Gavin Wiesen’s film The Art of Getting By is an interesting portrait of a unique young man’s coming of age in a cosmopolitan city; a film with a good subject, script, and cast and crew, illustrating the attractions, confusions, and dangers of a smart boy’s life.
Courage, Democracy, Entertainment, and Vengeance: Gladiator, starring Russell Crowe, directed by Ridley Scott
Gladiator is example of an entertaining epic, of a film that has great action and large themes—courage, family, honor, integrity, nation, democracy—that are attractive to a mass audience, and to individuals who want something to think about.
Charming Rogues in a New Kind of Western: Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, starring Paul Newman and Robert Redford, directed by George Roy Hill
It is a story presented with excellent craft. The film Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid has a lot of style, in its cinematography, and in its structure; and its landscapes are gorgeous, musical interludes romantic, and it has well-measured pacing. Its use of silent film and black-and-white photographs, tinged sepia, are a nice touch.
Language, Spirit, and Vision: August Wilson’s The Piano Lesson, featuring Charles Dutton and Alfre Woodward
The Piano Lesson, as presented by Hallmark, has some staginess still, but what remain impressive are August Wilson’s language, spirit, and vision. Wilson’s language is more natural than poetic, but it is ever flowing—creating character and music and relationship—and summoned are a particular time, 1936, and place, America (Mississippi and Pittsburgh).
Human Truths, Humorous Tasks: Meryl Streep and Tommy Lee Jones in Hope Springs
The film has a leisurely pace with a nice score, interspersed with a huge lot of popular songs of emotion and energy. The songs confirm what is at stake in a relationship, the excitement of that. The film’s languor allows us to know its characters and their relationships and situations.
A review of The Long March Home by Zoë S. Roy
This is a historically consistent plot turn, but to make no mistake, it is one Western readers in particular will like. The book is hardly anti-China, but Roy, a Chinese-Canadian, also does not sugarcoat the oppression, fear, and insanity of Mao’s regime.
A review of Tea and Biscuit Girls and The Love Immigrants by Barbara Celeste McCloskey
Many works of fiction have been set during World War II. Two of my favourites are the TV Foyle’s War and the movie Yanks. It is a well-known fact, however, that if one assigned the same topic to a room full of fiction writers, each would come up with something unique. McCloskey’s novels show her flair for exploring women’s friendships and feelings and will attract and educate today’s generation of young woman readers about an intense, dramatic time in history.
A review of Blue Skies Tomorrow by Sarah Sundin
Sundin certainly did her homework on the period, accurately capturing both life in the military and on the home front during World War II. This was an era where a family kept their secrets and did not share their troubles with outsiders—not even their closest friends.
Interview with Jennifer Maiden
The author of Liquid Nitrogen reads from and talks about her new poetry book, about her themes, about the combining of the personal and political, about writing topical poetry, about meta-poetics, mentorship and parenting as it plays out in her…
A review of Liquid Nitrogen by Jennifer Maiden
Though the description of the Nebula alone is worth the price of the book, this building up of smaller things into something larger, powerful, transformative, is exactly what Liquid Nitrogen does, taking the many cultural, political and literary characters and references, in order to create something large, complex, woven on a “spinning jenny.”