Americanah, by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

I adore Adichie's writing (I was a big fan of both Half of a Yellow Sun and That Thing Around Your Neck). For some reason, I find her writing style completely absorbing. It's not that her books are transcendent works of genius -- there is something missing from them that I can't identify, they seem almost too closely bound to actual life? They are a little too neatly constructed? I know those are basically the opposite critiques. Shut up. -- but they are just a wonderful place to spend time in. They're like hanging out with someone you really like and having an interesting conversation. They are very smart, and often quite edgy. This one, in particular, has a lot of extremely incisive and intelligent observations on race, immigration, and identity (a nice companion piece to Baratunde Thurston's How to be Black, which I apparently never posted about but was very impressed by. Smart, funny, and highly readable. Everyone, regardless of their race, will learn something from it.). The highly cynical critic might complain that much of the story seems like an excuse for all this fascinating reflection on racial identity; but they would be missing out on how well realized many of the characters are.

The novel opens with Ifemelu, a Nigerian woman who has been living in the US for over 10 years, getting her hair braided in preparation for her return to Nigeria. Over the course of the 6 hours she spends at the salon, we go back in time and learn about her adolescence, and particularly about her former boyfriend. We also get caught up on his life since they parted ways, positioning ourselves to be ready for their reunion. In this sense, the book can seem slightly overdetermined, but one does have to admit that the shifts in chronology are skillfully handled, and the book admirably manages to straddle multiple settings, and bring all of them to life.

Yes, it is in many ways catnip for the Good Liberal Reader. But what can I say; it's a smart and enjoyable book, and a quick read, despite its length. I look forward to seeing what Adichie does next.

Blue Nights, by Joan Didion

I loved The Year of Magical Thinking, so I was looking forward to Blue Nights, morbid as that sounds. It's hard to critique this book without feeling like a jerk, because she's obviously tackling very difficult topics (the death of her daughter, her own increasingly poor health), but the fact is, it's just not as good of a book. It's scattered and fragmentary, without a strong thread running through to link the parts together. The voice is timid; Didion's trademark brevity comes across as incomplete thoughts rather than controlled prose condensed into hard nuggets of insight. The stories about her daughter -- more specifically, about her daughter's adoption -- are interesting, but they also seem almost still too personal.  Overall, it reads more like material for a book than a finished product. Not her finest work.

A whole bunch of movies

I think my lack of updates is at least partly caused by a combination of suddenly having a very busy social life (back in Chicago) and becoming a regular listener of NPR's Pop Culture Happy Hour (haven't they basically covered it?), but I miss you, blog. And I've seen A LOT of movies in the last few weeks. So rather than trying to make myself go back and write thoughtful, worthwhile posts on all of them, I'm just gonna give it to you fast and dirty (admit it, sometimes you like it that way).

Before Earth

I love Will Smith, but nope. Bo-ring. The biggest problem, I think, was that one of the premises of the film was that the Bad Things tracked people by sensing their fear. So the ultimate fighter (Will Smith, duh) had to be a person who could show no fear, which turned out to translate more broadly into showing no emotion, ever, which is kind of counter-productive in a movie that also wants to be about father-son relationships. Or not - it basically plays right into the emotionless-father-and-the-raging-hormonal-son-who-just-wants-to-hear-Daddy-say-he-loves-him dynamic. But I don't go to Will Smith movies to see him being a robot goddamnit.

  Jaden does an ok job, but he's maybe a bit more like a normal teenager than one really wants to see in the movie. In other words, one minute he's acting like a child, the next like a brave young man. He regularly doesn't listen to instructions and does the exact opposite of what he should do and you want to shake him. So yeah, probably just like a real teenager?

  I will say though, the special effects were pretty cool. The planet looked really neat, and definitely seemed like a living thing, another character in the movie, which does weirdly make you think about climate change and saving the environment and stuff. 

 Oh, and then there's this weird thing with ghosts (ok, I guess I had more to say about this movie than I thought...). Unclear whether the dead really are coming back to speak to the living, or whether imagining they are is a way that the living pep themselves up. I found it kind of odd. Maybe this is because I'm working on a book project about Gothic fiction, so I am way, way more attentive to how the supernatural is being portrayed than anyone else would ever want to be.

  Overall though, the movie was boring. The promo interview that Will and Jaden did together in NYMagazine, on the other hand, was totally fascinating.

Fast and Furious 6

I don't understand why all of the Fast and Furious movies are totally sweet. But they are. I mean, people are like, "what? really, another one?" And then they're like "well, I guess if suckers are still willing to go..." And you know what? I am one of those suckers. I will keep going because they keep being bizarrely fantastic. The writers seem to have hit on the formula for the perfect mindless action movie. Convoluted plot, sprinkling of corny emotional issues (but not enough to drag the movie down) delivered with just the right amount of sincerity and woodenness, snarky humor and cheesy one liners, and stunts that are just ridiculous enough to be TOTALLY AWESOME. A ringing endorsement from me. Boyfriend hasn't seen the entire series and I am really looking forward to going through it again and seeing if the previous movies are as good as I remember. 

Man of Steel

I don't know why everyone is hating on this movie so hard. I wasn't all that interested in seeing it (I'm pretty over the whole superhero movie thing), but Better Half was, as were some of our friends, so why not, we went to the opening screening at midnight. I should be up front here and tell you that I dozed a little. But still! I enjoyed it! I very much appreciated that they skipped a lot of the stock pieces of the superhero genre (lengthy montage as he figures out his capabilities; droning explanations of how things got to this point; tormented negotiations with the love interest because superheroes aren't good at maintaining relationships; self-righteous lecture on what a hero is) or dispatched them quickly and efficiently. I thought the movie wasn't nearly as trite as many of these things are - I even found some aspects of the story compelling. The movie was definitely really, really long, but again, what movies aren't these days? The special effects were pretty sweet. Overall, I quite enjoyed it, for what it was. It wasn't exactly the same as every other superhero movie. Maybe that's why other people hated it?

What Maisie Knew

Very well done. Excellent acting, gorgeous cinematography. It's really hard to tell a story about a sweet little girl getting neglected by her parents, because often you worry so much about the child and hate the parents so much that you can't actually enjoy the film. What Maisie Knew cleverly gets around this problem by having rock-solid, reliable caretakers at hand, so you know that nothing really bad will happen to Maisie, and also by giving the parents just enough self-awareness to realize what awful parents they are, even if it's not enough to make them better, which makes you despise them a little bit less. It's a sweet, quirky story about incredibly attractive people. I liked it.

Star Trek: Into Darkness

Meh. I enjoyed it well enough when I saw it, but I don't remember much of it at all. I didn't like it as much as I did the last one, and I think overall the dialogue was less snappy and the plot was less intelligent, but it wasn't bad.

This is the End

Maybe it's partly because I read this Linda Holmes piece  on the lack of women in this summer's movies, or maybe because it really just is that blatant in this movie, but GAH! Let me start by saying, sure, it's a funny movie. The porn mag sequence between James Franco and Danny McBride is phenomenal. There are plenty of chuckles to be had. It's fun to see celebrities playing versions of themselves, kinda, and to feel like you get to see them in their regular lives, kinda. The plot is silly and takes a seriously cheesy turn towards the end, but hey, that's ok. But seriously, how much do these guys hate women?? Three women get to talk during this movie: Mindy Kaling, who shows up to say that she wants to have sex with Michael Cera; Rihanna, who basically just gets to repeat that she's not gonna have sex with anyone (see, 'cuz she's empowered! Right?); and Emma Watson, who gets to resurface in the bunker in the middle of the movie, only to be kicked out of the movie again because she makes rape jokes not funny. No, really. She reappears, then there's this odd scene where Jay, the sensitive guy, tries to talk to the other guys about how she might be worried that they're gonna rape her (how depressing is that? The movie can't quite decide whether he's a sensitive feminist for being concerned about this, or whether it's creepy and weird. I can't either.), and in the ensuing dialogue, they accidentally give her the impression that they're debating who gets to rape her, and she gtfo, after axing a giant penis sculpture. Once she's gone, the movie can go on with slotting males into all the traditional "female" roles (thereby challenging typical conventions of masculinity, which initially tricks you into thinking its doing something subversive with gender, until you realize that it's only subversive enough to permanently rid themselves of women) by having Franco, for instance, have a crush on Rogen. In fact, they even go the distance and have one of the male characters get raped, and another one later in the movie become a sex slave. Sexual violence: totally funnier if men are the victims. Right?

It's a rare case when gender stuff angers me enough that I have a hard time enjoying the movie, but this movie managed to do it. It's not just the specific points listed above. It's that throughout the entire movie, I felt very much like I was on the outside looking in on a scene where I was not wanted, specifically - and solely - because I'm female. It's not that they don't think women can be funny. It's that they don't care, because so can men, so why have women? My boyfriend was like well, it's just that it's a movie about a group of friends, so it had to be those guys because they're friends in real life. To which my response is, oh, so they don't have female friends in real life either?
  Look, maybe I'm rare in having a large group of friends that includes men and women. Maybe it is unreasonable of me to think that people should have (close) friends of the opposite sex. But I do, and yes, if you don't, than I think you probably are kind of sexist. 

Much Ado About Nothing

Yes, this really is the next thing I saw. Even more funny, Anthony Lane actually reviewed this along with This is the End (and I thought his review was spot-on, though I don't always enjoy or agree with his stuff), pointing out that both movies are basically extended house parties. 

Anyways. Let me be up front and say that I LOVED the original (well, the 1993 version, maybe there was an earlier one) Much Ado About Nothing, the one with Kenneth Branagh and Emma Thompson back when they were still married, and Denzel Washington, and Kate Beckinsale and Robert Sean Leonard before they went on to do kind of weird random stuff with their careers, and even a surly Keanu Reeves. It's actually one of my all-time favorites. I basically know it by heart. I've seen it a bazillion times. It's so great. Why would you even make another one, unless you're gonna do something meaningfully different, because obviously you can't do the same thing better? So I was almost certainly not gonna like this one anyhow, and you should probably discount everything I have to say.

  But I thought their delivery of the lines was flat and ugly, and the black and white stripped the whole film of any warmth or human feeling, and the gestures toward modernizing the story were unnecessary and seemed tacked on and actively dumb, given the whole Hero plot. A couple of the moments of self-parody that many reviewers have mentioned, like a dog howling in the distance during a monologue about love, are cute. Nathan Filion is pretty great as Dogberry. But I didn't care about most of the other characters, and I was bored during the entire movie. So there.

The East

An entertaining thriller. I don't have much to say about it, and I suspect that in years to come it'll be one of those movies where people mention it and I'm like "huh? oh! yeah! that WAS pretty good!" Actually, I tend to not enjoy spy/CIA type movies very much, so the fact that I liked this one is in itself notable. It definitely wants to be a thought-provoking movie that makes you think about terrorism and social action and evil corporations, and it's willing to take that to surprisingly subversive places. Tangent, but I love the way Ellen Paige walks. My boyfriend says it's because she walks like a dude. 

The Heat

YES. Yes, yes, yes. I went in wanting to love it and so worried I wouldn't, and I loved it so much more than I expected. I love buddy cop action films of the 80s, so it's not like it was a hard sell, but this was SO funny, I was literally in tears at one point. Holmesie (yes, that's how I refer to her in my head now, because I love her so much, don't make it weird) nailed it in her review, so I don't think I need to say much else. As a side note, one point where Holmesie and I do disagree - I watched Miss Congeniality on my flight back to the US in June, and I enjoyed it, I dunno why she hates it so much. But entertaining as it is, it is nowhere near as good as The Heat, which is just completely great. Go see it. It's awesome. 

The Lone Ranger

Bo-ring. So boring. Johnny Depp is entertaining enough, doing basically his typical Johnny Depp thing, but he cannot shrug off the deadweight that is the rest of this bloated turd. Everyone else in this movie pretty much sucks. Is the movie offensive to Native Americans? Well, there is the matter of the serious implication that an entire tribe gets wiped out in the middle of the movie, which is, you know, a bummer, but isn't gonna get in the way of anybody's happy ending. Really though, the movie is just overall offensive in its immense suckitude, and you should shun it.

The Way Way Back

If you have seen the trailer for this movie, you probably know exactly what you're gonna see, except for maybe the last 3 minutes of the end. Not that it's bad, it's just pretty paint-by-numbers indie flick. It is nice to be reminded of what a good actor Sam Rockwell is, and how very likeable he is when he's being likeable. It's fun to see Steve Carrell be a jerk, and nice to see that he's a good enough actor to do it convincingly. I don't particularly enjoy watching movies about unhappy teenagers, because I was one myself and what's the fun in being reminded of what that was like? But in this movie, as in many such things, the world is actually far kinder and better than reality at crucial moments (even my boyfriend, who is normally tolerant of movies in a way I struggle to be, leaned over after a scene involving break-dancing and said "Yeah that would never happen."), even though it still kinda sucks. Meh. Pretty skippable movie overall.

I think I'm still forgetting some movies, astonishingly enough. But that's a start at least. I'll try to be better from now on...

5 Minarets in New York

My friend Colleen is reviewing this movie for a journal, so we watched it together the other day. Having just read the draft of her (excellent) review, I started thinking about the movie again and figured I'd log my own responses (bonus: this being a blog rather than a respectable publication, I don't have to be nice). What makes the movie interesting is its attempt to be a Turkish-American blockbuster. The plot centers around a terrorism investigation that brings two Turkish cops to NYC, where they are to capture a local imam named Haci and bring him to Turkey to stand trial. One of the cops has tortured the crap out of some terr'rists and identified Haci as The Bad Guy. After a quick chat about American imperialism with a comically bigoted FBI agent (Robert Patrick, what happened to you??) they arrest their man, who is then rescued in a daring mission led by Danny Glover, his Muslim buddy, and Glover's army of Harlem thugs. In a wildly improbable sequence of events, the Turks end up hanging out with Haci (and his Christian wife, played by Gina Gershon, who as Colleen points out, is dressed like a Turkish mom for the entire movie, distressingly though impressively obliterating her considerable sex appeal) for a few days, where they are forced to confront the fact that he is clearly a saint. This puzzles them somewhat, but in the end, off to Turkey they go (where innocent men don't stand a chance!). I won't spoil the rest for you, because the surprise twists are half the ludicrous fun of it. But as Colleen aptly summarizes it, from that point on, the movie basically turns into a Turkish soap opera.

Let me be totally clear: this movie is terrible. The dialogue is appallingly bad (I suspect the English language bits were written in Turkish and fed into Google Translate), and the movie is basically a massive collection of worn out stereotypes. You might think that a cooperative effort between Turkish and US film folk would help avoid stereotype, but bizarrely, it seems to do the opposite - instead, all character types are pulled straight out of the stockpile of cliche, whether they be Turkish, Muslim, American, cops, WASPS, distressed daughters... there is nothing new under the cinematic sun, in this movie. I was, however, somewhat intrigued by the question of audience, namely - who is this movie made for? I think it must be Turks, because Americans a. don't like reading subtitles, ie will be turned off by all the Turkish dialogue, and b. won't get a lot of the cultural specificity of the Turkish segments. Not that they necessarily need to, but the underlying critique of juxtaposed scenes of fundamentalist groups chanting in a mosque and quasi-fascist training of the Turkish police force is going to be somewhat lost on them, and it might be one of the more interesting aspects of the film. I wonder, then, whether the problem is that this movie shouldn't be judged alongside American film at all, but rather, as a stock Turkish melodrama that has upped its ante by including American actors, similar to the way you occasionally see US film stars in Bollywood films (Kambakkht Ishq being particularly awesome in that regard. Seriously.). Not being a connoisseur of Turkish melodrama, I'm not really qualified to speak on that, but I think it's an interesting possibility.

Running the Books: Memoirs of a Prison Librarian, by Avi Steinberg

I learned about this book after reading a New Yorker article by the author, and immediately bought it. I'm really interested in prisons and what life there is like, and have long considered teaching a class in one or getting involved in some kind of program that helps former inmates adjust to life outside. So unsurprisingly, I found this book incredibly fascinating, albeit not as well written as I might have liked. Oftentimes I caught myself thinking "ok Avi, enough about you, tell me about the stuff I'm actually interested in." The episodic nature of the book is a mixed success; I liked the way some stories were left to sit for awhile, to be returned to later, but other times it seemed I was dealing with a collection of fragments that weren't woven together well. Actually, I'm somewhat inclined to blame the editor. To be honest, the book is WAY too long. A lot of the material could be cut (and potentially used for a different book). That said, to me at least, it was still very much a worthwhile read, and at moments, packed a real punch emotionally.

Ruby Sparks

I had exactly zero interest in watching this movie, because the previews made it look like a fairly obnoxious and precious love story about a guy who writes his dream girl and then has hipster montages with her. But I've been listening to a lot of back episodes of Pop Culture Happy Hour, and in one of them Linda Holmes said she expected to hate the movie but really liked it, and I have come to trust Holmesie pretty much blindly, so when it was available for watching on my flight, I gave it a whirl. And of course, Linda was right. What makes the movie great is that rather than being the manic pixie dream girl story you expect, it is a very smart critique of exactly those kinds of stories.

Calvin is a lonely writer looking for love, and after he has a few dreams about Ruby, he writes one down, and presto, she comes to life. Thankfully, the movie doesn't spend much time trying to make that real; it establishes the hypothetical premise, does the bare minimum to validate it, and then turns to an exploration of the moral/philosophical aspects of the issue. Namely, do you actually want your dream girl, and what are relationships between real people like. It turns out to be a very smart and interesting take on that (though poor Calvin ends up looking like an unbelievably self-absorbed jerk who is borderline sadistic). I particularly enjoyed the way the movie used an implicit contrast to two other relationships to reflect on the subject. I also really liked the character of the brother, who seems, at moments, like a crass frat boy type, but turns out, much like Homer Simpson, to be redeemed by the deep love he feels for his wife, and the very grounded perspective he has on it.

Interestingly, although the movie seems to be a critique of the way that women are constructed as fantasy objects rather than valued as the complex and imperfect people that they are, it doesn't actually spend much time with the female characters, which is kind of ironic. But then again, what else is new. Despite that, it's a smart and entertaining film, definitely worth watching.

The Great Gatsby

I read The Great Gatsby twice. The first time was in high school, and I HATED it. Mostly because we spent all of class time on plot summaries and beating the green light symbolism into the ground. I re-read the book in grad school (I think mostly because my friend Dunx said it was an amazing book and I figured I needed to give it another try) and realized, actually, yes, it is a phenomenal book. But that first experience made me aware of just how easy it is to ruin an excellent work of literature. And if you love the book and can't imagine how it could ever be ruined - go see Baz Luhrmann's movie version.

There are so many things to hate about the movie. First off, it's long. IT IS SO LONG. It's poorly paced and the story is poorly adapted, and it goes on and on and on. Second off, the music. I was also prepared to be annoyed by this thanks to Moulin Rouge, but I was also ready to give it the benefit of the doubt. But no. Just no. You wanna do hip hop, fine, do hip hop (though personally, much as I enjoy Jay-Z, does he have to do every soundtrack of every major movie?). But don't do some watered down, loungey bullshit mishmash. "You know what I really hate about the Roaring 20s? The music." said no one, ever. There was some vague attempt, perhaps, to combine hip hop and the music of the time, but it was a colossal failure as far as I'm concerned. Third off, the party scenes. Baz Luhrmann, for goddsakes that's what you're supposed to be good at? These were so totally bland and unexciting. And there were SO many of them, and they went on for SO long. Fourth, the characters. Especially Daisy. She spends most of the movie looking distraught, lip quivering. I don't blame Carey Mulligan for this (I loved An Education so much that I am inclined to give her the benefit of the doubt), I blame the script and the directing. She lacks Daisy's petulance, her charm, and her toughness. She is bland. Tobey Maguire isn't particularly persuasive as Nick either - he's just affable and kind of there. Leonardo DiCaprio is probably the best thing about this movie - he's actually fairly spot on for the role, so long as you can forgive him for saying old sport every 20 seconds. I couldn't quite forgive him for it, myself. Which brings me to the fifth, the green light. I was deliberating which was more annoying, the constant refrain of old sport or the goddamn green light. Jury is still out.

But what really screwed with me is the racial dynamic of the film. Apparently the only thing the internet has seen fit to complain about is the Jewish villain. To be honest, I didn't notice that aspect as much. What I did notice was the weird, weird way blackness came up in the movie. Or rather, the first half of the movie, because in the second half, there's only one moment with black characters, and the point there seems to be that Baz wants you to appreciate the fact that he DIDN'T have them sing a spiritual when he totally could have. And it wasn't easy for him. You can tell. They are so very very close to busting one out, they're clustered around and even kind of humming, but he showed ADMIRABLE RESTRAINT you guys. No, I'm talking about the first half, where, as some commentators have noticed, you see lots of black people! Which apparently contented some critics, who were pleased that the movie wasn't whitewashed. I appreciate that sentiment. But there's something really odd about all these loving shots of black servants, and black men digging. But ok, maybe the point is to highlight how the wealth of these white folks is built on the back of black labor. Fair enough. And then the characters are slumming by having this secret apartment for their debauchery, and when they look out the window into the other apartments they see that there's all kinds of debauchery going on! Because this is a BLACK neighborhood! See, there's a trumpeter on the fire escape playing the soundtrack. In one apartment, there's even an interracial affair. Very taboo. Because... that's what black neighborhoods are like? Full of... life? Ok, moving on, we have Tom spouting his racist rant at the beginning, about how the black folk need to be kept down before they take over, and that's how we know he's a bad guy. Fine.

Except that meanwhile, the movie is using a hip hop soundtrack, apparently with the idea that hip hop is today's version of the conspicuous consumption culture that these white people are reveling in. In order to hammer that in, one of the more blatantly racist lines in the book - "a limousine passed us, driven by a white chauffeur, in which sat three modish Negroes, two bucks and a girl. I laughed aloud as the yolks of their eyeballs rolled toward us in haughty rivalry" (55) - is brought to life in the movie by having the "3 modish Negroes" portrayed in a tableau that obviously reference the Notorious B.I.G. So in the book we have Nick, amused by the idea that blacks could ever compete with whites, and racist Tom paranoid that in fact, they will. And in the movie, we have Baz Luhrmann telling us that in fact, that's exactly what happened! Black folks are the new rich people! How wacky is that?!?
Am I reading too much into it? Maybe. But watching the movie, I was repeatedly puzzled by the weird undertexts of blackness in the film. I have been trying to put my finger on exactly what was bothering me, and that's what I've come up with so far. I'd tell you to go see it and come back and tell me what you thought, but honestly, I don't think it's worth subjecting yourself to the film for. Read the book instead. It costs less, and probably takes about as much time as you'd spend on getting to and from the theatre and sitting through the movie. And it's actually really, really good.