautiful pen and ink drawings by James Graves. The book is less a travel essay than an ethnography, as he delves into the history, myths, and community of Colonsay. Along the way he investigates, celebrates and debunks a great deal.

As part of my pre-Oscar film frenzy, I saw Milk over the weekend. I loved it; I learned from it; I wept. I’ve read movie critics who wonder at the tendency to turn good documentaries into films. Milk is largely based on the highly regarded documentary The Times of Harvey Milk. I think that films, especially well-made and -acted ones like Milk, get a wider release, and are more able to be seen, thus more likely to be seen. They can in turn prompt people to seek out the source material, which I plan to do.

I was amused by this bit of trivia from IMDB:

During a July 2008 interview with the Orange County Register about Pineapple Express (2008), the interviewer told Seth Rogen and James Franco that he prepared for the interview by watching the classic stoner comedy Fast Times at Ridgemont High (1982) the night before. When he asked Rogen and Franco if they prepared likewise before making Pineapple Express, Franco said he prepared by making out with Spicoli (a reference to his having shot Milk (2008), in which he and Sean Penn play lovers).

Oh, I am filled with geek joy. Not for the NCAA tournament, but for the Morning News Tournament of Books 2009! They’ve published the contenders (see below), and you can become a fan at Facebook.

Care to join me in nerdishly obsessing over some of the best books of last year? I read along with the tournament last year, and found some of my favorite books of the year. I’ve only read one from this year’s list–My Revolutions by Hari Kunzru–but it was a good one. And several others were already on my TBR radar. I’m off to scan reviews and load up my library request queue.

The White Tiger, Aravind Adiga

2666, Roberto Bolano

A Partisan’s Daughter, Louis de Bernieres

The Northern Clemency, Philip Hensher

The Lazarus Project, Aleksandar Hemon

My Revolutions, Hari Kunzru

Unaccustomed Earth, Jhumpa Lahiri

The Disreputable History of Frankie Landau-Banks, E. Lockhart

Shadow Country, Peter Matthiessen

The Dart League King, Keith Morris

A Mercy, Toni Morrison

Steer Towards Rock, Fae Myenne Ng

Netherland, Joseph O’Neill

City of Refuge, Tom Piazza

Home, Marilynne Robinson

Harry, Revised, Mark Sarvas

Danny Boyle’s Slumdog Millionaire shouldn’t succeed, but it does. It’s structured around a set of coincidences too numerous and too convenient to be believed. It follows a story line so old and predictable it’s mythic. And yet, Slumdog did succeed, for me at least, and very well, at that. A boy from Mumbai India grows up under trying circumstances, and has the chance to succeed when he goes on the game show Who Wants to be a Millionaire. Dev Patel is geeky and charming as the underdog, especially in the laugh-out-loud enjoyable end sequence.

For more on love of Slumdog and moviegoing in general, see Marsha’s fabulous entry at ALoTT5MA.

As part of a recent Role Models-inspired resurgence of my crush on Paul Rudd, I re-watched Knocked Up for the first time since I saw it in theaters. Hilarious if you’re a fan of the painful/funny Judd Apatow brand of humor. This reverse Cinderella story is overly long, but not obnoxiously so.

I made inroads into the even-more overly long extras on the 2-disc DVD. Thus far, I found Line-o-Ramas, Gag Reels, Roller Coaster documentary, Finding Ben Stone, and Director’s Video diary to be funny and worthwhile. Not worthwhile: Directing the Director; Gummy: The Sixth Roommate; Kuni files; Stripper Confidential. I think I’m going to dive into the rest, as a number of reviews say that the commentary is hilarious, and the extended scenes are worth watching.

Were I to judge Michael Chabon’s Maps and Legends by its fabulous cover (one of the best of last year), I would guess it to be geeky, beautiful, layered and complex. In other words, generally pretty awesome. This book, like its cover, is pretty on the inside.

Given, I’m a geek who reads comic books, and a fan of Chabon’s writing; I’m predisposed to like this book. His Mysteries of Pittsburgh was a pivotal novel for me; it made me want to be a better reader, and seek out better books. I had an embarrassing moment with him at a signing a few years ago* that seemed only to cement my crush on him.

But enough about me. To the book.

Maps and Legends is Chabon’s first collection of essays. In it, he writes about subjects as varied as Sherlock Holmes, comic books, planned communities, children’s literature, and golems. He ties these disparate topics with a shared theme of blurred boundaries, most often between truth and lies, reality and imagination.

Because Trickster is looking to stir things up, to scramble the conventions, to undo history and received notions of what is art and what is not, to sing for his supper, to find and lose himself in the act of entertaining. Trickster haunts the boundary lines, the margins, the secret shelves between the sections in the bookstore. (p. 26)

Fond of subjunctive clauses, Chabon’s writing is challenging in an energizing way, spurring this reader on to further thought, related reading, and flights of fancy. I was reminded of the essays of dear, departed David Foster Wallace–erudite AND entertaining, though Chabon’s book has far fewer footnotes. I’m not sure the book would be as entertaining to non-geeks, but I found a great deal to appreciate.

*Another amusing (to me, at least) story from the signing. My friend and former bookshop co-worker Kate DiCamillo was there, too. Her book, Because of Winn Dixie had recently been released, and had not yet won the Newbery Honor award. Before Chabon’s reading, she saw a woman walk by holding Winn Dixie, and offered to sign it for her. The woman looked at Kate oddly, unsure if she was who she said she was, but handed over the book. Kate whipped out a pen, signed the book and handed it back. I wonder if the woman remembers the incident, and wonders at the encounter with the soon-to-be-well-known author.

5yo Drake and I were walking home in a cold but lovely twilight last week. I saw and star and pointed it out to him, then taught him the rhyme:

Star light, star bright, first star I see tonight
I wish I may, I wish I might, have the wish I wish tonight.

He thought for a moment, asked to hear the “lyric” again, then said it and I told him to whisper a wish and not tell me, and maybe it would come true.

The next day, he repeatedly ran into the living room, looked around and announced, “Nope, my wish isn’t here yet.”

I assured him that wishes didn’t always happen, but they were fun to think about. Then I thought for a moment.

“Drake, did you wish that a Hot Wheels Triple Stunt Starter Set would appear on the toy table?”

Drake stared at me, frowned, then yelled, “You knew my wish!”

Much as I’d like to claim clairvoyance, he’s been talking about this toy since he got the Hammer and Hoop set in November, and he was disappointed not to receive it at Christmas. It wasn’t a great intuitive leap.

He saw a star again last night, and wished for something new. “It’s BIG, Mom!”

Today he’s mentioned it a few times, even moving toys around to create space for it.

I’m afraid to guess. I hope it’s not a puppy. Or a sibling.

In a recent attempt to fight back the encroaching filth in our house, I was energetically dusting–not only the obvious surfaces, but down low and up high, too. I whipped my cloth across a high-up nook and dried pine needles rained down. I gave it another swipe, and more needles came down. I was surprised; my husband and I have lived in the house since 2004, and have never had a live Christmas tree or greens in the house. This detritus must have been from the previous owners, so the dried needles were at least five years old. I shudder to think what other “surprises” lurk in the house, waiting to mock my ever-more-lax cleaning standards.

In his essay, “Kids’ Stuff” from the collection Maps and Legends, Michael Chabon notes that comics as an art form has gained credibility but lost readers:

Days when comics aimed were [sic] at kids: huge sales. Days when comics are aimed at adults: not so huge sales, and declining. (p. 90)

Children did not abandon comics; comics, in their drive to attain respect and artistic accomplishment, abandoned children. (p. 91)

Chabon offers a number of suggestions to rebuild the legacy of comics for kids. While the number of monthly comic books for kids, especially younger ones, is small, there are a few standouts, as well as other comics to be found for kids at the comic store. Until the selection of comics swings back in favor of the kids as Chabon would like, here are a few of our family favorites:

Bone by Jeff Smith
The Adventures of Polo and Polo: the Runaway book by Regis Faller
Chicken and Cat, and Robot Dreams, by Sarah Varon
Silly Lilly and the Four Seasons by Agnes Rosenthiel
Jack and the Box by Art Spiegelman

Over at Game Theorist, Joshua Gans writes about the Slate article, “Reading isn’t Fundamental.” Gans believes the article starts well, by noting the concern some parents have seeing other kids read before theirs do. He thinks the article does well to point out that reading is a learned, unnatural skill with many variables. The Slate article, though, goes on to offer suggestions on teaching kids to read, a gaffe Gans adroitly points out:

one would think that the Slate article might be a call for rationality and an alleviation of blame. No such luck. Right away it falls into a standard trap: children learn to read at different rates (a good true fact) and if parents are worried here is a thousand things you can do to overcome it (a bad conclusion).

Gans makes the sharp and useful distinction between reading and communication:

The issue is not ‘love of books’ but ‘love of communication’ and reading is just a part of that. You need to read to communicate in society and that is the primary consideration.

My own anecdotal experience backs up his analysis. 5+yo Drake has been reading for about a year, but his early reading is not reflective of his communication skills; in fact, they seem to be inversely related. His communication skills right now, especially with peers and in periods of stress and transition, are relatively delayed, and this has resulted in difficulties both at home and at preschool.

I echo Gans’ conclusion to other parents. Don’t push early reading or be overly impressed by it, since it may in fact run counter to the more useful and important skills of general communication. I’d go further to say that playing with kids (something I’m not good at) is likely to be better for development than reading to them (something I do all the time).

Michelle Slatella, in the NYT, on reading like a girl:

But there is one thing I notice my daughters doing when they hang around the house that makes me ache, with a terrible yearning, to be young again. They read.

Or more precisely, they read like I did when I was a girl. They drape themselves across chairs and sofas and beds – any available horizontal surface will do, in a pinch – and they allow a novel to carry them so effortlessly from one place to another that for a time they truly don’t care about anything else.

The link is from Mental Multivitamin, who accompanies it with a (qualified) book recommendation. Mmv wonders, “Can you still read like a girl?”

Still? I never _stopped_ reading like a girl: one book at a time, fiction preferred because of its transporting qualities. I’m a more critical reader than I was as a girl, and more selective. But I’m no less ardent. I often distinguish between books I love, especially ones that aren’t necessarily great, and ones that are good, even great, but that I don’t love.

At Gurulib, I have a record of most of the films I saw last year in my library; just click on 2008 movies.

I can hardly believe I’m writing this, but I think I need to cut back on movies. I saw a lot of middling ones last year, and I’d rather spend time writing. We’ll see how that hope plays out in ‘09. Again, I’d like to watch more from our home library and Tivo, rather than getting them all from the public library.

A few favorites:

Of 2008: Wall E, Dark Knight, Iron Man, Forgetting Sarah Marshall, Hellboy II, and Mamma Mia! (critics be damned!)

On DVD from 2007: Across the Universe, 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days, Diving Bell and the Butterfly, In Bruges

Last New Year’s Eve we watched Roman Holiday, this one we watched Breakfast at Tiffany’s, from our Audrey Hepburn box set. It’s a fractured love story between Hepburn and George Peppard, two young dreamers who take money from older people in exchange for sex. Hepburn is charming and loopy. Her fashions in this film, by Edith Head and Hubert de Givenchy, established her to this day as an icon. Peppard is handsome and stern as the struggling writer, by turns her complement and her reflection.

There’s a lot to enjoy and appreciate about the film, but I have trouble with it, too. Mickey Rooney’s Mr. Yunioshi is beyond painful to behold and had to have been in poor taste, even then. Hepburn’s rendition of “Moon River” is too saccharine for my tastes, as is the subplot with the cat, and the ending. Most troubling to me, though, are Peppard’s claims that he loves her and she belongs to him.

Paul Varjak: I love you.
Holly Golightly: So what.
Paul Varjak: So what? So plenty! I love you, you belong to me!
Holly Golightly: [tearfully] No. People don’t belong to people.
Paul Varjak: Of course they do!
Holly Golightly: I’ll never let ANYBODY put me in a cage.
Paul Varjak: I don’t want to put you in a cage, I want to love you!

This, more than anything, prevents me from perceiving the movie as romantic; to me it’s an odd little film. I wonder if my impression comes closer to the spirit of Truman Capote’s story than to the polished package of its Hollywood marketing.

Finally, the copyeditor in me must point out that it’s Tiffany, not Tiffany’s. I’m surprised that they didn’t insist on the correction.

2009 is off to a promising start in books with Emmanuel Guibert’sAlan’s War, a comic-book memoir of a U.S. G.I. during and after WWII. Originally published in French, the new English translation is in a typically spiffy edition from First Second books.

Guibert met Cope in Europe. As their friendship grew, Cope told his war stories to Guibert, who felt compelled to transform them into a comics narrative. Guibert’s black and white art is deceptively simple looking, but it contains a great deal of atmosphere and emotion. Cope is a likable everyman, and his memories unfold in spare vignettes, though many of them loop back and reappear later. As Guibert hoped to make clear from the title, the book is not a history of the war, but one man’s experience of it.

At the age of 18, like all young Americans, I was drafted.

I took some exams. I got a perfect score on the radio operator aptitude test.

And then they put us on a train.

Cope’s optimism, resilience, adaptability, and ability to make friends all make for a touching and engaging personal history.