MOVIE - Fifty Shades of Grey

R (1:50)

Wide release 2/13/2015

Viewed date at Roadhouse on opening day 2/13/2015

RT Critic: 27   Audience:   53

Cag: 4/Liked it a lot

Directed by Sam Taylor-Johnson

Focus Featires
Contemporary Seattle

Based on the book by E. L. James

Jamie Dornan, Dakota Johnson, Marcia Gay Harden

My comments:  Yes, I went to see it on opening day.  And yes, I liked it.  I was really curious to see how they'd handle all the x-rated scenes from the book - which was a good half of it - in an R-rated movie. In my very own, personal opinion, the movie worked really well.  Sure, there were things from the book that were missing, but the sex scenes were really well done and titillating enough to make me giggle. The book was pretty poorly written, but the movie was quite well done.  Yes, others disagree with me, but it really worked for me and I enjoyed it.  The leads were terrific.  However, other than perhaps Marcia Gay Harden as Christian's mom and definitely Max Martini as Taylor, I didn't like any of the people cast as the supporting actors.  None of them worked for me. So, all in all, the movie was ten times better than the book, but I'm glad I read the book first.

RT Summary:E.L. James' kinky best-seller gets the big screen treatment with this Universal Pictures/Focus Features co-production. The steamy tale details a masochistic relationship between a college student and a businessman, whose desires for extreme intimacy pen from secrets in his past. 

38. Dead Until Dark - Charlaine Harris

Sookie Stackhouse/Southern Vampire Series Book #1
for: ADULTS
Ace Books/Paper, 2001
292 pgs.
Rating: i n t e r e s t i n g

I've heard lots of people enjoy the HBO series Trueblood, which is based on this Sookie Stackhouse series. So when I stumbled across this first installment, I decided to give it a look-see. So what do I say about it?

It was a quick read. It held my interest. There were some very....steamy.....parts. It has an interesting take on our contemporary world, making vampires recognized, and even legalized. It gives the reader a look into smalltown southern (Lousiana) America.

Sookie Stackhouse is a cocktail waitress with a "disability" that keeps her separated from much of the world. Separated by choice. She's pretty, but because of her strange....gift... most people think her dim-witted, and she has no boyfriend. She feels she'll never be able to have one. Sookie's strange ability is to read other people's minds. She spends much of her time - and energy - trying to block people's thoughts from bombarding her, confusing her, as a mish mash of other people's tidbits swirling around in your head might indeed be a bit disconcerting.

And then Bill, a good-looking loner vampire walks into the bar one evening. Her world changes. Her employer, cutie-boy Sam, who has his own mysteries, starts to notice her. Her brother, Jason, the town's handsome womanizer, keeps getting in trouble. Her grandmother, with whom she lives, would really like to see her find a boyfriend. And the tiny town's somewhat quiet life is interrupted by a series of murders of young, "loose", women. There are vampires galore - good ones, bad ones, iconic ones. Just plain fun.

I haven't read a book with good "steamy" parts in years. This certainly is not great writing, but it certainly IS entertaining. A perfect book for me to read on this last day of school. Chill. Swim. Have a marguerita. Curl up and read. Welcome, summer! No I can rent the first few episodes of Trueblood and see what's goin' on.

1. My Lost and Found Life - Melodie Bowsher

For: Gr. 9+
Published: 2006
312 pgs.
Rating: 4/5
Read: Over the Christmas holidays, finished yesterday on the plane home


Ashley Mitchell, a spoiled, popular high school senior gets the surprise of her life when she discoveres her mother has embezzeled money from her firm and left town, leaving Ashley completely alone, destitute, and unprepared. I very much enjoyed watching Ashley's character change and grow and rearrange itself so that she became a survivor and a much nicer person. Set in Burlingame, CA and San Francisco, Ashley sells all the contents of her house, lives in a tiny unheated camper trailer behind a gas station, and gets a job at a coffee shop in SF - all things that she would have previously sneered at/about. She lets down her snobbiness and snootiness more and more, slowly making real (vs. superficial) friends, and discovering what it really takes to survive in life.

This was a really good story, kept me entertained on long airline flights without making my eyes get heavy or my head nodding - -

61. Maybe - Brent Runyon

For: Older YA (Gr 9+)
Published: 2006
196 pgs.
Rating: 4
Finished Monday, Dec. 15, 2008

Brian's older brother has died, we slowly find out how. Brian's grief is locked inside himself, and we follow his life and his thoughts as his family moves to an affluent area in Virginia. Here he becomes a junior at his new high school, finds a group of friends - they happen to be in the drama department - and he even gets a part in a play. We are very much in his head in this book, sharing his thoughts, his yearnings and his misgivings. His first...his only...thoughts about each girl he meets is sex, and he goes out with them whether he likes them or not, hoping, hoping...... He's really quite messed up. We are with him as he gets his license, meets new people, even sit in on his classes with him. And slowly, slowly he gets to face his brother's death and get on with his life.

I went up and down about my feelings about this book. I wasn't crazy about the protagonist, but the book is really well written, and I do feel like I was in Brian's head. Brian's screwed up head. You do end the book thinking he's going to be okay - but it's because he finally finds a female that he likes for herself. Where will this take him? Will his fickle feelings return so that he'll have to begin all over? We can only guess!

58. Cycler - Lauren McLaughlin

For: Young Adults
Published: Aug. 26, 2008
256 pgs.
Rating: 5
Finished Nov. 16, 2008

I was picking through my pile of ARCs from last May's BEA, realizing that I can't read them all in a timely manner, choosing what to take to school to share with my students. I'd never really looked at this one, so when I read the back cover I left the piles all over the living room floor and started to read. And kept reading.

17-year old Jill McTeague does not have a teenager's "normal" premenstrual cycle. Oh no. For four days each month, her body is mysteriously transformed into a boy's body. Jill was initially horrified and appalled by this transformation, but her mother took it one step further. PLAN B was created, a way for Jill to blot out her four-day transformation and be able to live the other 24 days of her month as a normal teenage girl with a combination of self-hypnotism and meditation. During the male-four-days, she/he never ventured from the house, and Jill's absence from school was explained away with vague monthly blood transfusions. But, by blotting out thoughts of herself as a boy for four days, her mind created Jack, I guess you'd call it an alter-ego, who was very much a boy. Horndog boy.

The story switches back and forth, month by month, between Jack and Jill.

Really interesting characters. Her best friend, Ramie, gorgeous and unusual, a crazy-fashion designer. Her crush, Tommy, bisexual and caring, a dream...and dreamy ...guy. Her mother, control-freak extraordinaire with a screw loose. Her father, a man with a story that would make a great book itself....a house-bound guru meditation yoga freak who has taken to living in their basement. And Jack and Jill.

Somewhere I read this was a "dark comedy of sex, gender, and sexuality." Yes, yes, and yes! FUNNY, very funny. Asking great gender questions. And it's full of sex, oh yes. Greatly written, very satisfying, I would consider McLaughlin a very clever storyteller, indeed. I had originally given this a 4.5 rating, but I'm going back and changing it to a five. Many facets, and I liked them all. I think I originally took that extra half point because of all the sex, I don't feel totally comfortable sharing the book with my students, though I know some of them would LOVE it. But the sex parts WERE important, well written, and .... fun.

The setting, a small town on the North Shore of Massachusetts, is pretty much where I was raised. I could see the streets, the people, the beach, the yacht club, the high school.

I've turned the cover over, looking between the front and the back at least a dozen times. How did I miss it before this weekend? Write on, Ms. McLaughlin!

57. Living Dead Girl - Elizabeth Scott

For YA (ARC says 16+)
Published: Sept, 2008
176 pgs.
Rating: Unrateable
Read in one sitting, after school today

Tragic
Heartbreaking
Unforgettable
Disturbingly Disturbing
Older YA - NOT MS, for sure!

15-year old "Alice" was kidnapped from a school field trip when she was ten and in the fifth grade. Terrorized into thinking that her abductor, Ray, would kill her family, she submitted completely to him, mentally, sexually...and became an empty shell. He wanted a "little" girl, and has been starving her to keep her under 100 pounds, de-hairing her to keep her innocent-appearing, and rarely lets her out of his grip. Now he decides he needs a new, younger "Alice" and is forcing her to help him find and capture her. I hated it. I had to finish it. I couldn't stop. I had to find out what happened. Reluctantly.

Reader beware: though the descriptions are not what one might consider extremely"graphic", this book left nothing to the imagination. We see every painful, constant assault. But it was beautifully written and a fast read, though repetetive in places.

I'd love to think that this could and would never happen. Unfortunately, I am certain that it wlll, can, and has. What is our world coming to? I know they're out there. How? Why?

How would this young woman EVER be able to lead a normal life?

56. Little Brother - Cory Doctorow

For: YA
Published: April, 2008
384 pgs.
Rating: 3.5
Finished Nov. 8, 2008

Set in San Francisco just a year or two in the future, Marcus Yallow is a 17 year-old techno-geek high school senior. One afternoon he and his three best friends skip out of school to play Harajuku Fun Madness when they hear a huge explosion. A bigger-than 9/11 terrorist attack has destroyed the Bay Bridge, killing thousands. But they are in the wrong place at the wrong time - they are picked up by an unmarked white van, hooded, bound, and taken in a boat to an old prison. There they are held separately in deplorable conditions and questioned mercillessly, without any rights at all. This is what sets up the premise of the book.

Marcus, once released, becomes w15t0n, the head of XNet. Together with one of his buddies, Jolu, and his new girlfriend, Ange, he comes up with plan after plan to try to point out to American citizens that they are now living in a police state and that many of their constitutional rights are gone - or at least being ignored. Teenages begin working together to overthrow the DHS (Department of Homeland Security), who have become a ruthless, overbearing, self-righteous group of our-way-or-the-highway clones.

CONS
-Endless technical explanations
-Paced well in places, very slow in others
-No goodness showed in any of the bad guys -- come one!
-No texting? Hard to make a book set two or three years in the future believable without texting.

PROS
-Makes you think......HARD.....
-Deals with a very important, timely subject
-Keeps you guessing
-Raises questions that need to be asked
-Marcus' reactions are very real: elation, crying, being over-the-top scared, horny - you do get to know, and understand, and root for, this young man
-Lots of references to interesting things - the beat writers, places and areas in San Francisco (yeah, City Lights Bookstore!), hippie and yippie history, Orwell's 1984

PRO AND CON, both
-The sex scenes. I really want some of my 7th and 8th graders to read this. I have two in particular in mind, but the sex scenes, which I think are important and very well written. are not appropriate at all for these two young techno-geek men who would otherwise eat up this book. No objections for the readers who can handle and understand this VERY smartly written (and really, quite small) part of the story.

And, hey, this is my ONE HUNDREDTH post!

52. When It Happens - Susan Colasanti

For: Young Adults (for sure)
Published: 2006
Setting: New Jersey
310 pgs.
Rating: 3.5 for fun
Read: Oct. 10, 2008
Read in one long sitting

This was a very satisfying, predictable, high school romance with a happy ending. Just what everyone wants and needs once in awhile, no matter how much they say they don't.....

The Washington Post says: "When It Happens is sort of like high school itself: The outcome may be predictable, but what's really important is what happens along the way." It is, indeed, a "fun romance", as it quotes on the back cover.

The story is told alternately between the two protagonists, both high school seniors, Sara, a very bright, hard-working young lady, and Tobey, a very bright self-proclaimed slacker who is a music afficionado. We go through Sara's crush on Dave, a really good-looking, popular jock who she discovers, very shortly after they begin dating, has nothing remotely in common with her, and at the same time we observe Tobey's yearnings for Sara. Tobey is a really sweet, sensitive, sexy too-good-to-be-true-or-bellieved young man that every mom wants to think is just like her own son.

Sara has two best friends with whom she shares all, Tobey has two best friends with whom he shares most, the popular crowd are typically mean and self-centered...there are no surprises here, but no frustrations, either....just an enjoyable read with a satisfying ending.... and doesn't everyone needs that kind of fix once in awhile, especailly on a Friday night before an extra long weekend?

50. Fly on the Wall - E. Lockhart

How One Gir Saw Everything
For: YA
Published: 2006
182 pgs.
Rating: 3.5/Fun
Finished: Oct. 8, 2008

This is the third E. Lockhart novel I've read - all for the TARC YA Reading Group. Lockhart's audience is the female late middle-school/early high-schooler who likes romance novels. I recommended this book to an 8th grader who as been emrboiled in the Clique series (gag), and she liked it a lot. It's led her to others of this genre that are SO much better than the Cliques.

Gretchen Yee, a 16-year-old half-Jewish, Half-Chinese comic book artist, attends the Manhattan School for the Arts, where no one want to be normal or "average". This is tough for her, because that's exactly how she considers herself. Nonetheless, she dies her hair bright red in an attempt to fit in. She has a best friend, Katya, but holds herself off from many of the other students. Literature and Drawing are the two subjects she's having trouble with - Drawing because her art teacher is trying to get her to abandon the comic book style that she loves, and literature because....well, she really doesn't care about literature. The sophomore class is currently studying Kafka's Metamporhasis, and she could care less. She has a huge crush on Titus, a classmate that also appears to be a very nice young man, popular with the Art Rats (the sophomore drawing program), but laments that she doesn't understand boys at all.

One weekend she is magically changed into a fly in the boy's locker room, where she resides for a week, not understanding how she got there or if she'll ever be able to return to her own life. What she observes for this week will change her life, change her confidence in herself, and help her understand boys a whole lot more.

It's a great premise, and I like the way bullying and homophobia are handled. It's an entertaining story, seemingly lighthearted but with a couple of pretty powerful messages included.

49. The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian - Sherman Alexie

Illustrator: Ellen Forney
For: Young Adults
Published: 2007
National Book Award
230 pgs.
Rating: 5/5
Finished Sept. 22, 2008

The first time I ever heard of Sherman Alexie was when I traveled cross-country in 2002 and stopped in a cool little bookshop on the southwestern coast of Washington, just before hitting Oregon. I'll have to try to figure out where that was. I purchased a really cool Alaskan painting in that little town. That's where I picked up Alexie's The Toughest Indian in the World, and I'd never heard of him before. In May, at the BEA convention, I heard him speak. I am now a fan.

This is Sherman Alexie's first YA book, and it's a doozy. It's autobiographical, seriously funny and incredibly sad. 14-year old Arnold "Junior" Spirit, born and raised on the Spokane Indian Reservation, just outside Spokane, Washington, decides to leave the rez school and attend the all-white school over 20 miles away in Reardan. He loves to read and he's very smart, and he knows this will be the only way to make something of himself. He becomes ostracized by the entire tribe other than his immediate family. However, he perserveres, transforming from the geeky Indian kid that everyone ignores to a well-liked basketball hero and smart student. During this year, many of the people he loves and admires die...his father's best friend, Eugene, who is always good to him, his grandmother, the smartest, kindest person he's ever know, and his older sister, who hid out in the basement of their house for years until she fled to Montana to get married and live in a trailer that looked like a TV dinner. His best friend, Rowdy, totally abandons him, his father is frequently drunk, he has little to eat and sometimes no way to get to school other than walk.

Junior is a budding cartoonist, and Ellen Forney's cartoons throughouot the book compliment the text well.

There are probably a hundred or more quotes that really hit me in this book. "I think the world is a series of broken dams and floods, and my cartoons are tiny little lifeboats." "I wish I were magical, but I am really just a poor-ass reservation kid living with his poor-ass family on the poor-ass Spokane Indian Reservaton." "Like the coffin was settling down for a long, long nap, for a forever nap." And "Gordy gave me this book by a Russian dude named Tolstoy, who wrote: 'Happy famiies are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.' Well, I hate to argue with a Russian genius, but Tolstoy didn't know Indians. And he didn't know that all Indian families are unhappy for the same exact reasons: the fricking booze. Yep, so let me pour a drink for Tolstoy and let him think hard about the true definition of unhappy families."

Sherman Alexie is now an extremely successful author, husband, and father of two. A success story. Big lump in the throat. Real big lump. Real.

Impressive.

42. A Bad Boy Can Be Good for a Girl - Tanya Lee Stone

For: Young Adult
Pub: 2006
230 pgs.
Rating: 4/5
Finished: Aug. 30, 2008

After I'd read the first third of this book, I realized I'd read it before. So I looked it up and I had - when it first came out. I'd given it a 2.5 rating. It's written in verse, and I've read a lot of verse novels since then. And I've read a lot of books recently about teenage girls that can't figure out boys, so they're anxous fragility is still in my mind. But I do wonder why I apparently like this book so much better now than I did when I first read it.

Written in three sections by Josie, then Nicolette, and finally Aviva, the girls talk about a good-looking, sexy, too-good-to-be true senior that has swept them all of their feet, gotten away with as many "favors" as he can, then broken their hearts. Josie finds Judy Blume's FOREVER in the school library and writes a warning to other Beach High Girls. It comes to light that he has done the same thing to many, many of the girls in this high school in his four years there.

He is never named. I like that. There is nothing to admire in him, it seems to make him a lesser person, which he is. And this book, and the previous two that I just read (The Boyfriend List and The Boy Book), remind me of the thoughts and feelings and anxiety that teenage girls go through. Since I work with them every day, this reminder is a very good thing. I had sort-of forgotten. Hard to believe since it was only yesterday I was that anxiety-ridden teenage girl....

Addendum 9/3, A review I read that will help me remember the book:
"WOW - I devoured this book. The title is so appropriate yet misleading: the story of one guy and the girls he uses, one after another. Each girl tells her own story, leading the reader through the intense passion of a crush, the decisions to call, to kiss, to love, to leave. Written in verse, the language is packed with sensory imagery. Judy Blume's Forever plays an integral role as girls' notes to one another in the back of that old library book comfort and console. High school (and even mature middle school girls) need to read this book before they find themselves in similar situations; this would be a good companion novel to Laurie Halse Anderson's Speak."

41. The Boy Book - E. Lockhart

A Study of Habits and Behaviors, Plus Techniques for Taming Them
For: Young Adult
Pub: 2006
193 pgs.
Rating: 4/5
Read: Aug. 28th (in one sitting)

This is really part two of The Boyfriend List, although it was set up a bit differently and I liked it a bit more. There were still footnotes, but not as many, and not as long, and they didn't seem as obnoxious.

Ruby is still a leper, practically friendless, and still seeing Dr. Z, her shrink. It's now junior year and her life is very, very different than it has been through the beginning of tenth grade. You can see how talking with a psychiatrist (at least a GOOD psychiatrist) helps you understand yourself a little better, as well as how to make the right choices for yourself.

Roo misses Kim but becomes friends with Meghan, who carpools her to school, and becomes friends-again with Nora. She still pines for Jackson, and has become buddies with Noel. She gets a part time job at a zoo, where she really seems to enjoy the animals, and is truly becoming less passive than previously. The crises point in this book comes when all the important characters in the story go together for a sort-of-nature week at "Canoe Island".

It's not a pat, girl-gets-boy ending. It's a REAL ending, an ending that shows growth and maturity and thoughfulness. It's an ending that's truthful. It ends, "I lay there in the blue light from the TV set. Not really watching. Just lying there, between Meghan and Nora..........The water lapped at the sides of our houseboat. And I felt lucky." She's going to be all right.

40. The Boyfriend List - E. Lockhart

A Study of Habits and Behaviors, Plus Techniques for Taming Them

For: Young Adult
Pub: 2005
229 pgs.
Rating: 3.5/5
Finished: Aug. 24, 2008

After quickly skimming some reviews for this book, I found three things that people liked. I agree with one of them.

Organization. Lockhart frames the story using a list of 15 boys that have somehow touched Ruby's (Roo's) life. Yes, it was a clever way of telling the story and worked well introducing characters, but it did not help the time frame, it made the story jump around, I was always confused about whether she was talking about years ago, months ago, weeks ago, or the present. Sometimes I even had to go back a few chapters to figure out the sequence or to double check which boy was which.

Footnotes. There were footnotes on every page, or so it seemed. Long ones. This was how Lockhart continued the story. She could have easily included it in the prose of the story, but I guess she was just trying to be clever or different. I had to jump back and forth, read the bottom, move my eyes over the page above to find where I'd left off, only to have to switch to the bottom again. Hated it. More confusion. At the end of the book is a section called "A Conversation With E. Lockhart". One question asks her what her ten favorit all-time movies are. This list helps me understand from whence her writing style doth cometh, since it included: Annie Hall, Cabaret, Moulin Rouge and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind -- very telling, eh?

First person perspective. Always love it. (Aha, you guessed it, this is the one with which I agree.)

The plot, when you finally sort out its sequence, is SO sopohmore girl angst-y. The insight that Roo finds from writing AND talking to her "shrink", Dr. Z, is spot-on perfect and not overinflated. Her sophmore year in a small private school, Tate, where she thinks she's the only scholarship student, is complete with being thrilled about having a boyfriend, loving her quartet of best friends, making a few missteps, not knowing what to do, and then screwing everything up. Painfully. And that she lives on a small house boat with her one-woman-performance-artist, macrobiotic mother and her "but how does that make you FEEL" gardening father. And that she has questions and misgivings about boys, sexuality, boys, kissing, boys....you get the idea.

Lots of things to like, a few things to get past, but now I'm ready for the next installment, The Boy Book, which I have to read for a book club, but decided to read this, its predecessor, first.

38. Spanking Shakespeare - Jake Wizner

AUDIO Read by Mike Chamberlain
For: Young Adult !!
Book Pub: 2007
Audio Pub: 2008 Listening Lib.
6 hrs. 35 min.
304 pgs.
Rating: 5/5
Finished: Aug. 13, 2008

I loved this book. Publisher's Weekly's starred review says: "Bold and bawdy ... exceptionally funny and smart." First and foremost, it's laugh-out-loud funny. It's told in the first person by Shakespeare Shapiro, an angst-ridden high school senior. Voice! Unbellievable voice. Whether we're listening to Shakespeare's current woes or reading the memoir essays he's written about various embarrassing times in the past seventeen years of his life, it's all a riot. And yes, it's bawdy, to say the least. He focuses on the things that I imagine most 17-year-old boys focus on....sex and girls and parents and school, with a few observations about drugs and alcohol thrown in. This book is not for prudes, and I wouldn't recommend it to my middle-schoolers for a few more years, but I am definitely going to recommend it to friends from high school age on up.

Mike Chamberlain does a superb job with the reading. We can hear and see Shakespeare in his wonderful rendering of the story. The cover is cute but misleading. This is NOT a story about the bard. It's the story of a wonderful writer, a thoughtful, endearing, very funny young man who I would sure love to meet.