MOVIE - The Five Year Engagement

A real treat (though a bit long) 

Wide release 4/27/12

I saw it Saturday 5/26/12 at Century Kolb, alone

R (2:04)

RT Critic:  62 Audience: 64

I liked it a lot....4.5

Director: Nicholas Stoller

Universal Pictures

Jason Segel (who co-wrote and produced), Emily Blunt (both were superb)

Good comedy - a touch of seriousness, all worked together well.  

MOVIE - The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel

Most Excellent Movie!
Limited release 5-4-2012
Viewed Tuesday 5/4/12fvgrge
PG-13 (2:04)
RT: Critics 76 Au/dience 84
cag:  Loved it/5 at El Con alone (I'd gone the week before, 1/2 hour before showtime, and it was completely sold out!)
Director:  John Madden
20th Century Fox

Judi Dench, Maggie Smith, Dev Patel, Tom Wilkinson, Bill Nighy

A group of British retirees meet for the first time at the airport in London, departing for what they think will be a snazzy hotel in India that will allow them to live more cheaply than in expensive London.... comfortably.   Dev Patel is the youngest son who is trying to get his father's rundown Marigold Hotel open and back on its feet.  Needless to say, the joint isn't exactly what anyone expected.  But they all bond...in their own ways...and, for the most part, take their new lot in life and go for it.  All the characters are wonderfully portrayed.  It's a rich story in a great setting and I loved every moment of it!

28. The Burnt House - Faye Kellerman

audio read by George Guidall
11 unabridged cds (13 hours)
2007, Harper Collins
464 pgs.
Rating:  4 Really liked it

LA Homicide Detective Peter Decker investigates the disappearance of a woman when a small commuter plane traveling from LA to San Jose crashes into a house in a in a fiery explosion.  Roseanne Dresden is missing, and although she was a flight attendant and her husband says she was on this flight, she was not working and her body cannot be found.  This opens up all sorts of questions and leads investigators to another disappearance from many years before.  The story was gripping and interesting, and although I wasn't crazy about the previous Faye Kellerman that I read, I will now search out and try some other Peter Decker mysteries.

MOVIE - Dark Shadows

MOVIE - Monsieur Lazhar

unrated (1:34)
opened 4-13-12
saw at the Loft, by myself - lots of folks there on a Sunday afternoon.
RT critics: 97 RT Audience: 91
my rating:  Really loved it/5.5
Directed by Philippe Fatardeau
Music Box Films
in French, with subtitles

A 55-year old Algerian immigrant becomes a teacher in a Toronto elementary school.

MOVIE - A Separation

PG-13 (2:03)
Limited release 12/30/11
This was my birthday movie (4/30/12) at Crossroads or the Loft, I'm writing this long afterwards and I can't remember..... (then went to free dinner at Claim Jumper afterwards.
RT critics:  99 RT audience:  93
my rating:  6/It was awesome
Director:  Asghar Farhadi
Sony Picture Classics
Winner of the Academy Award for the Best Foreign Film

Setting:  Contemporary Iran
Very engrossing, even with some long, slow-moving scenes.  Every movement - body and facial - have emotion and reason  There are a few places at the beginning that were unclear to me - the wife is asking the husband for a divorce because she wants to "go abroad" -- and it seems as if she wants him and their 11-year old daughter to come, that perhaps they may have even planned for this and requested visas together -- but the husband refuses to lave his house-bound father with Alzhheimers.  There is something in there about 40 days, and two weeks, and then she goes to her mother's a short car ride away.  Between reading and listening, something got lost in the translation for me, I guess.

The daughter, Termah, is bright, solemn, and smart.  She is being tutored for exams.  She has chosen to live with her father (because she knows her mom won't leave the country without her).  Her father, Nader, who is a banker, has hired a woman (who brings her 4-year old daughter) to care for his father during the day while he works.  This is where the drama really begins.

Great movie.  It does seem to leave a major questions unanswered (what happened to the money that was supposedly stolen) and the ending leaves you trying to chose one or two scenarios that might be the possible outcome -- but this is GOOD thinking, GOOD questions, thinking that stays with you...

Excellent acting on all counts - from the four major players to the two children to the senile grandfather.  A really good movie.

27. Lone Wolf - Jodi Picoult

2012/Emily Bestler Books/ ATRIA/ Simon & Schuster
HC $28.00 TPPL
for: adults
421 pgs.
Rating:  It was okay (the 2nd half was more engrossing than the first)

1st line:  "In retrospect, maybe I shouldn't have freed the tiger."
Setting:  Contemporary Beresford, NH
OSS:  After Cara and Edward's dad, Luke Warren, a famous wolf scientist, suffers severe brain trauma in a car accident, the estranged family tries to decide what's the next step....sustaining his life or pulling the plug?

There were many things I liked about this story.  Each short chapter was in the voice of one of the key players....Luke, the father, Edward, the son, who had left at 18 for Thailand because of some sort of argument with his dad, Cara, the younger sister who lives with and idolizes her dad, Georgie, the ex-wife and Edward and Cara's mom, and Joe Ng, Georgie's new husband and the lawyer that defends Edward.  Each character is given his own font.  Luke's pieces, all italicized, are the story of the wolves and his obsession with them.

This is the story of a family that has had a tough time from the beginning.  When you have a dad that would rather live in the wild with wolves, you have a dysfunctional family, right?  So for most of his adult life Luke was lost between two worlds, never able to fully participate in either (except for the two years he actually lived in the Canadian woods and joined a pack).  There are little mysteries to be solved, actually quite evident ones, that come out as the trial proceeds.  What trial?  The trial that pits brother against sister in who will have legal guardianship of their father.

If you're an animal lover, especially a lover of wild animals, the story would probably be quite enthralling.  For me, a little bit of the wolf information went a long way.  I guess it was entirely based on the work of Shaun Ellis, a guy in England on whom the character of Luke is based.

My daughter loves Jodi Picoult, so I thought I'd try this new book.  The only one I read previously was not a favorite.  Laura says this one has not had the greatest reviews.  I think I'll wait awhile before reading another.

26. The Affair - Lee Child

#16 Jack Reacher (this is the prequel)
audio read by Dick Hill
11 unabridged cds
14 hours
$45.00 TPPL
2011, Random House Audio
416 pages
4 **** (Really liked it)

Setting: 1997, in a tiny town called Carter Crossing, Mississippi, home to Fort Kelham, an army base used as training grounds for special forces troops.
OSS:  When Jack Reacher is dispatched to Carter Crossing, Mississippi to make sure the army isn't involved - or even mentioned - in the murders of three beautiful young women, he teams up with local sheriff Elizabeth Devereaux to get to the bottom of it all.

This is the story of how ... and why ... Jack Reacher left the army.  It's the story of his last job as an Army major.  It is Jack Reacher through and through, his cleverness, his seeing the minute clues that others would never even consider, and it's also about his stance for what's good, and what's right.  The way he decides to deal with it all at the very end of the book does bother me somewhat, but I guess that's what makes Reacher Reacher, right?  He trutsts... and lusts after ... Devereaux right off the bat, but when she becomes implicated in the crimes, you can't help but wonder.  Child keeps the reader thinking every step of the way.  The story went really fast and was really good.

25. Wildwater Walking Club - Claire Cook

read by Kymberly Dakin
6 unabridged discs (7:45)
2009 BBC Audiobooks America

Setting:  contemporary Massachusetts seashore community
OSS:
1st line/s:  "On the day I became redundant, I began to walk.  Okay, not right away.  First I lay in bed and savored the sound of the alarm not going off.  I'd been hearing that stupid beep at the same ridiculous time pretty much every workday morning for the entire eighteen years I'd worked at Balancing Act Shoes."

The narrator of this story reminds me of the voiceover commercial voice of a local ambulance-chaser law firm ad.  In some places it is SO not what I want to hear, putting a slower cadence with drawn-out wording that gives a different affectation than of what I'm hearing in my head.  Oh well, the story was okay, and I also had the book ot look at, so I read over some of the parts I'd listened to in the car.

24. Taken - Robert Crais

#15 in Elvis Cole/Joe Pike series
Audio read by Luke Daniels (He's really good.  My only wish is that sometimes Joe Pike didn't whisper all the time....)
7 unabridged cds
(7:47)
Brilliance Audio, 2011
However, looks like it was published in 2012
$32.99 TPPL
352 pages
Rating:  4.5 Super storytelling

Setting:  some LA, but most of the action takes place in the desert near the Dalton Sea, Indio/ Coachella/Palm Desert/Palm Springs in southern California

Written in an interesting way - the point-of-view switches, as does the time.  It might go from Elvis Cole in the current time to Joe Pike six days later to the kidnapped couple in the time between.  Keep you on your toes.  I didn't think, at first, that I was going to like it but I did.  Elvis Cole's sections are always in the first person, all the rest of the characters aren't, just in descriptive mode.

This time, Cole and Pike are assisted by , a government mercenary who'll try anything and follows orders from Joe Pike really well.  I see him a tall, cute, blonde, always laughing, nothing bothering him.  His hidden military/government credentials seem to be able to get him out of any predicament.....I bet he's going to show up again.

Elvis is hired by Nita Morales, a mom whose college daughter Christa and her boyfriend, Jack Berman,  have mysteriously disappeared.  She is afraid they've eloped, but this is very far from the truth...they've been kidnapped, in the wrong place at the wrong time when a group of coyotes who were transporting people from all over the world across the border are hijacked by really bad guys called bajadores. These are bandits that steal from bandits.   Life has no meaning to them.  They're just plain mean and heartless---I hate the thought that there really are people in the world like this!

POEM - How to be a Poet - Wendell Berry

How To Be A Poet

i

Make a place to sit down.

Sit down. Be quiet.

You must depend upon

affection, reading, knowledge,

skill—more of each

than you have—inspiration,

work, growing older, patience,

for patience joins time

to eternity. Any readers

who like your poems,

doubt their judgment.

ii

Breathe with unconditional breath

the unconditioned air.

Shun electric wire.

Communicate slowly. Live

a three-dimensional life;tay away from screens.

Stay away from anything

that obscures the place it is in.

There are no unsacred places;

there are only sacred places

and desecrated places.

iii

Accept what comes from silence.

Make the best you can of it.

Of the little words that come

out of the silence, like prayers

prayed back to the one who prays,

make a poem that does not disturb

the silence from which it came.

Wendell Berry

Thanks, Lisa, for posting this on Facebook. I like it a lot. And today is April 1st, the first day National Poetry Month. The birds are singing...merrily and loudly enough to wake me up on this gorgeous Sunday morning. Life is good.

23. The Unwanteds - Lisa McMann

Aladdin, 2011
Rating:  3.5/ It was a good story
for:  Middle Grades
390 pages

Setting:  the community of Quill, unknown present or future.
OSS:  Two 13-year old twins lives are severed forever as one is labeled Wanted and the other Unwanted, sent off to be purged/eliminated/put to death.
1st sentence/s:  "There was a hint of wind coming over the top of the stone walls and through the barbed-wire sky on the day Alexander Stowe was to be Purged."

But there is a surprise awaiting the Unwanteds.  They are 'unwanted ' because their creativity, their artistic inclinations, make them undesirable.  Not so in Artime, where magic and creativity and beauty are nurtured and revered.  That is, until they are discovered and a war begins.  A war with antiquated weapons and rusty vehicles on one side and magic on the other.  There is even a Dumbledore-like leader named Mr. Today.

MOVIE - The Hunger Games

They really did a very good job turning this bestseller into a movie.  Congrats!

22. Here Lies Linc - Delia Ray

2011, Alfred A. Knopf
for:  Middle grades
308 pages
Really good read (4)

First line/s:  Most people end their lives in a graveyard.  Sometimes I think my life began there."
Setting:  Contemporary Iowas City, Iowas, on a dead end street beside Oakland Cemetery.
 
Linc attends public school - 8th grade - for the first time, and attacks making friends with a sense of humor and a knack for storytelling.  And, what's really cool, is that some of the legends and history in the story are based on reality.

When Linc researches the history behind a huge black angel statue in the Oakland Cemetery, he also uncovers some hidden secrets from his own family's past.  I love cemeteries, genealogy, research -- that's what this book is all about, but in a fun, funny, can't-put-it-down read.  Each of the 38 chapters begins with a real epitaph from somewhere in America - including the location.

21. Delirium - Lauren Oliver

#1 in a series
Harper, 2011
for:  YA
441 pages
Really good/4

First line/s:  "It has been sixty-four years since the president and the Consortium identified love as a disease, and forty-three since the scientists perfected a cure."
Setting:  Dystopian Portland, Maine - contemporary parallel
OSS:  Just a few months before the mandated treatment that cures everyone at age 18 of any feelings of love, Lena falls in love.

This is a well-done dystopian adventure.  Lena and her best friend, Hana, will both be cured in September, and they're ready.  love is a disease that can kill you.  Once  you're cured, the only thing you have to worry about is government regulators and raids.  Your mate is chosen for you as is your job, your home...and people find safety in that.

When Lena meets Alex, she learns more about the Resistance, and the "invalids" who live outside the city's electrified fence.  She's reluctant at first to senak out after curfew, attend secret parties, and meet on the sly with Alex - but she can't help it.

Horrifying ending - you just can't wait to read the next segment.