How ‘bout an attempt at some weekly reviews? I have opinions. Why not share them?
Movies:
“Man of Steel”: Really Jo? It came out last weekend. It’s yesterday’s news.
In the future, I’ll try to review movies before you have a chance to spend your money on a ticket. I’m not sure how I’ll do that but I think you’re worth it, so I’m going to try. Without further ado…
This latest version of the Superman saga is, in the words of Goldie, one of the worst movies ever made – unless of course you love video games, in which case you might enjoy it because it’s a 2 hour and 20 minute video game. Wham! Bam! Rock ‘em! Sock ‘em!
The film opens on Krypton where we’re forced to spend 20 minutes listening to characters, including Russell Crowe as Jor-El (“I am your father”), offering gibberish details about the end of their planet. “Yay ya, wa waa, blah blah, our people, pip pip destroy them, cluck cluck, let him go, General Zod, tsk tsk, goodbye my son.” When we finally get to earth, a place I’m particularly fond of for its human inhabitants, Kal-El/Clark Kent is suddenly grown up. I don’t blame the editor for the atrocious cuts and confusing continuity. It’s the job of the director (Zach Snyder) to come up with a cohesive vision – but honestly, you can just imagine the editing room littered with film clips (if they still edited like that, which they don’t) and then the post-production team trying desperately to find the footage needed to make some sense of the story. Instead, we’re offered re-shoots that feel tacked on and by the end of this mess, who cares?! There wasn’t a special effect we haven’t seen hundreds of times before. The fight scenes are inane (after a particularly long one, a broken neck is all that’s needed to end the mayhem), the story is paper-thin and dull at that, and derivation is rampant. Here’s how the conversation went with the girls after the movie, post Goldie’s opinion that it doesn’t get much worse than “Man of Steel”:
Bun Bun – “I was soooo bored, I just sat and organized my Sour Patch Kids.”
Miss T – “I was thinking about what kind of shoes I’m going to get for fifth grade.”
Goldie – “I’m pretty sure that movie could have been 15 minutes long.”
It’s not worth further discussion.
Music:
About a month ago, Goldie introduced me to Robin Thicke’s “Blurred Lines”. I’m feeling in a superlative mood today so I’ll simply say it’s the greatest song ever. I dare you not to crank it up and move. Reminds me of Prince’s best stuff. Yes, I realize the lyrics are questionable at best. Please forgive me.
Macklemore has really grown on me, and while “Same Love” is talk-y in ways I don’t always like my songs to be, the refrain sung by Mary Lambert is as beautiful as it gets. The message – gay love is the same as straight love – is beautiful, too.
Books:
Last week, I finished The Interestings by Meg Wolitzer. In short, a group of six friends, from New York 
City and just outside, meet at a summer arts camp in the 1970s and deem themselves special and bound together for life, or as much of it as Wolitzer includes in this authentically reflective novel.
Jules Jacobson is our protagonist, and through her eyes we experience not just the totemic aspects of the decades between Watergate and today, but the actual events that changed our lives, and the lives of the friends to whom Jules remains painfully and lovingly attached. Having lived in New York at approximately the age these characters do also, I was emotionally involved in ways familiar, often comfortable, occasionally difficult. After college and living in Manhattan, Jules and her best friend Ash want to be actresses except Jules is only marginally talented. Ash ends up the wife of Ethan Figman, their friend from camp who finds exceptional success as an animator, creating a “Simpsons”-like show that allows Ash to indulge in the theatre on her own terms, directing experimental plays. Before meeting Dennis, her future husband, Jules takes the all-too-familiar route of becoming a therapist in the face of her failed attempts at a career on the stage. Together, Dennis and Jules struggle in the most realistic relationship Wolitzer creates.
Wolitzer knows how to write real life – slightly magnified, somewhat lyrical, never dull. The best books are the ones you want to crawl into and inhabit, that take you somewhere, whether it’s place or time or character. With The Interestings, Wolitzer manages it all. I don’t believe in ‘summer’ reading. I believe in getting lost in a book. The Interestings is that kind of book.
In my never-ending (honestly, it will never end) quest to read the novels considered ‘great’ and ‘classic’, I picked up James Agee’s A Death in the Family. While I may not appreciate his repetitive prose, I understand the tone Agee attempted to create with it.
Knoxville, Tennessee, early 1900s. There’s been a death in the family, and a premature one at that. Mary answers the phone to a gentleman asking if there’s a man about who can come his way. An accident has happened. When her brother Andrew arrives with Aunt Hannah, who will stay with Mary until news is delivered, he wonders like all of them if the gentleman offered any details. Profoundly, Mary didn’t ask. Having lost my mother in December, passages in A Death in the Family resonated with me, but none so much as this phone call and Mary’s reaction to it. By the tone of the gentleman’s voice, the exact words he chooses, Mary knew the accident was fatal. Rather than inquire about the severity of the incident, she simply did what she was told and reached out to Andrew. When my brother-in-law called me that Sunday morning on my way back from a soccer game and instructed me to drop off the girls at his and my sister’s place and come by my mom’s, I knew and asked nothing further. The dialogue in A Death in the Family is appropriately stilted for the times, but the subtext is identical to how anyone would feel today if they received that proverbial call in the middle of the night.
As I mentioned, Agee’s novel is repetitive. Whole chapters evolve with no new information offered. But with depth and pain and poetry, Agee conveys his own story (the novel is largely autobiographical) and suggests how the death of a loved one can define us, like it or not.
Now go out and read, listen, watch. What’s on your cultural calendar?