Letters From Iwo Jima and Ash

I went to see Letters From Iwo Jima and I have to say this was a great movie. Shot from the Japanese perspective and filmed in muted tones, this movie really stuck with me. From the Japanese nobles (some who behave nobly while others do not) to the regular enlisted men, Clint Eastwood draws great performances from his cast in what could have been a traditional war movie. In some ways, it still is a traditional war movie (Come on! As soon as I saw the horse, I knew he was toast, it was just a matter of how it would happen) and in the scene when the Japanese soldiers realize that in some ways, the Americans are just like them-hard-working, brave and committed to their cause. Ken Watanabe was very good as the general who knows his cause is doomed and yet does his best to protect his men and give them the best chance they have to win, while Tsuyoshi Ihara and Kazunari Ninomiya as Baron Nishi and Saigo are both excellent-Ninomiya is particularly good as the drafted Saigo, who just wants to get back to his wife and child and is saved three times by a combination of the General intervening and pure luck.

I also read the Book of Ash: The Rise of Carthage. I wasn't too sure when I started this book that I would like it, although it looked interesting. It's the story of a female mercenary in Medieval times-not too long after the time of Joan of Arc. This book is alternative history, but it's a little strange, even for alternative history. By that I mean it is interrupted periodically by academics who are quibbling over historical documents that in the beginning are classified as documents but by the end of the book are being reclassified as fiction-which turns their whole belief in Ash (the titular mercenary) as a real person into a fictional character. As this book is pure fiction, I'm wondering why the need for the quibbling academics? It really breaks up the pace of the book ends up being more annoying than intriguing. My friend Y tells me that this device is used in the second book in order to further explain how this world became an alternate universe to our own, but is that really necessary? Just say it is what it is-there's no need for an explanation, but if you need one, just toss in a sentence or two-there's no need to continually interrupt the pace of a well-written book with this stuff.
I'm reading the sequel to Bloodsucking Fiends right now-called You Suck, a love story and it is hilarious. It's another Christopher Moore book I'll be sorry to see end. More on Moore later....

Pan's Labyrinth

So, I've been hearing about Pan's Labyrinth for the past few months-and as it was directed by Guillermo del Toro (of Hellboy, one of my favorite movies) I really wanted to see it-and it finally opened up in the nation's capital. I don't know why it didn't open sooner, but that's me. Anyway, I loved this movie. It was poetic, beautiful, sad and uplifting all at once. It's worth it just to see the little girl who plays Ofelia (Ivana Baquero), because her face is so expressive, it's amazing. If you can't make the leap into a movie that has creatures or monsters, then you should give this movie a pass. But if you can make that leap, this is a wonderful movie-yes, it's a fable for grown-ups and it's about love, hate, power and sacrifice, but it's also just a great movie.

I also watched Gosford Park, and sad to say, I spent most of the time saying to myself " is that Helen Mirren playing a frumpy maid?" and "Is that really Clive Owen?" Yes, it has a great cast and the setting really is impeccable, but I'm afraid I was too busy paying attention to everyone in the cast, who in the years since the movie (and especially in the last couple of years) have become very known actors-and if I was paying too much attention to the cast and not very much to the plot...well, you get my point.

I owe an apology to Fellini....

But first I'll start with the movie I saw before I watched Juliet of the Spirits-which was Children of Men. This movie is emotionally devastating, no way around it. Set in a future where women can't have children anymore and no one knows why, the world has fallen apart. England is mostly in ruins, immigrants are put into camps and and cities around the world are besieged. Theo Farren is a middle class worker in London, who gets drawn into a battle he doesn't want to fight. His ex-wife needs to transport a girl to the coast and she needs Theo's connections to get the transit papers. He agrees to help-and it isn't until he meets the girl that finds out that she's pregnant-and may be the only woman in the world who is. This sets him on path though beauty (his cousin who he asks for help has made mission of rescuing artwork and has both Michelangelo's David and Picasso's Guernica in his office) and horror (the displaced person camp Theo and Kee enter in order to both avoid the people chasing them and to get to the coast to the people who will help them is like one of the circles of hell-a close in circle). This is an amazing movie-it isn't often that I come out of a movie feeling like the director knew exactly what he was doing and was in complete control, but I felt that here. From casually having Guernica on the wall in a very nice room, to using a hand-held camera to shoot a firefight in the camp (complete with blood spattering on the camera lens), Alfonso Cuaron has one of the steadiest hands in running a movie that I've ever seen-it was amazing and there scenes that actually brought tears to my eyes. Clive Owen finally gets to be there hero-a run down, grimy, unhappy hero, but a hero nonetheless. And while the supporting cast is stellar, I would like to single out Michael Caine and Danny Huston as being especially good in extremely different ways. Julianne Moore was good, but honestly, she didn't have much to do. And Clare-Hope Ashitey was very good as Kee. Yes, it was depressing. Yes, it was totally worth it to see it. It makes me very happy to see that even though it hasn't opened in more theaters, it keeps rising in the top ten at the movies-and it's clear that it's because of word of mouth. And don't talk to me about how it's different from the book. Yes, I read the book when it came out and yes, it's different. But it keeps the main idea in focus and it knows the heart of the book-that's what's important. It's rare to see a movie made in such an assured manner and that alone makes it worth seeing-but there's so much more to it than that.

Okay, so here' s why I owe Fellini an apology. I freely admit that after I saw Children of Men, I was planning on going home and watching my Netflix movie-Juliet of the Spirits and I was NOT looking forward to it. Although I loved Children of Men, afterwards I wanted something light and frothy-something that would cheer me up and/or make me laugh and I thought I had seen Juliet of the Spirits on TV many years ago and it was NOT light, cheerful or happy. Luckily, the movie I watched all those years ago (when I was college and flipping through channels late at night) was not the Juliet of the Spirits. While it wasn't always light-hearted and was at times surreal and odd (duh!), I couldn't take my eyes off of it-it was fascinating in a really good way. Giuletta Masina is a middle aged housewife who isn't very happy with her life-her husband may be cheating on her (when she married him young and he's her whole life, as she tells a friend). Her mother and sisters, all tall and beautiful treat her badly and her life is not what she wants it to be. Into her life come her neighbors (I admit that when I first saw these people, I thought they were circus folk-why were they playing around in her yard like that? I thiunk they WERE circus folk). And as this is a surreal story, it was kind of hard to tell what was real and what wasn't in Juliet's various encounters and the only thing I was sure of was that the group of people dressed in monk's/nun's habits were probably not real and were just one of the things in Juliet's past that she needed to get past. This movie isn't for everyone-if you don't have a taste for the slightly weird/bizarre/surreal, this movie is not for you. Juliet's many encounters with episodes from her past make it hard to tell sometimes if it's past or present tense and the symbolism, while clear to some may be confusing to others (I know I could benefit from another viewing of this movie). So Fellini-I'm sorry. I loved this slightly bizarre story of the housewife who needs to overcome her good Catholic girl past, with the help of the circus folk next door (the symbolism of the butterfly attached as art to Valentina Cortese's naked shoulderblades was clear even to me) in order to move on with her life and get rid of her cheating husband. It was tremendously entertaining and a little strange and it made me think. I couldn't have asked for more.

4 Books, 4 Movies

Did I really read the same amount of books and see the same number of movies? Well, if you count my Netflix movie (and I do) I guess I did.

First, following my Christmas tradition, I re-read Traveling With the Dead-and I was reminded as to why I like it so much as it's such a well-written book. Great characters, wonderful descriptions of people (well, vampires), clothes and settings and a fairly good sense of the time and its societal norms...it was really good. And it takes place close to Christmas, which I don't think I realized until this year. Maybe that's why I read it before Christmas! Or, you know...not. I went from Travelling to Spin-a gift from my friend DL, who loves science fiction as much as I do and is a pretty good source of good SF reads (although he does enjoy mocking some of the authors I like but that's okay). So Spin was very good. It takes place in the near future and the Earth has been enclosed by a protective shield, which not only blocks the sun, moon and stars (but still offers artificial sunlight that looks like the real thing), it encloses the earth in its own space-time continuum and outside the shield, time is moving at a much faster pace. This occurence is viewed threw the eyes of the three main characters-a brother (Jason) his sister Diane and their friend Tyler. Jason is a genius who wants to discover as much he can about the Spin, Diane become a religious convert and Tyler lives his life being friends with and later person physician to Jason and trying to deny his unrequited love for Diane. In the meantime, Jason and his team of scientists have been trying to seed Mars so it can become livable-so what happens if Mars became not only habitable but developed its own humans...and one came to earth? This book posits not only that question, but how people would behave at the end of the world. When the spin disappears, many people believe the world is about to end, and I have to say almost no one behaves well. because it's the supposed end of the world, many people take it as a licensce to behave as badly as possible by killing everyone they want, raping whoever they feel like and grabbing whatever property is around. You know that line from Star man where Jeff Bridges says about the human race "You are at your best when things are at their worst"? This is the opposite of that and while it made for a great story, I'm not sure I can believe it. There have been times when humans believed the world was ending (the year 1000,during the Plague of the Middle Ages, the dawn of the year 2000) and no one behave THIS badly. Yes, bad things happened and many people acted strangely but not on a massive scale like this. And if you thought you were going to die, would you rather
A) be with your loved ones or
B) Go out and kill some people?
While I do believe people are capable of behaving very badly, this was pretty extreme-but it was still a really good book. It was well-written and the ideas were very interesting.
After Spin I read Spook and I really needed a book like this after the harrowing tale of Spin. Spook takes a scientific look at the afterlife in a very irreverent but still serious way. What I mean by this is that the author is serious about the subject matter-she has a true intellectual curiousity about the afterlife without any preconceptions. She's curious about reincarnation (the stories change a lot) but her strip to India is very funny. She's curious about ectoplasm (unlikely to exist but the possible hiding places for it on the mediums' bodies are both fascinating and gross) and she's curious about actual mediums-and this provides a true WOW moment when she meets the woman who is the inspiration for the TV show Medium. At first, she isn't impressed and is curious as to why spirits don't answer the important queations-like "what's it like where you are? and Is there a God?" No one cans answer these questions-but when the medium tells the author that she thinks she's spoken to her mother and she's showing her an hourglass...and her brother collects hourglasses....it was a little creepy. The author has a tremendous sense of humor-it's much like mine so that should tell you whether you want to read it or not.

Next up was the latest installment of Charles Stross's Merchant Princes series-this one was The Clan Corporate. While I really liked this book and the ideas it posits about trade, ideas, education and the role role of women in different societies, this book still drove me crazy. And it was because Miriam, who is a former journalist and med school graduate, makes some incredibly stupid moves. How can a woman who develops a factory and a business in a Victorian-like society make some incredibly stupid moves? Oh, it was annoying. But the book was still fun to read and if you've read the other two, you should read this one as well.
And last is the latest installment in Chelsea Quinn Yarbro's St Germain series. The Count St Germain first appeared in Hoterl Transylvania (a great book) and has been having adventures thoughout different periods of time ever since. (he's 4,000 year-old vampire, did I mention that?). Truth to tell, I had been getting a little bored with the series as they all seemed to follow the same plot-St Germain is in a precarious period in time (the Renaissance, the Middle Ages, the height of the Roman Empire) and meets a woman who he either falls in love with or wants to cause his destruction (and sometimes both) and he has to make a mad rush out of town before either the A)Praetorian Guard B) The Nazis or
C) some Devil-worshipping French aristocrats try to kill him and/or the woman he loves. It's usually a near miss but St Germain always makes it and sometimes the woman does too and sometimes she doesn't...but it was a formula that was getting old. As much as I loved her descriptions of the different eras (and she prides herself on correct place names, hairdos, clothes and manners) I wanted a different story-and in the last few books it WAS different. In Come Twilight, St Germain makes the mistke of changing a woman he doesn't know very well over to his life-and what a mistake it was. She turns her son and all her clan into vampires and they end up running a whole area of Spain-in the mountains where the vampires are difficult to reach. And in Midnight's Garden, he meets an albino who has the marks of stigmata and who ends up walled up as an anchorite in a remote abbey. As she feels she deserves this, it's kind of a happy ending for her-but what I liked about these two books was that they weren't the usual story-but unfortunately the latest Roman Dusk is a return to the same story. Don't get me wrong, it's still engaging and the descriptions of the Roman Empire as it begins to fall is very interesting, but St Germain makes his narrow escape, organized religion gets a bad reputation (usually deserved, sad to say) and luckily in this case, the woman who loves him survives as a wealthy woman to do as she pleases-the women in these books don't always have such a happy ending.

As for movies (and I miscounted! I read more books than saw movies! Whew...i was worried there for a minute).

So, I saw The Good Shepherd, Casino Royale, The Curse of the Golden Flower and Pollock. All of them had their good and bad qualities (well, Casino Royale didn't have any bad qualities) but I liked all of them for different reasons.

The Good Shepherd was really good-Matt Damon gave a great, low-key performance. he isn't required to do much in this part-but he does look like he's always thinking, even if he doesn't give much away. I still find it hard to believe a straight guy could marry Angelina Jolie and ignore her for the pretty, deaf girl but that's me. Wouldn't he make the best of it? But I'm more and more impressed with Matt Damon as an actor-he melts into the part and yet it's always him, even when the parts are different-it's pretty amazing. My only quibble is that the kid playing his son looked like he was 15-it was hard to believe he worked for the CIA but it wasn't hard to believe he'd spill some secrets.

Casino Royale...my friend D told me I had to see it because Daniel Craig was really hot and she was right-he is. The man exudes sexual charisma like nobody's business. That said, Casino Royale is a hugely entertaining, well-made movie. It has characters instead of stereotypes and a Bond girl who actually has a brain in her head and can give right back to Bond. She's not an idiot or a wuss. And Craig is a great Bond-hard as nails and willing to do what needs to be done to finish the job and won't let anything go. It's a tough, believable performance-and yet different from the Israeli agent he played in Munich. It's way overdue that Bond got reinvented...and he's really hot. Did I mention that?

The Curse of the Golden Flower reunites the beautiful Gong Li and her old lover/director Zhang Yimou. These two raised the bar for Chinese movies, with such films as Raise the Red Lantern and Red Sorghum (please don't say Crouching Tiger-it was a good popcorn movie but Raise the Red Lantern was great drama and no wire work. That said, I did think Zhang's work in Hero and The House of Flying Daggers was much better than Ang Lee's in Crouching Tiger-he did the whole Chinese action/wire work thing much better-just look at the fight among the leaves in Hero and deny it...) Anyway, Curse is about an extremely dysfunctional royal family in ancient China. The Emperor is poisoning the Empress to get her lands, the Empress is scheming with her stepson (who she's been sleeping with) to overthrow the Emperor...and the nice youngest son? Not so nice, as it turns out. This movie is beautiful-the colors and set design are amazing, as are the costumes. Everything is red and gold or blue and silver-and when the armies of the Emperor and Empress clash, clad in silver and gold, it's beautiful You know there was no CGI involved in this movie and that it's the real thing. That said, the performances are excellent. Gong Li is beautiful and scheming, Chow Yun Fat doesn't look evil, until you find out just how evil he really is and the actors playing the three sons are uniformly good. But were there really that many bosoms in ancient China? The costumes are glittering and gorgeous but definitely designed to show off off the decolletage and it was a little weird as I thought everyone really covered up then-am I wrong?

Pollock, about the life of painter Jackson Pollock features some great performances. Ed Harris (and usually when an actor or a director finally gets to make their "lifelong dream of a movie" it turns out to be crappy)gives a great, powerful and tough performance. It's usually quite difficult to show an artist on film-for many writers and painters,it's internal. This movie accomplishes the difficult task of actually making you feel the creative process and having you believe it. Harris and Marcia Gay Harden are both wonderful.

So, I recommend all the movies, but they aren't all for everyone...make your choices wisely.