Kat’s Film and Book Reviews

Mystic River

by Dennis Lehane

Harper Torch Press

2002

496 pages

Mystic River is a very complicated novel, but complicated in the way real life is complicated. It’s messy and overwhelming, but only because of the pain, struggle, and tragedy it tackles. The writing is actually clean, sharp and strong—expertly conveying the depths of pain and struggle that human lives encounter.

The story begins with a prologue from the lives of three boys—Jimmy, Sean, and Dave. Jimmy’s the bad boy from the wrong side of the tracks, while Sean’s the golden boy, the one things seem to go right for, at least from the outside. And then there’s Dave. I think we all know a Dave, a sort of frumpy-dumpy kid who has good intentions and a good heart, but never seems to fit in anywhere. He might have acquaintances who tolerate him, like Jimmy and Sean do, but he doesn’t really have any close friends…no matter how badly he wants them.

In this first section, Dave is kidnapped by two child molesters pretending to be police officers. The things that happen to Dave are never spelled out, but it’s clear as the book progresses that in the four days before he managed to escape, Dave has been abused terribly. But he’s a poor kid with a crazy mom and no real friends; he doesn’t get counseling or support or any kind of attention. He’s just left to struggle along alone, the best he can. So are Jimmy and Sean, who saw the kidnapping, but have no idea how to deal with their role in it, or with Dave in the years to come.

That’s the set-up, and then the book skips to the three boys’ adulthood. Sean’s a detective with a shattered marriage, Jimmy’s an ex-con with three daughters who has gone straight, and Dave’s a blue-collar worker with a wife and son. In the beginning of the present day, a gruesome tragedy occurs—Jimmy’s daughter is brutally murdered—and the rest of the book is about how each of the three characters deals with that. The murder brings each of them back into each other’s lives in ways none of them could have imagined, and the mystery surrounding the girl’s death affects each of them in ways that only unfold slowly through the course of the book.

The book looks at the relationships between husbands and wives, parents and children, cops and criminals, siblings and old friends. It looks at questions of duty, love, and vengeance. It explores how short we all fall in our efforts to make something of our lives. In fact, sometimes the relationships are so realistic and so complicated, it can make the reader a little depressed. Don’t any relationships work out? Doesn’t anyone ever get anything right? Isn’t anyone happy?

The mystery is extremely compelling, and I’ll only say that things aren’t always as they seem—though the author is never less than honest with us. And the ending, though sad, almost seems as though it’s for the best.

Dennis Lehane writes with a fullness and complexity that compels you to keep reading page after page, even when you’re afraid of what you’re going to find. Every character is relatable and sympathetic, even when they’re doing things we hate. Lehane is uncompromising about the dark depths of human life, yet he doesn’t fall into the traps of nihilism or pretension that so many so-called literary authors do. His story and characters simply are what they are, for better or worse. I recommend that you read Mystic River and experience them for yourself.

Okay, remember last week’s quotation?  It was won by Abby, who correctly guessed Back to the Future. Good job, Abby!

Here’s the original Back to the Future trailer, though it doesn’t have last week’s quotation in it.

Now, for the new quotation!  Ready?

Fasten your seatbelts.  It’s going to be a bumpy night.

Okay, last time we had a longish quotation, then we had several hints, but nobody got the book quotation.  Here’s what it was:

Along the road there came a stranger in a land where strangers were rare and suspect.  He walked up to the door of a crumbling farmhouse and hammered.  After a long moment, a light blinked on somewhere in the house and a young woman appeared, drawing a cheap mail-order bathrobe tightly about her.  She opened the door a crack and her sleep-swollen face winced with fear as she stared at the apparition on her doorstep.  He was over six feet tall and dressed entirely in black.  He wore a black suit, black tie, a black hat, and black overcoat, with impractical black dress shoes covered with mud.  His face, barely visible in the darkness, sported a neatly trimmed mustache and goatee.  The flashes of lightning behind him added an eerie effect.

“May I use your phone?” he asked.

The clues were:

• was originally written in the 70’s
• is non-fiction
• had a  movie based in it a few years ago.

The answer is…The Mothman Prophecies, by John Keel.  And I have to say, I think my friends in West Virginia could have gotten that if they’d thought about it.

Anyway, here’s another one for next week.  This one includes a special shout-out to my dad, since I got the quotation from a book I borrowed from him.

She was not quite what you would call refined. She was not quite what you would call unrefined. She was the kind of person who keeps a parrot.

Peter Graves, who would have turned 84 this week, died Sunday afternoon at his home.  He had just returned from brunch with his wife and kids, when he collapsed outside his home.  His daughter administered CPR and his doctor arrived, but they were unable to revive him from an apparent heart attack.

Peter Graves had that heroic voice, face, and presence that made everyone trust him.  He said once that friends often encouraged him to run for office because he looked so much like a trustworthy person.  Some of the most famous roles of his career include the Nazi spy in 1953’s Stalag 17, Jim Phelps–the leader of the Mission Impossible team in the long-running TV show, and airline pilot Captain Oveur in 1980’s Airplane!

He was completely classy, and I’m sorry he’s gone.  I hope he’s accepting a beautiful new mission right now.

Image courtesy of Team Sugar--young, cute, fresh faced Corey in the 80's

80’s teen star Corey Haim has died of an “accidental” overdose.  Not much is known of the circumstances of Haim’s death.  At about 3:30 AM, his mother found him in responsive in his apartment and called an ambulance.  The ambulance took him to Providence St. Joseph’s Hospital in Burbank, where he was pronounced dead at about 4:00 AM.  The police were then called in to investigate.

Unfortunately, Haim’s death can’t be a surprise to anyone.  A tragedy, God knows, but one 25 years in the making.  For all the enjoyable acting he did in the 80’s in such films as The Lost Boys, Murphy’s Romance, and License to Drive, he made his reputation not as an actor or even as a child star, but as an out-of-control addict whose attempts to stay in the public eye grew increasingly more pathetic as the years went by.

It’s an all-too-familiar story–the child or teen actor who gets caught up in the corruption and drug lifestyle so freely offered to him in Hollywood.  It doesn’t have to be that way; a lot of kids in that position made good choices and transitioned to admirable careers.  But Corey wasn’t one of them.  I hope he finally finds the peace and freedom I can only assume he was seeking all these years.

The drug bloat--nobody's best look

The Incredibles, 2004

Pixar/Disney

Directed by Brad Bird

Rated PG

It will not come as a shock to anyone that the world is rough on nice guys. And gals. People who have good hearts are paid lip service, and when we say that someone is nice we mean it in a complimentary way. We even hold up niceness to our children as an ideal for behavior and interaction: play nice, be nice, that’s not nice. But the truth is, the world, by which I mean the culture and the systems which order our life, does not nurture niceness. Sharing, helping, going out of one’s way to be kind, are met with suspicion, opposition and ridiculed as childish virtues. Ruthlessness, competition, and self-interest, while never explicitly encouraged, are the values of winners.

What happens, if, for the sake of the extremes of animation and the communication of the point, we took that dichotomy as far as it could go? What if the nice guys were more than just nice, more than just helpful? They would be Superheroes, the ultimate Nice People. They would be amazing people seeking only to do good, with bodies and skills that reflected the size of the hearts beating within. So, a man with enough inner strength to step out of his myopic world and lend a hand becomes a man with enough physical strength to help in extreme situations. He becomes Bob Parr, Mr. Incredible. And a woman who can multitask and care for others out of the deep wells of her compassion and omnicompetence becomes a woman who can stretch without snapping, who can be in two places at once without tearing herself in two. She becomes Helen Parr, Elastigirl.

And what does the world do to nice people? Especially Super nice people? It isn’t pretty. Mr. Incredible, in the course of his other professional nice guy duties, saves the life of a man preparing to jump out a window. The man slaps a “wrongful life” suit on him, and the floodgates are opened to lawsuits against anyone trying to help anyone without their express consent. The Superheroes are put out of business and sent into the Superhero Protection Program, where they are instructed to live out their lives in unremarkable anonymity. They’re not supposed to bother anyone with their inclinations to be helpful.

But some instincts run too deep to bury. Bob and his best friend Lucius, also a retired Superhero, can be found sitting in their car in dark alleys listening to the police scanner, and sometimes, it must be said, they give in to temptation. Yes, they go and help people. It’s illegal, it’s unappreciated, and their wives won’t be amused, but they can’t help it. Because they’re really good guys.

That’s just the set-up, of course. The rest of the action takes place when the opportunity to use their powers arises, causes a lot of trouble, and the Parr family has to decide who they really are. Their children have to be taught how to focus and control their powers, and Bob and Helen have to be reminded what really matters in the end. One of the beautiful things about this film is the portrayal of Bob and Helen’s marriage. There’s tension here, and not everybody is perfect all the time. But these two love each other for better or worse, and when the going gets tough, whether it’s an attack by a Supervillian or a chaotic family dinner, these two come through for each other, often with the kids in tow.

The acting is led by very strong performances by Craig T. Nelson and Holly Hunter as Bob and Helen. In a solely vocal performance, they convey love, competitiveness, anger, fear, relief, jealousy, and a whole host of other complex emotions in such a way that we forget that the art-deco sets and primary color schemes are not the real world. They may be animated, but every marriage should be this strong. In a tense moment when Elastigirl and two of her three offspring (baby Jack-Jack is home with a traumatized sitter) have just saved Mr. Incredible from the clutches of the villain Syndrome, Bob tells Helen to take the kids and wait outside so that he can finish the job. She interprets this as a sexist remark and is indignant, but Bob blurts out that for all his muscles, he’s not strong enough to lose her again. Nelson’s and Hunter’s acting in this scene is intense, the characters’ expressions are exquisite, and the audience is deeply touched by the dramatic purity of the scene. This is a top quality cinematic moment.

Mention also should be given to actors Samuel L. Jackson as Lucius/Frozone, and Jason Lee as the side-kick-wannabe-turned-Supervillian, Syndrome. If their performances aren’t as deep as those of Nelson and Hunter, they do their jobs and give us a friend we love to depend on and an enemy we love to hate. And of course, director Brad Bird himself, as Edna Mole, supersuit designer to the heroes. More than any other character, Edna makes Superheroism seem positively normal. In fact, she seems quite convinced that it would be normal, if not for the chic outfits she herself provides.

The partnership between writer/director Brad Bird and Pixar Studios is a fortuitous one. Pixar enjoys a well-deserved reputation as the industry’s leading creator of high-quality family films, such as Toy Story 1 and 2, Monsters, Inc., and Finding Nemo. And Bird, in his work on the “Simpsons,” the “King of the Hill,” and The Iron Giant, has shown us that in the midst of lives that range from mundane to extraordinary, nice people can have compelling and complex stories to tell. I don’t think it’s giving too much away to say that in The Incredibles, Bird sticks to his strengths, and the nice guys come out on top.

Last week’s quotation, if you’ll remember, was this:

Cars don’t behave.  They are behaved upon.

That quotation is from Driving Miss Daisy, 1989.  Here’s Siskel and Ebert’s review, which includes the scene with the quotation in it:

Now, here’s the new week’s quotation.  This one has a special shout-out to Ray:

He’s an idiot. Comes from upbringing. His parents are probably idiots too.

Code Orange

By Caroline Cooney

Delacourt Press, 2005

Some people are better researchers than fiction writers. We get the feeling that what they really want is to show the reader how interesting their topic is—and it usually is interesting. But that’s not what we go to fiction for. We read fiction because we want to learn about people, others experiencing things that we find connections to. The best fictional characters, like the Velveteen Rabbit, become real simply because we believe in them so completely.

Caroline Cooney understands the difference. Each of her novels centers around a certain theme—forgiveness, sundered families, identity—and you know that she’s done her research. But that’s not why you read. You read because the main character—always a teenager—grabs your attention and your heart from the first words.

That’s exactly what’s going on in her gripping novel, Code Orange. The title refers to the Homeland Security danger alert codes implemented after 9/11, and hints at the sort of danger that will be encountered in the book. The main character, 16-year-old Mitty Blake, accidentally comes across an envelope full of smallpox scabs, and from there we follow his journey into fear and paranoia, illness, bioterrorism, and worse. It’s utterly compelling, and incredibly suspenseful; as Cooney counts off the days from exposure to infectiousness, we are as impatient and fearful as Mitty is. And she cuts us no slack—is that headache just a headache, or is it the onset of smallpox? Is Mitty chilled because it’s February in New York, or is it a symptom of smallpox? She won’t tell Mitty, and she won’t tell us.

Cooney uses Mitty’s science research paper as a way of feeding us the information we need to have to become as scared as Mitty is. Mitty writes in his own words about the symptoms and development of smallpox, how it is passed from person to person, how it was eradicated and how it might return, and chillingly, about its potential uses as a weapon of bioterrorism. It never feels too farfetched, especially since Mitty can come up with a million reasons why this couldn’t really be happening. We know the incredible odds as well as he does. But we are still as afraid as he is.

Even more interesting than the smallpox storyline is Mitty’s character development. When we first meet him he is the ultimate teenage boy slacker. He cares for nothing but music and the girl he’s crushing on, and he’s filling a seat in an advanced biology class that his parents paid the school to put him in. But through his research and the fear that he might contract smallpox—and even worse, give it to others—we see him grow up. He realizes what’s important, and he learns how to act on his newly discovered feelings of love and loyalty. In the end, Mitty is no longer a slacker in any sense. Mitty knows what the right thing to do is, and he acts on it.

I would recommend this book for middle school age and up (including adults). The terrorism theme might be scary for the younger kids in this age group, but in my experience it’s better for them to be a little bit afraid and to ask their parents or teachers about it, than to hear something on the radio or TV and be terrified. Much as adults might hate it, terrorism is now a part of our children’s lives, and like all difficult subjects, kids must be exposed to it in controlled amounts. Since the book has no violence, only the threat of violence, I think that even pre-adolescent kids can handle it. And adults will find that they can’t put it down, and don’t want to, until they know how it ends.

Image courtesy of Chicagoist.com

DH and I are big fans of film critic Roger Ebert–which is not to say we always agree with him (usually, but not always).  We have both of his books containing reviews of movies he gave 2 stars or less to (I Hated, Hated, Hated, Hated This Movie and Your Movie Sucks).  So, since this film blog has been quite short of Oscar season news, I thought I would give y’all Roger Ebert’s Oscar picks for this year. He says, “I can’t remember a year when it seemed easier to predict the Oscars.”  Of course, we all know that what should win isn’t always what does win!

I’ll give the whole category, then indicate Ebert’s picks.

Image courtesy of Manny the Movie Guy

Best Film

• Avatar
• The Blind Side
• District 9
• An Education
• The Hurt Locker
• Inglorious Basterds
• Precious
• A Serious Man
• Up
• Up In the Air

Ebert likes The Hurt Locker.  He also gives good reasons that Up in the Air and Avatar might have shots, but says, “Of these three, I’m predicting The Hurt Locker. If one of the other seven wins, let’s say I’ll be very surprised.

Best Director

• James Cameron for Avatar
• Katherine Bigelow for The Hurt Locker
• Quentin Tarantino for Inglorious Basterds
• Lee Daniels for Precious
• Jason Reitman for Up In the Air

Ebert says, “If you vote against Kathryn Bigelow of The Hurt Locker, you’ll be going against years of precedent that say the winner of the Directors Guild Award will win the Oscar.”

Best Actor in a Leading Role

• Jeff Bridges for Crazy Heart
• George Clooney for Up In the Air
• Colin Firth for A Single Man
• Morgan Freeman for Invictus
• Jeremy Renner for The Hurt Locker

While I would like to say that Colin Firth is totally due, Ebert has a different opinion.  “Jeff Bridges for Crazy Heart. The movie opened late in December and moved out more widely in January. But the distributor, Fox Searchlight, made a wise move: They screened it extensively in advance for movie critics and sent out lots of screeners. Bridges’ great performance swept the critics’ awards, won a Golden Globe, a SAG award and now looks like the winner. Jeremy Renner or George Clooney could win, but Bridges has the momentum.”

Best Actress in a Leading Role

• Sandra Bullock for The Blind Side
• Helen Mirren for The Last Station
• Carey Mulligan for An Education
• Gabourey Sidibe for Precious
• Meryl Streep for Julie and Julia

Ebert likes Sandra Bullock.  “Few people saw this one coming, especially in a year where her two earlier pictures bombed, but Sandra Bullock’s comeback in The Blind Side was dazzling, and she also collected a lot of year-end awards. Meryl Streep was thought to be the front-runner for Julie & Julia, but Oscar likes a comeback role, and Streep has never needed one.”

Best Actor in a Supporting Role

• Matt Damon in Invictus
• Woody Harrelson in The Messenger
• Christopher Plummer in The Last Station
• Stanley Tucci in The Lovely Bones
• Christoph Waltz in Inglorious Basterds

While I have sentimental reasons for wanting to see Harrelson and Tucci honored (I didn’t know Christopher Plummer was still alive, actually), Ebert is firm: “Christoph Waltz, a relative unknown, won the best actor award at Cannes in May 2009 for Inglourious Basterds and has never looked back. I don’t know of anyone who doesn’t expect him to win this category. A sure thing.”

Best Actress in a Supporting Role

• Penelope Cruz in Nine
• Maggie Gyllenhall for Crazy Heart
• Anne Kendrick for Up In the Air
• Vera Farmiga for Up In the Air
• Mo’Nique for Precious

Ebert’s pretty positive about this one, too.  “Here again, what looks like a sure thing: Mo’Nique, for her powerful performance as the mother in Precious. Known primarily as a TV personally and comic, she came, in a way, out of nowhere to create a character who was a damaged, cruel woman. The other four nominees were all very, very good, but Mo’Nique will win.”

I like to see comedic actors stretch their dramatic wings, so I’d be okay with Mo’Nique for that reason.

Actually, I’d be okay with all of these.  Does anyone else have any predictions, or any arguments with Ebert’s thoughts?  I’d love to hear them.