Tag: reviews

Book Review: The Orphaned Adult

One of the most interesting things about the book The Orphaned Adult is the very notion that adults, when they lose both of their parents, do fall into a largely unexamined class of people. After all, as the author, Alexander Levy noted, “Parental loss is not the province of an unfortunate few. It is the ultimate equal-opportunity experience, requiring nothing other than children not predeceasing their parents.” So the dearth of literature he found prior to writing this book, published in 1999, is not at all surprising.

The book is an amalgam of stores of Levy’s patients and his own loss of both parents, and how it changed all involved. I’ve written elsewhere about my favorite story in the book.

Early on, he challenges the notion of the Elisabeth Kübler-Ross tidy five stages of grief, while recognizing that the structure served a purpose at a time when many avoided the topic of death and grief altogether. As I’ve noticed myself, grief is nonlinear. And grief, Levy argues, is good; “by illuminating life’s impermanence, grief alerts us to pursue those important goals that we otherwise tend to postpone in the naive belief that our time is enduring.” In fact, he suggests that there are serious hazards in avoiding grief, and offers ways to express it.

The death of both parents changes the “I am” sentences of one’s life, from being your parents’ son or daughter to “I am an orphan.” Yet Levy talks about the ongoing relationships with parents after they die, and how one’s relationships with others can change as well.

Recommended for those who have lost both parents or who are involved with people who have. I have suggested the book to a guy at church who lost his second parent, his mother, about two months after I lost mine.

 

Movie Review: Made in Dagenham

Here, Sally Hawkins was matter-of-fact plunky without sinking to cliche. Indeed, once knows the basic outline, it is difficult to avoid a bit of predictability. Fortunately, the story, and performances were strong enough.


Late last year, my wife and I saw the trailer for the movie Made in Dagenham, and liked it well enough that we decided to go see the film itself. But for whatever reason, we didn’t make it.

Then we noticed that it was playing for three days at Proctors Theatre in Schenectady last week. So I took off early from work, went home, and we dropped off the daughter at the home of a teenaged daughter of a church member. We were running late for the 5:15 p.m. showing because of rush hour traffic, so Carol parked the car while I bought the tickets and popcorn. Walking from the ticket counter to the entrance, the door closed, and it was LOCKED!

So I walked back to the counter to comment on this. At that very moment, my wife showed up AND someone opened the door, we ran in and got led into the darkest theater I’ve ever gone into. Thank goodness for the guide’s flashlight.

We walked in during the opening credits, and I don’t know if there was anything before that; evidently, there were few or no coming attractions.

From the IMDB: In 1968, the Ford auto factory in Dagenham was one of the largest single private employers in the United Kingdom. In addition to the thousands of male employees, there were also 187 underpaid women machinists who primarily assemble the car seat upholstery in poor working conditions. Dissatisfied, the women, represented by the shop steward and Rita O’Grady, work with union rep Albert Passingham for a better deal. However, Rita learns that there is a larger issue in this dispute considering that women are paid an appalling fraction of the men’s wages for the same work across the board on the sole basis of their sex. Refusing to tolerate this inequality any longer, O’Grady leads a strike by her fellow machinists for equal pay for equal work. What follows would test the patience of all involved in a grinding labour and political struggle…

Sally Hawkins, who played Rita, was someone I wanted to see in the well-regarded Happy-Go-Lucky (2008), but didn’t. Here, she was matter-of-fact plucky without sinking to cliche. Indeed, once one knows the basic outline, it is difficult to avoid a bit of predictability. Fortunately, the story, and performances by Hawkins, Geraldine James as Rita’s friend Connie (who had a more interesting story arc), Bob Hoskins as her ally Albert (whose character has his own motivation), Daniel Mays as Rita’s trying-to-be supportive husband Eddie, and in particular the amazing Miranda Richardson as Cabinet member Barbara Castle, a glass ceiling breaker in her own right, were compelling enough. Another strong performance was by Rosamund Pike, who, like Hawkins, had a smallish role in the movie An Education (2009), which we did see.

The one complaint is that especially early on, we both had real difficulty discerning what was being said because of their accents. At least one reviewer had the same issue. I don’t know if my ear acclimated or the dialogue became easier to understand, but it did get better.

The movie had period music as its soundtrack, most of which I recognized, and it neither enhanced nor detracted from the movie for me.

Definitely inspiring without being mawkish, and worth the trip.
***

The UK trailer, I believe.

 

Book Review: Word Freak

The early chapters alternate between the competition narrative and the history of the game, from inventor Alfred Butts; to the various game owners…


On my train ride to Charlotte, NC, earlier this year, having finished the Motown book, I started reading Word Freak: Heartbreak, Triumph, Genius, and Obsession in the World of Competitive Scrabble Players by Stefan Fatsis. This was another library sale book purchase. I finished it a few mornings later.

The book is part history of the game, part autobiography. Fatsis, a Wall Street Journal sports reporter who can be heard regularly on National Public Radio, writes about his evolution from playing pickup Scrabble games in Greenwich Village (lower Manhattan) to his improbable rise through the ranks of high-ranking Scrabble players. He describes the elite competitors, who play at a level far beyond those 30 million players who compete in American living rooms. The “freaks” include a vitamin-popping standup comic; a former bank teller whose intestinal troubles earned him the nickname “G.I. Joel”; a burly, unemployed African American from Baltimore’s inner city; the three-time national champion who plays according to Zen principles; and Fatsis himself, who we see transformed from a curious reporter to a confirmed Scrabble nut.

The early chapters alternate between the competition narrative and the history of the game, from inventor Alfred Butts; to the various game owners (Selchow & Righter, Coleco, Hasbro, Mattel UK) and their response/responsibility to competitive Scrabble, which, unlike chess, has intellectual property restrictions; to the words themselves, how best to learn them – anagramming! – and how legitimate words are determined in the US and in international play.

If the latter chapters were a little bit too much “inside baseball” – will Fatsis make it to the next level? – it was still an interesting read. I particularly enjoyed the description of Albany, or more specifically, “Outside Albany, at the Marriott in suburban Colonie, along a highway [Wolf Road] lined with strip malls and corporate parks.” And Ron Tiekert, using a rack of EENRSU?, spelling AUBERGiNES through an existing A, B, and G, making the blank an I, IS extraordinary. —

Book Review: Where Did Our Love Go?

Georgia slave owner Jim Gordy had a son named Berry (b. 1854) by his slave Esther Johnson.


One of the strategic things I did on my train ride to Charlotte (and back) is that I did not bring any electronic items – no headphones and music, no laptop, except, necessarily, my cellphone. What I did bring were three books.

The first one I read, actually by the time I reached Washington, DC, was Where Did Our Love Go? – The Rise and Fall of the Motown Sound by Nelson George, which I purchased at a library sale. I should say that I’m a big fan of George, who has written about American black music (r&b, soul, hip hop, rap) for a number of years. Back when I had a subscription to Billboard magazine, he was a writer there. I even supported his recent Kickstarter project, Brooklyn Boheme: Fort Greene/Clinton Hill Artists Documentary.

The fact that the book was a tad disappointing may not be George’s fault. The reason I wasn’t as engaged as I might have been is that I had heard most of the narrative – about Berry Gordy writing music for Jackie Wilson, utilizing his family in the business, future stars serving as office workers or, in the case of Marvin Gaye, as a session drummer, the power of the songwriters to lay the same tracks on several artists, the ultimate push for more autonomy by Gaye and Stevie Wonder, and Gordy’s special relation with Diana Ross – before, quite possibly in articles written by Nelson George. So it wasn’t new, though it was complete and well written.

What WAS new for me was the ancestry of Berry Gordy. Georgia slave owner Jim Gordy had a son named Berry (b. 1854) by his slave Esther Johnson. Berry married Lucy Hellum, a woman of black and Indian heritage, who conceived 23 times; nine children survived, including another Berry, born in 1888. He married teacher Bertha Ida Fuller, and in 1929, they had Berry, one of the youngest of their seven children. These first two chapters about race in America were largely new to me, and, therefore, quite fascinating.

The book I recommend to people who know less about Motown than I do, which, immodestly, I suggest is most people.

MOVIE REVIEW: Blue Valentine

This movie is best known for the fact that it was initially slapped with an NC-17 rating by the MPAA, a commercial kiss of death.

My wife and I wisely passed on seeing Blue Valentine on Valentine’s Day. Instead, we watched it on Presidents Day.

It is about love gone sour, and the flashbacks to a happier time, when love was fresh and exciting and not stifled by the routine or pathology. Michelle Williams, Oscar-nominated for this film, and Ryan Gosling, who could have been, are also executive producers of the film, which suggests that the actors really believed in the story. The film makes it easy to tell when the film is in the present-day and when it’s in flashbacks. Much of it is well done.

From John Rodat’s essay in Metroland: “Much of the dialogue of Blue Valentine was improvised, and the actors went to some lengths to develop a real-life closeness to facilitate the conversation. Early scenes of the meeting and courtship were filmed first, with later scenes of their married life waiting until after the stars had rented a house together, living and shopping on a budget appropriate to the circumstances of their characters, and learning to bicker.”

Yet we both found the film depressing as all get out.  There’s no “if only he did this” or “she did that.” Love just dies. I admit I looked at my watch when one more reminder of what was once good flashed across the scene.

This movie is best known for the fact that it was initially slapped with an NC-17 rating by the MPAA, a commercial kiss of death, not that it’s going to generate boffo box office. The ruling was successfully appealed, and the simulated oral sex scene which had generated the original ruling didn’t seem any more provocative to me than any other simulated sex scene in an R-rated film.

Still, I just can’t imagine seeing this movie again, unless I have a burning need to be in a melancholy mood.

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