Review: North & South

Here's what happens when you search for "North & South" on Tumblr: Lots of pictures of Richard Armitage's face. This is understandable, since he plays John Thornton, a handsome, brooding type and variant on the Darcy trope. However, it's a pity there's not more balance between his face and his co-star's, Daniela Denby-Ashe, who plays the wonderfully opinionated and passionate heroine, Margaret Hale. Part of what makes this miniseries so great is their two faces - both unusual and enormously expressive, even when they're just staring intensely out of windows (which they do for inordinate amounts of time).

 
I'm certainly a sucker for romantic costume drama. There's just something so refreshing about a movie where the hero has only to loosen his cravat (I'm using this term very carelessly, but if someone knows what to call the amazing wrap-around tie Thornton wears, please let me know) or the heroine let her shawl slip from her shoulders to ratchet up the sexual tension from high to sizzling.
I know, the use the word sizzling about a movie that's set in northern England is pretty odd, but these two actors and characters are truly perfectly matched in their verbal sparring and their ability to make the absolute most of a close-up. And the beautifully done setting and costumes (minimalist by comparison to some more lavish dramas, but still very effective) just makes it even better.


The story concerns the changes Margaret undergoes when she is uprooted from her idyllic life as the daughter of a parson in rural southern England and must move to the cold and strange world of a northern industrial town. But she's certainly not a passive player in this story. She has strong opinions, but more importantly, she also wants to inform herself and refine those opinions when faced with the debacle of industry and labor politics in her new home. She is possessed of a generous spirit, but she's also very stubborn. She seemed to me a wonderful embodiment of the complicated person that one becomes when one's natural inclinations clash with what society expects - in her case, she is caught between being a good daughter and a good christian and pursuing her own betterment and education. The great thing is that none of this is presented too baldly. She doesn't yearn to become a working woman or go to school, she doesn't rebel against her parents, or anything like that. But she strains against the boundaries of life in ways that feel very real. She talks out of turn at dinner parties and refuses to shake people's hands when she feels it isn't the right thing to do. But later she listens to what people thought of her behavior and adjusts herself - though only partially - to what they expect. She certainly makes me want to read more of Gaskell's work and see in more detail how she crafted her heroine.

The other aspect of the movie that its fans on Tumblr fail to note is the its political dimension. Margaret's journey is not just about finding love or becoming more tolerant of the northerners and they of her. She also discovers and must come to terms with the complicated realities of industrial labor. Thornton runs a cotton mill, and several other key characters work there, so much of the story revolves around the intractable battle between "masters" (as they call the mill owners) and workers, especially those trying to start up a union.

In this respect, the movie reminded me very much of Henry Green's novella "Living," or rather a combination of that book and "Pride and Prejudice." Of course it was originally a book, too, written by Elizabeth Gaskell, whose work I've never read but am now curious to. I found the treatment of the politics quite good because it never fully worked things out. Margaret is truly torn between trying to understand the worker's plight and the master's difficulties, and through her we get to see both sides in a relation that is never black and white.

All in all, this series is highly recommended for anyone who enjoys period pieces, Jane Austen, Charles Dickens, Henry Green, good dialogue, and attractive faces gazing broodingly out of windows.

Travel: Pacific Northwest Road Trip, part I

No blogging for a while because I took myself out of the internetosphere for a week to go camping up on the northern California coast and to visit the Oregon Shakespeare Festival in Ashland, OR.

I'm not very experienced in travel writing, and I don't really want to write an exhortation to visit the ocean or the redwoods (although you certainly should, because they are rare and awe-inspiring, and the state parks need support). But I do want to record my own experience of walking through incredibly old forests for days on end, because it was such a relief and a good change from my daily life. I live a very busy life, partly by choice, but that element of choice is actually one of the biggest stresses in my day to day existence. Urban modern life is just so chockablock full of choices - what to eat for breakfast, whether to start the day by working or by blogging (I opted for the latter today, but only as long as I'm sipping my tea), what brand of shoes to buy, and how many skirts to pack in my suitcase. To name only a few of the forks in the road that I encounter over the course of a single day.

These are obviously extremely good choices to have. Nothing in particular rests on them, and they imply a plethora of opportunities and resources. Many people would love to have these choices on their plate, and I don't blame them. But I find decisions, even the smallest ones, extremely difficult to make, sometimes to the point of excruciating. I constantly find myself torn between loving the variety and possibility of my life and the allure of a simpler life where there would be less things cluttering my mind at any given moment.

So it was wonderful to spend a week doing only a certain set of things: walking (mostly preset trails), reading (only brought one novel), eating (same porridge for breakfast every morning), setting up and taking down a tent (a comforting routine), and sleeping (one mat and one sleeping bag, no decisions over how many blankets or pillows I needed). Minimalism, basically, was a really good experience to get back to (I spent a lot of time camping in my childhood, but I hadn't been for years).

I don't think I could ever cut my life down to that scale permanently, at least not at this stage of it. I love clothes and food and music and travel too much to settle for less variety in any of those. My taste is varied and I like it that way. But I'm also trying to live more with the attitude that life is relatively long and that it's OK to settle for less at certain moments. I can get to the other stuff later. And if I never do, then at least I'll have enjoyed and experienced the things I did more fully.

In that vein, I turned down an interview opportunity recently for a job at the Edinburgh International Book Festival. I was going to try to squeeze in some work experience before starting my course in the fall. But then I realized that I was grasping for too much and making my life complicated. There were a lot of difficult choices involved in pursuing the job, and my making the one decision to turn down the interview, I freed myself of all those other choices. Which means that instead, I'll get some other choices about what to do with the few weeks of free time I've now got, but as John Green said in a recent video, I can always just go to an art museum, which sounds just about perfect right now.

Well, I meant for this post to be a bit more of a summary of my trip, but instead you got some rambles and reflections. Perhaps I'll fill in with a part two later this week talking about the plays I saw in Ashland. Stay tuned.

Review: Une vie de chat

The words that come to mind immediately when talking about a good animated movie are "delightful," "inventive," and "charming." A Cat in Paris (or Une vie de chat in the original) is all of those things. However, it's also suave and beautiful. It's sleek and vibrant at the same time - literally vibrant, in fact, since the animation (which I believe is hand-drawn) actually seems to pulse as the shadows and highlights play across the faces of the characters. It's really quite a wonderful little movie.

The story is classic without being clichéed: a little girl is kidnapped by the gangster who killed her father and saved by her detective mother and by a cat burglar who is friend's with the little girl's cat, Dino. The best part of all this, is that most of the film takes place on the rooftops of Paris (including a beautiful set-piece on Notre Dame). Watching rooftop chase scenes is always thrilling, even for people who are afraid of heights (like me), but watching these animated characters leap lightly and sinuously over impossible gulfs and land on impossibly thin narrow ledges with acrobatic ease is something else.

The characters are neatly drawn, wit amazingly expressive eyes. They actually seem to move like cats as they tiptoe along high walls and race after each other through and over houses and streets. The actual cat, Dino, is a wonderful invention, with crimson stripes and a turquoise nose. In typical cat fashion, he binds all the characters together and saves the day several times without seeming too concerned about anything at all.

I saw the movie in a theater filled with children, and it was nice to think they were seeing an alternative to the loud, raucous movies that Hollywood likes to feed to children these days. It's a perfectly accessible film, with chase scenes and a bumbling group of gangsters who provide regular comic relief (if watching a cat wander through Paris isn't enough to put a smile on your face). But nothing is overstretched or amped up the way they are in a lot of films these days. The scary and the funny and the sweet are presently gently and moderately - which was plenty. For one little girl behind me, the scares kicked in the moment the little girl climbed out of her bedroom window into the night, proving to me that a lighter touch is really all that's necessary for both children and adults.

For older viewers, the movie also offers a nice homage to noir films. I thought in particular of To Catch a Thief, in which Cary Grant is a retired cat burglar who also has a feline companion. So if you like beautiful animation, Paris, noir, cats, or any combination thereof, then this is a movie I heartily recommend to you.

May Things

This post is inspired by italktosnakes's new video Things I'm Into: May! which you should all check out. Anyway, the idea is to recap a month, not just with the books one's read or things one's done, but all the stuff that's worth sharing and recording. I think it's a nice idea, anyway.


Summer fruit: I love love love summer because of the strawberries and blueberries and blackberries and peaches and nectarines and cherries and apricots, etc. etc. And this morning I just discovered a really spiffy way to eat fresh peaches that I wanted to share:

• Cut your peach in half and take out the pit. 
• Spread fromage blanc on the cut side generously. 
• Drizzle honey over the fromage blanc. 
• Shake a light dusting of cinnamon on top of the fromage blanc as well. 

It's a little messy, but oh so good. I'd include a picture except that I just ate the last bite....


YA literature: This is sort of a thing I've been rediscovering. I suppose I read it when I was actually a "young adult" (although frankly that term seems to apply to me more at age 22 than at age 15 or whatever), but I also read a lot of regular books, by which I mean adult books, I guess, although I'm not sure I subscribe to that differentiation, given the fact that I enjoyed said books before I became a fully-fledged adult. But after four years of college, some easy reading feels great - I mean easy in the sense of a story that just sucks you along with it, as opposed to a book that makes you stop and deconstruct sentences.

So far, I've finished the Hunger Games trilogy and The Fault in Our Stars, both of which came very highly recommended and still managed to exceed my expectations. I wouldn't rank either of them as in any way lesser than other books, nor are they written carelessly, or with regard only for story, not style. It's just that they don't beat you up (except maybe emotionally) while you're reading them. They don't judge you for wanting to turn the pages very quickly and find out what happens next before you sit back and think about metaphors.

In short, they feel friendly. I enjoy intellectual sparring as much as the next person, but sometimes it's just nice to sit down with someone who will tell you a story.


I suppose that's it for now. Let me know in the comments if there's anything you've discovered in the last month that you simply must share.

Happy June!

Summer

There have already been almost three weeks of post-graduate life and almost three weeks of summer. It feels like a long time and no time at all, of course. Time warps weirdly in transitional moments because you don't really know what to tack it onto yet.

So far, my summer has consisted mostly of nature and books, which is a great start. I'm busy as ever, it feels, but I'm dotting the next few months with weekends and weeks here and there that will feature nothing but grass and trees and my two feet. And between those dots, I'm trying to squeeze in lots of long stretches of story time, which, since I don't have my entire brain to devote to it, draws mostly on other people's stories. I've read three books since graduating and am half-way through two more, which feels great. All of them simply for pleasure, except that it turns out one will be on my course reading list next year.

And by the way, I don't think I've mentioned it before - but now it's a bit ridiculous, because I've known for months, but anyway - I'm moving to the UK next year for to get a master's degree. I'm afraid that you all missed the initial excitement, but you can still catch the new upswing in excitement that began soon after graduating. Suddenly it feels real and I have a pile of things that I will take to England and I have a plane ticket and I have many many wonderful plans.

But there's still a few more weeks of summer in California left to enjoy - and to put to productive use. Being me, I have a lot of projects that I want to get done. Including writing some more on this blog. Expect some book reviews coming your way soon. In the meantime, the sun is shining and the errands are waiting to be attended to, so off I go for now.

Review: Damsels in Distress

This is a really late review that I planned to write two weeks ago, but then graduation happened and moving back home happened and here I am now finally sitting down to reflect on this very odd, but ultimately pleasing movie.

The only real parallel I can think of to this film's style of satire is Evelyn Waugh's Decline and Fall. And in fact both Waugh and Whit Stillman seem particularly galvanized to poke fun at the education system in their respective countries and times - and the faults they reveal about them do not differ that significantly. That is to say that the undergraduates at Seven Oaks College are just as silly and absurd and totally uninterested in actually learning anything in school as Waugh's marvelous bunch of teachers and schoolboys.

This movie, though, is particularly focused on the many and diverse dilemmas of young women at college. It deals with issues like mental illness, sex, friendship, and identity, but all with a very unsettling kind of humor that makes you unsure whether to laugh or offer a serious, sympathetic shake of your head.

Ironically, for a movie that uses title cards to announce new scenes, it absolutely refuses to give you any of the usual signposts - the ones we learn to recognize and follow without even noticing them, the ones that define our interpretations of a character and cue our emotional reactions. Even the timing of scene endings is odd. Through the whole movie, I was constantly surprised by the moments on which Stillman chose to end his scenes, and the new scenes that followed.

For a while, this was somewhat disturbing. But after watching the movie all the way through and thinking about it for a couple of weeks, I've come to really admire Stillman for choosing to disregard convention in every thread of this movie.

The characters seemed at first to be caricatures, and at a certain point I gave up on finding any sane person in the whole movie. It turns out I was right, but the prevalence of insanity eventually turned even the oddest, most absurd characters into sympathetic people. I hesitate a little to say it, but these characters felt more real than the most psychologically dissected protagonist of any modern drama.

Because instead of explaining Violet's OCD or Fred/Charlie's identity crisis or Frank's crippling stupidity, the movie simply presents you with these damaged, multi-layered, sometimes tragic and sometimes hilarious characters, as life presents you with equally complex and incomprehensible people. In real life, you don't get revelatory back stories or cues about who's going to end up with whom or who's going to crack under the pressure of being human or who's going to find a happy ending, if anyone ever does.

 There's something both unsettling and deeply comforting about this movie, both for regular people and for storytellers. It shows that you can break all the rules and still come out with something good, maybe even better. It's not a flashy, presumptuous movie. It probably won't have much popularity because it's not easy to watch, but I wholeheartedly recommend it. Even if you don't fall in love with the characters or sympathize with the unique challenges of East Coast college life, it's fun to take a break from formulaic summer blockbusters and get your assumptions shaken up a little bit.

It'll also give you a whole new appreciation of rainbows.

Recommendation: "Would you date a Disney Prince?"

A quick recommendation of things about the internet:

Just watched a video by Carrie Hope Fletcher, in which she expresses more succinctly than any fairy tale theorist I've read why fairy tale gender politics are bad. Link here:

"Would you date a Disney Prince?"



And while you're at it, go ahead and check out her other videos. She's cool.