Dawn’s Thoughts

Today I started scanning old creative writing comments so I can have them on the computer. Then I made a shopping list, stopped by Fry’s to get a very long flash drive for my new Library of Congress player, among other things — God, I’m going to like this thing, I will have to give it a review all to itself — the bank, the cobbler’s to fix my broken purse strap, and the bagel shop to eat a cream cheese thing called a boureka. Very good. I also got a response back from History San Jose re: their archives. They finally got their email and computer problems fixed after lightning hit their light tower, and I have a tentative appt for Thursday. Yay! It’s been a couple months.

I watched two movies over the past two days: Out of the Ashes, which I found cheap enough to replace my VHS — and I Am Because We Are.

The first is about Dr. Gisella Perl, a woman I hadn’t heard anything about until I saw the movie a few years ago. It’s about a inmate-doctor at Auschwitz, and i’ve run into a few old hardbacks from after the war that are similar, though I haven’t read them. I rented it from Hollywood Video. It’s a Holocaust movie and has the — well, if you can say so — usual horrers about it — tattooing, life before the war, how that life was changed, adjusting, causal cruelty — you name it, it has it.

What makes the film spooky is not that Gisella Perl was forced to participate as a doctor, against her will, but using her training to better the lifes of those around her — but the use of flashbacks. These flashbacks are short cuts of film or longer versions as Dr. Perl tells her story to New York officials who want to stop her from practicing in the U.S. What makes them spooky is their suddenness, the change from a perfectly normal conversation in the film to a memory of Dr. Mengele, music on the radio, sudden accusations from other inmates in broad daylight, and also, a very distinct palette change.

Scenes in New York in this film are bright and colorful and except for when Dr. Perl is in her house, which has wood paneling, generally not dark. The scenes from Auschwitz are dark, lit only by one or two bulbs, dingy — often oddly green colored from security lights. These scenes are intercut and the results are striking. You know instantly where you are in these flashbacks — standard colors are “modern-day” post-1945 New York, green or drab colors are Auschwitz, and a gold sepia color are flashbacks from when Dr. Perl was a child.

This is a good cable-produced movie, but not one I generally watch at night.

I wanted to like I Am Because We Are, a documentary about AIDS orphans in Africa…but I disagreed with the delivery. The film is narrated by Madonna and within the first few minutes or so I was hooked.

The film draws you in with the opening lines, has excellent snippets of news footage about the area’s history…a large percentage of child-headed households, an orphanage basically run by children who are assigned or at least take care infants (with an 9-year-old carrying a baby); juvenile prisons where children wait to be aged out into adult prisons. for crimes like stealing a radio; the witchcraft form of disease such as alcoholism (and very likely AIDS as well), and mutilations.

So many interesting things. Anthropologically interesting, humanly interesting…excellent, startling photographs, a wonderful though impoverished area to film in, and an intriguing question somewhere in the middle. How can these people, who sing and are so happy, be happy with such poverty and disease, while we in America cannot? It raises the question of the modernized society and whether a modernized society is right under these circumstances. I thought this was a wonderful question.

And yet…

I actively watched for 30 minutes, and fast forwarded every so often thereafter.

The film has the usual talking heads, officials, doctors, etc. which is fine. It explores the stories of a number of adults and children and gives a good overview of the problems in the country…but talking heads do not always make a good documentary.

After 30 minutes or so of the Poverty Hotline soundtrack playing constantly in the background, the talking heads restricted eventually to an almost constant appeal for help in the area, actually saying that we were all people, etc. I wanted it to end.

It felt as though I was watching a station break program. You know, with the starving children that you need to help.

Are they starving? Most likely. Do they need help? Most likely. Is it a shame they’re orphans? Yes, it is.

Do I wish the film had shown me more in-depth stories of the children and their remaining parents?

Certainly.

The film explains how Madonna adopted one of her children there. Now if she felt the need to adopt, she must surely have seen something in the people she liked, or at least been sincerely interesting in helping one of the children. But this film does not convey that. It tries so hard to convince the viewer that these are humans in need of assistance, that ultimately it fails, in my opinion. The tone is wrong.

For example, one child explains that he is only fed once a day and he is seen to be wringing out his spare shirt and hanging it out to dry. He has friends with families and envies them. But that is all it explores. I wanted the camera to follow this child…what does he do for fun? When? Where? Does he get his shirts at the same place as the food?

If there were only 2 adults to be seen at the orphanage, what else did the children do there? Obviously, as in the child-headed households, they had taken on adult responsibilities, but show me that…

This film has great scenery and good overview, but what I have highlighted above is unfortunately what I felt it showed that was different and better than the usual Help-Children station break. The rest, I felt, was standard…filmed well, but standard.

Maybe I only have a different view of documentaries…But then again, I find nothing wrong with historical documentaries, which are almost nothing but talking heads, photographs and reenactments. This leaned too heavily on the side of the talking heads, and spent astonishingly little time interviewing the children involved. The DVD does include additional interviews in the extras, but I didn’t watch those. I wanted the film to show me a human side of the story…what could it tell me that no other film on the subject could? They had the subjects, the landscape, the experts, but if the film was about the children, then show me directly and without preaching why their stories are important.

Well, the film doesn’t preach, but you get the idea. There are some things I was fairly surprised to see, like the anthropological witchcraft, but all in all…

I wouldn’t rent this again. The tone did not sit well with me.

(2/13) I just finished Snowy Mountain Passage by James D. Houston. The occasionally shifting tense didn’t work for me, and I didn’t get particularly attached to the story. That’s either because I know the story all ready — it’s about the Donner Party — or because I find the way the sentences are structured jarring. I haven’t figured out which.

However, as historical fiction it explores one particular aspect of the Donner Party that I’ve always considered underdocumented and that is, what happened when James Reed and William McCutcheon went over the mountain? MCCutcheon is always described in historical accounts, if at all, as a big man who liked to swear, recite Shakespeare, and didn’t much care what people thought about what he said. Houston remembers this when he makes McCutcheon a character.

Houston also remembers several things that are trickier to find — such as the fact that rescuers were paid large sums to retrieve the survivors of the Donner Party, that streets in San Jose are named for the Reed family (Reed, Martha and Virginia Streets — though Houston only mentions Reed), and that McCutcheon left behind a daughter in the camp. The story mentions in passing that the child died — but doesn’t detail how, which is probably just as well, since the one account I’ve found is shaky at best. If Houston found the same account, perhaps he thought it was too historical unreliable. Houston also mentions that the Reed family settled on Market Street, and that Reed was given a (later contested) orchard. I haven’t heard of the orchard before, or that Salvador’s brother came looking for him. I think maybe that’s fictional.

But Houston mentions that the Donner Party were a bit out for themselves after awhile, that when a second murder occurred they didn’t try to string that person up as they wanted to with James Reed (something I hadn’t heard before). In alternating chapters, he cuts between Reed’s banishment from the camp and journey back to his family, and Patty Reed’s remembrances as an old woman. Occasionally, he makes good use of other cultures which would not have recieved much notice at the time: John Sutter’s native Hawaian wife, or Salavador’s memory of the priests at the mission. Somehow it hadn’t occurred to me that the Donner Party happened right between the Spanish missions and Native Americans, and just before the Gold Rush. Houston points out these things.

Does make me wonder though…did John Sutter have a Hawaiian wife? This book (and Sutter’s Fort museum) say he was Swiss, which I had never read until I went on a field trip there.

Houston also tries to get inside Jim Reed’s head as he’s getting help for his family and the others. What is he thinking about? What does he regret (other than the stabbing that led to his banishment). Houston raises an interesting point here.

[If I could only remember what it was…]

I always thought Jim Reed was, in a way, remarkably lucky that he almost got himself hung, because if he hadn’t gotten banished, the liklihood that anyone else would have been so determined to go into the mountains in a snowstorm, seems less. Of course, Houston makes it clear that Jim Reed the character may have felt very differently.

Now of course, I’m wondering where the Reed orchard was located…
In the end, Houston wraps up the story by giving a summery of people. He notes one of things I always founds neat, but sometimes hard to find: that kids threw rocks and things at Keseberg later on because of what he did; that Jim Reed was involved in the city council. If I remember right, although he mentions San Jose’s contest for state capital, he doesn’t mention that Reed was involved in that, or that Reed and McCutcheon got into some kind of argument through the newspapers.

What Houston does say is that the Reed’s house on Market Street was eventually lost when Patty Reed was grown. Now there’s something I didn’t know. Now I have to look that up. I know Virginia Reed’s house burned down in downtown San Jose fairly recently, historically speaking, because I’ve handled the historic resource inventory for the address at internship.

I know that McCutcheon and Amanda his wife had other children — if I remember right, one of them was given to the family doctor, and that child may have been the one to become a lawyer in San Francisco — but I’m not sure, as I haven’t looked at paperwork in the California room for awhile. I know that McCutcheon became the sheriff, though it’s a shame there’s not more documentation after that about him. If I remember right, there was a William McCutcham who was a general laborer after a time, and due to spelling differences, that might be have been William McCutcheon. But I don’t know. In his account, Houston has other characters refer to William as Bill or Mac.

Well, even though I know James D. Houston has done history books before, I haven’t read many of them, aside from the book Farewell to Manazar, coauthored by his wife (which I’ve always enjoyed). I met him briefly once at a booksigning at SJSU — I forget for which book. I won’t try and argue historical scholarship here — Houston has enough little throw-away lines in this book that are historically hard to find, that I suspect he’s really done some research.

But even though I’m historically and personally interested in the Donner Party, and especially in William McCutcheon and company, I can’t say the story here ultimately grabbed me. Something about the way it was written. I gravited more toward the Patty Reed entries, the more commonly fictionized character, than I did to the Jim Reed sections. It’s not the language — sentences in this often have great imagery — but some of the rest I found too abrupt.

Maybe that’s just me. Other people no doubt will find that this book moves along fine, that they love what’s been done with it. I have to say i’m impressed with what’s in this book — but not necessarily with the way it was done. I’m not sure why. But because it deals with a part of the Donner Party that’s somewhat neglected and reimagines it, and because it has a better epilogue portion than most, I can’t be too harsh about it. I would refer to this in future if I needed a memory jog about a historical location or something, if I already knew where to search — but I would not refer to it for its fiction alone.

I watched two movies over the past few days, and I have to say ultimately I did not like them. But they did some things which I admire, and so I thought I would write them here. I’ve avoided seeing the movie In the Bedroom for awhile, even though I knew what it was from the trailers. We had to read it in English –  the short story is Killings by Andre Dumas. I’d forgotten much of what happens in the story but after finishing the movie, I was reminded of some of it, and can say that if you enjoyed the story, probably your favorite scenes are here — the son being tended by his parents and the ex-husband’s ride in a car are two scenes that jogged my memory.

However, even though I remembered liking the setup in the story, I also remember as being extremely long, and I was not particularly attached to any of the characters. In the movie, thankfully, I am more able to see them as people — at least until the midpoint.

In the Bedroom starts out with 3 scenes that I was amazed by. The camera goes up and down several streets, showing neighborhoods and houses, goes by a harbor with boats, and shows a neighborhood party where the priest shows up, everyone responds to a woman’s ex-husband coming, and a bunch of kids are playing on the swing set. 3 shots, in the very beginning of the movie. I thought that was great. It showed very quickly what kind of neighborhood this was — everyone knows each other, and if they filmed this on location somewhere, they picked a great spot as far as houses.

The people are also established quickly as a family — they’re smiling and joking and having a great time, and you can believe that they have a good relationship. The mother and father and their college-age son; the son’s older girlfriend and her two sons; the woman’s ex-husband…are all well done. And the father, by the way, takes the girlfriend’s kids out fishing, so it’s obvious that the girlfriend is on good terms with them.

Whoever plays the ex-husband does a good job. Again, any violence is off-camera (maybe for budget reasons), but it works better. You don’t actually see him doing anything violent, but it’s implied that he can. I like the set dressing too…there’s one of those little wall-hanging coat racks with a bunch of jackets on it, and I thought that really worked well. Also, during the midpoint scene — which I won’t give away in case you haven’t read it or seen the movie — there’s a lot of toys smashed all over the floor. That was a nice touch.

But after the midpoint is where I begin to lose interest. The family that was so carefully set up begins to fall apart, which is the point, but still…the father doesn’t take the girlfriend’s kids fishing anymore, no one talks, and there is a complete breakdown of everything that went on previously. Including the community. I mean, the poker games still go on, and that’s shown, and the priest is still there, but where’s the community? I fastforwarding a lot through this.

Then comes a very significant car ride in the film, and after that things will never be the same. While this is similar to several other movies I can think of that I have watched, in some ways it doesn’t work as well — even though the father’s reaction is actually more realistic. The film leaves him in bed, hardly moving, while his wife calls from downstairs.

I didn’t like the ending. The actual midpoint made sense, and realistically so did the character’s reactions throughout, but it didn’t work for me. When the camera pulls away and does a similar aerial shot for the ending, it doesn’t work. The movie leaves the characters right there and doesn’t make an ending for them. Are they all right? Will they stay together? Will things continue as they are? Doesn’t say, and if I remember right, the story didn’t either. This is one of the few times I’ll probably say I liked the movie more than the story. But I don’t need to rent it again.

I saw Joe the King in the video store when it first came out. I thought it might be something like King of the Hill (and no, not the cartoon…the Great Depression version where the kid is constantly lying and hungry…honestly, it’s a funny movie). But I avoided it because I heard bad reviews about it.

So, should I have avoided it?

Yes and no. It’s rated R, not necessarily for any violence or special effects, but for the almost constant swearing. I mean it. Parents, teachers, kids, and shop owners regularly cuss each other out in this. That being said, it’s not quite like it would be if the film was set today — there’s no gang members etc. It’s the 1970’s.

Again, the film has great sets. The insides (and under porches) of houses, railroad containers in front yards, alleys, and a great visual shot of getting to school (hopping over a K-rail). Really does a good job with setting. But there’s also a problem. I could believe that all this stuff could really happen, and I could believe that it could all happen to Joe, who is 14 — but here’s the thing — the character in King in the Hill, in somewhat similar circumstances has a sense of humor — funny things happen, even though he has to survive. That’s kind of what’s lacking in this story. Where are the things that kept Joe going?

The interesting set-up for this movie starts right in the beginning. People throughout this movie are routinely sarcastic and nearly all of them make snotty little comments — all of them. I get that parents and teachers could do this, but even at work, at the pawn shop? Everyone in town? The funny thing is if Joe doesn’t get enough sleep because he works all night and he doesn’t eat because there’s no food, why isn’t he bouncing off the walls? Instead, even though he rarely seems to cause any trouble in class, except by coming in late, teachers single him out and then pull him aside to ask him to pester his father to pay back their money. You’d think they’d want to be nice to him so that the money would get paid back faster.

The movie is kind of like what would happen in The Outsiders if the character Johnny Cade was telling the story. (Actually it’s filmed and lit kind of like that too — to the movie’s credit, because if it was filmed today, it would be blue-colored and darker, and it wouldn’t work).
The theme is pretty well set right in the beginning — Joe is the scapegoat of the story. The early scene that begins it is kind of freaky. The camera shows all the other kids playing — a seven or eight year old Joe is already smoking. (And no, that’s not the freaky part, it’s the kid’s haircut…Good God…).

It’s kind of hard to say why this scene is here, but it’s good to know some background. Joe’s father is the janitor at his school, something he repeatedly denies when asked in class. It’s interesting here that Joe answers the teacher’s initial question correctly — but isn’t praised for it. Some snotty comments from students are encouraged and arrive and Joe is hauled up for a spanking.

I was very surprised, considering more snotty comments from both parents when Joe gets home, that they didn’t immediately add to the spanking. I browsed the web and read some reviews — almost all of which described the father in this as drunk and abusive to his wife and kids. Huh. Well, he is a drunk in this, and a later scene shows that he’s clearly abusive to his wife, and it’s pretty well implied by the way he yanks the kids around and threatens to knock their heads off on a fairly regular basis that he likely is abusive toward them as well. But here’s the interesting thing. The movie only shows him slapping Joe twice. I had to read This Boy’s Life in English and afterwards watched the movie — good movie, but grueling, and so I’m happy to say that while this movie is downbeat and somewhat grueling in it’s own way, there’s no knock-down-drag-out fight at the end either. But that’s good for this movie. It’s grueling because of the snotty comments and the work (and stealing) it shows Joe engaged in every day, but the parents don’t inspire much. You can believe that they’re capable of ignoring their kids when not making snotty comments, but they aren’t really menacing characters.

The movie shows Joe playing at the roller rink — where he’s so euthusitac he doesn’t know how to act — and thereafter shows him running various places — to a night job, to school, under the porch. There are some vaguely sympathetic characters — Joe’s big brother is like his best friend, although he’s friends with a boy who also has a drunk mother — the man at the record store never makes snotty comments, and the guidence counselor, while asking Joe what he wants to do with his life, and ultimately changing things for him, though not in the way you;d expect, says he looks like a bum. (Other people in the movie say the same thing). But while his brother wears at least an fatigue jacket every day and maybe a different shirt, Joe never changes clothes. Which makes sense. His brother also works at the school, cleaning floors, and it’s unclear whether this is to pay for lunches or not — so both kids have jobs and support each other by sharing food when they find any. His coworker at a diner makes sure he eats so he doesn’t eat off other people’s plates.
One of the funny scenes happens when Joe steals some doughnuts. He finds that he has to feed the whole neighborhood’s kids too, because they swarm around the minute food makes an appearance. Joe helps people a little in this movie — he steals everything but he brags about stolen money only once; he pays back creditors; he buys something nice for his mother; he wanders around the house at night tucking in his parents and brother — and interestingly doesn’t appear to know what to do with himself when he’s home alone.

When I looked at reviews I can see why this was compared to the French film The 400 Blows. Both deal with kids who aren’t really bad people but who have parents who are disinterested in them and get caught in the system. But in The 400 Blows, it’s made clear that the parents’ problems occurred because, while the boy clearly got in the way of how they wanted their lives, they didn’t feel they could hit him.

And no, I looked up the title…it doesn’t mean anyone hit him…it’s an expression about raising hell.
In that movie, the boy was fed, got to school late, and in the one scene where he goes out with his family, is shown to be having a pretty good time and joking around with them. I just finished watching that recently as an ex-library item, and then got rid of it. It was slow, which I’m used to, but I also didn’t get a good feel for the boy, his life or the neighborhood. In this movie, you do. (Even though, in this movie, the rather opposite is true — part of Joe’s problem is they do hit him at home).

The 400 Blows clearly influenced a few films — probably this one, and another called The Slingshot, all of them end with in such an usual way — with freeze-frames — that it looks like a signature. The Slingshot is a fantastic film, by the way, and I wish it could be on DVD. I’ve tried to look up the book, but didn’t care for the part I found in an anthology. It has a similar ending to The 400 Blows and Joe the King, but it’s funny. In that movie, Rollie has a good relationship with his family — except maybe his brother. He jokes around with his father, and the main problem occurs because he doesn’t understand what he’s done. (The Slingshot of the title is one he sells to other kids made from his mother’s illegal condoms).

And, in The Slingshot, just like in Joe the King, the family is ultimately sorry about what happens, whereas the same can’t be said for The 400 Blows. The Slingshot is a happier movie, and I like it best, but I can also say that I like Joe the King better than the more-famous The 400 Blows. I guess a different style of movie making. The 400 Blows just didn’t grab me, and I spent much of it with the subtitles on fastforward. While I fast forwarded over bits of slower scenes in Joe the King, I can say that I’m glad they left the slow scenes in, and I even wish they’d included some more. Not because Joe the King is a happy story, but because it does so well making the scenery around Joe’s life work that I wanted to know more about what he thought about. The slow scenes they have are well filmed.
The film doesn’t have a plot so much as an everyday life kind of thing. (When Joe falls asleep in class after being up all night, it reminded me of what a substitute said: it was against school policy to wake these students in New York because they paid the rent and needed sleep more than education). The lowest point in the film, if that could be said in a film were almost nothing lighthearted happens, is when Joe’s brother refuses to speak to him. I guess the lighthearted parts are when Joe does something kind to people he has no reason to be kind to. Strangely, nearly all the children in this movie, except in the beginning, are in general supportive of each other. They cuss each other out and there’s some horseplay, but they like each other. So when they don’t along, in the neighborhood where everyone uses swear words as their first language, it’s actually surprising.

in contrast, Billy Elliot is another more famous film like this one — but I hated that movie. Same swearing, working-class background, fed-up father (Mum has died in that one) and in that case, the dad actually does punch one of the kids, and in the end is supportive but I hated that movie. I swear. For one thing, being supportive in the end didn’t work for me because I doubted the father would be supportive in that particular way — besides the fact that another opportunity would have come along, and people would have come looking for the dad for what he does in being supportive. For another, that film was lit in blue and is very dark — and when the subject matter is like it is, I’m glad that Joe the King is filmed somewhat brightly.
The 400 Blows may be more famous, and this film may be more downbeat than it probably should, but there’s something in this story that I really liked. I would rent it again — whereas I have no desire to watch The 400 Blows again (and that’s kind of tame compared to this). I started watching the commentary on the DVD and I’ve got to say if you want directors to get back to the technical commentaries and stop playing around with various actors on tape, than this a good place to start. So far it hasn’t shown which parts of this movie were semi-autobiographical, but it does show why certain camera angles were used, what was cut out, and why. It’s good to see that.

The thing that reminded me to watch this movie was www.joblo.com, (if you search for Jo Blo scripts in Google, you’ll find the section I want) has readable movie scripts for Gran Torino, Back to the Future etc. Some of them are the awful transcripts — better than nothing, but still…and some are actual scripts. Joe the King was in their system when I reviewed Gran Torino, but darn it, when I checked back, it’s not there. Too bad. The commentary refers regularly to scenes that were cut and I wanted to find out more. But the script so far as I can tell is gone.

The commentary says a lot of description was removed from the script. Kind of a shame, really. I’d like to read that.

Today I’ll be reviewing The Ghost Map by Steven Johnson. (No, it’s not about pirates). I picked it up to read on the train the other day, and it’s a fantastic historical book about an 1800’s cholera epidemic. It sets up the neighborhood in London first by explaining the various scavengers — rag-pickers, bone collectors, scrap metal, as well as the people who worked specifically in the sewers (a job I only recently read about fictionally in The Quincunx by         ).

But this book is about an actual epidemic. This book has cliff-hangers like any good detective story. It explores what the inhabitants of the neighborhood did for a living, what they ate and drank, and also the common medical beliefs of the day  — humors, constitutions, miasmas — and the social class problem. I’m familiar with this terms and their medical meanings, but I haven’t seen a book explore them before by demonstrating how they were used in combination, and how this restricted the germ theory.

This actually makes sense because today we believe in the germ theory, that diseases can be transmitted by water, and that you must rehydrate yourself if you have a fever. I may have picked the wrong things to demonstrate, but the fact is that we don’t generally believe in these things are isolated from one another. Likewise, Johnson shows that the social bias of the time influenced how neighborhoods were built, which influenced where people got their water — which in their own minds reinforced the idea that the lower classes by their inferior constitutions (something like an immune system) and filthy habits which caused miasmas (bad smells which caused disease) — brought about their own deaths from cholera. It also explores how religion influenced medicine.

Like a detective story, this book shows how a doctor interpreted these events, how he set out to prove that cholera came from the water when folkloric medical beliefs suggested otherwise. He did two very important things — interviewing people about deaths and any details about their daily life, and making a map that showed not only where the cholera began and how it traveled but why. The maps adds sociology — and this I think is especially interesting, given that years later, in 1911, Popenoe’s eugenics textbook will still hold to the old ideas, that internal constitutions of poorer, schizophrenic patients make their deaths from consumption likely — not that the sociology and living conditions make the germs spread.

So this study of cholera was very much ahead of its time. The doctor in it sets out to prove cholera’s transmission through water against the commonly accepted disease theories of the time period. The author supports any theories mentioned by explaining thier history, but then goes back to the drama of the neighborhood’s inhabitants.

I liked this book and would highly recommend it, especially if you want to understand how people thought about disease transmission, about how Victorian cities were built, or what it was like to live and work in London. I’m surprised I have not heard of The Ghost Map before.

I thought I would review Emily of New Moon today, although it’s been a few months since I’ve read it.

I discovered the TV series at a store, and was immediately interested, if for no other reason than it was a historical children’s drama done in Canada. I love the way some of those TV shows are filmed and written (Pit Pony season 1 comes to mind, excellent illustration of family life and child labor and has well-defined characters). I rented Season One and was by turns impressed by some scenes (as when Emily confronts Aunt Elizabeth about her books, or when Emily damns a group of relatives to hell), and dismayed or irritated by their melodrama (Emily spends much of episode one screaming at various times as her cat is left behind, tossed from a wagon and thrown out of a window). Even though the novel was written by L.M. Montgomery, the author who wrote Anne of Green Gables, and this implies it is an early-20th-century book, (as it is), but I was inspired to read the series of books because I was certain some of the scenes had been stretched to fit modern tastes.

Would a child in 1915 really speak to a group of adults as Emily does? I thought it was pretty bold for a child of that time period.
Now other rude children like Mary in The Secret Garden spring to mind, but the answer is yes, in the first book she does speak rudely to the adults, and she does confront Aunt Elizabeth about her books in roughly the same way as in the movie.

There are extensive changes from the books, and in most cases, I think for the better. I slogged through the second and third books, uninterested by Emily’s various suitors, understanding why the book was so internal (Emily wants to be a writer and it is largely how she develops skills), but I felt that there were missed opportunities. You don’t learn very much about the inhabitants of the village in any way except through Emily’s diary at times, I didn’t feel attached to Teddy, Perry or Ilse, Emily’s friends, etc. Also, very little seems to actually be happening (more happens in the first book, in my opinion). This makes sense because the book is about observing things, and its said that the Murrays of New Moon keep to themselves, but wouldn’t observing townspeople at least or church or rare gathering places be useful? Granted, I suppose it’s more realistic than Anne of Green Gables, in that Emily is not off having adventures all the time, but I felt that was rather a shame. I’m not a large fan of Anne of Green Gables or L.M. Montgomery anyway.
The TV series keeps the best parts of scenes in the books, makes up several others so that something happens in each episode (sometimes melodramatic, sometimes not), and changes several incidents. For instance, the first book starts with Emily’s father dying of tuberucolis — a common theme in books like this, and one that would have been familiar in reality to people of the time. But this means that Emily’s father is too tired to do anything during the first chapter, except die. The TV series corrects this, by showing that he dislikes public school (which is amplified by a beating Emily gets at school) — causing her father to knock the teacher around. Well, at least he’s doing something. Then a sudden heart attack finishes him off, and Emily is made to draw lots as to which relative wants her.

I thought for certain the lots were created for the TV series, but there they are in the book too. Also, another scene (Lofty John and the apple), and a funny scene where chore boy Perry ends up naked before company are also in TV series and book. Other things I wish the TV series had developed further — they make good use of an unconventional teacher, and Perry’s aunt (who appears in a second season), but the episode that tries to show what happened to Cousin Jimmy to make him “not all there” is more confusing than the lines in the book that inspired it.

For instance, early on in the TV series, Emily is asked to take out the cows — and if writing and reading are forbidden in this new home (a device I thought was wonderful) — why is she not also making up stories while doing chores? In the book, if I remember correctly, she is rarely shown doing any chores at all, and you can’t tell me that a working farm during this time period, however poor, would not have children working. In the TV series, Perry the chore boy is hired, and the scene where he wants to go to school is expanded, but very little use is made of his character — even though he lives in the same house as Emily and she sees him every day. In the book, she’s friends with him as well, but I thought good use wasn’t made of her friends there either (though I did enjoy the “yo’ mama equivilant in the series and book between Emily and Ilse).

In the second season, cows, chickens and sheep are ordered slaughtered by Murray relatives (who did not exist in the book). Although you see the horse and occasionally cows, and the barn is Cousin Jimmy’s place, you rarely see any chores except sweeping up being done and I was not aware the family actually possesed sheep.

so I read all the books. I like the first one best, though I doubt I will check it out again. I had no use for the second and third, and I felt they dragged, and although I find the TV series has it’s high and low points, and is not as well-produced as Pit Pony, I am in the middle of the second season and plan to watch the third. I feel that they actually made improvements by changing what happens drastically. As far as production values, I should add that the scenery, props, lighting, costuming and general construction of the series are as well done as I would expect from a Canadian period piece. They are as well done as Pit Pony or Anne of Green Gables. That said, there are parts of this series that are over-acted or difficult for me to believe — almost never the case with the Pit Pony series, even though both that and this series contain ghosts.

So I am finishing season two, waiting for season three, and waiting for impatiently for season 2 (the final season) of Pit Pony on DVD. The first was released years and left an excellent cliff-hanger and I’ve been dying to find out what happens to the characters. I can’t say I have the same impatience for this series — but be that as it may, I now own the first season of Emily of New Moon on DVD.

Recently a friend of mine and I got to talking about the films of Christian Bale, and my friend said she wanted to see all of them. I asked if she had seen Empire of Sun and found she hadn’t. So of course, i brought out the DVD and we sat down and watched it straight through (over two days).

Now watching this film straight through is something I very rarely do — so much so that some years ago, when I began at the beginning, I barely remembered parts of it at all. There are also sections that it took me numerous viewings to understand — such as the fact that the doctor in the scene on the roof does not actually need help in the hospital or the fact that the Americans may not actually have been setting pheasent traps, but rather planning an escape. (Although I recently realized that John Malkovich flies forward in the end not because he jumped but because he tripped over the pheasent trap). That said, I always liked that the Americans bet on Jim’s survival, that he turns from a spoiled rich kid into a self-reliant scrounger — and I’ve always felt that the camera angle during the scene where the Japanese soldier nearly captures him is forced. If someone is patrolling above you, all they have to do is look down at their just once, and they would have seen you.

After the movie, I looked online for paperbacks of Empire of the Sun, which for some reason I’ve done more than once, even though I’ve owned a copy for years. I skip around in it, and almost never read it straight through, but like the movie, there are parts I really enjoy. Like the movie, the book does such a wonderful job of world-building, and by the time you reach the end, you know all the people in it and a very good idea of living conditions. Although sometimes, I want to yank the author out of the book and say “Enough already! Then what happened?”

The author is J.G. Ballard. In the past, I’ve found a few of his science-fiction novels, for which I had almost no interest, and in the last couple of years, searching for Empire of the Sun, found a sequel, The Kindness of Women. I was very interested, since the novel Empire of the Sun was semi-autobiographical, at what happened next when Jim is sent to England, after absorbing everything that happened in internment camp. So I eagerly went and got it from the library.

Big mistake.

I hated it. I have, in fact, never checked it out again, and remember little about it, except that bits of the internment camp are described, with strange conversations between characters that never seem to read right to me — in contrast to Empire of the Sun, which does. Descriptions and conversations are shorter, which is in some ways a relief. The first-person narrative was rather startling, even though I tend to read that more often, because EOTS was written in third person. There are gaps of time in between chapters, if I remember correctly — the author’s time training to be a doctor; the death of his wife from a sudden fall; and, if I remember correctly, numerous relations with women that I had absolutely no interest in at all.

The same material is covered in the new autobiography I found the other day — Miracles of Life: From Shanghai to Shepperton — but it’s handled better. I would actually read this one again, though I still don’t understand about modern art, Freud, or other things in it, it does explain “what happened next.” It also explains where and how the author came up with some of the events in stories and what influenced them. In the movie and book EOTS, I noticed that Jim changes from a spoiled kid to an optimistic but disillusioned child — what I hadn’t realized is that the adults changed as well. Ballard notes the same type of effect as the book Farewell to Manzanar does — that parents and children became estranged in camp because they were powerless. Ballard says that the adults seemed as if they were on vacation, in shirts and shorts, whereas before they were always dressed properly. In fact, I think in the movie, there are adults running about in shorts and I never noticed it, let alone as a social change.

This book is more a summary than one of the autobiographies where characters are formed — but it works. It leads you from one event to the next — Ballard as a young student boiling a rabbit skeleton in school was a highlight — and it explains a lot about what went on behind the scenes. Here, Ballard’s wife dies suddenly from pnemonia, and he mentions girlfriends he’s had, but thank God, just mentions, and then gets on with things. I still had little interest in Freud or modern art that he discusses, but I can understand how these would influence a science fiction writer, especially at a time before television, when things were becoming more modernized. Pictures, it seems, and old science fiction novels, might be a way to imagine new technology to put in a book.

There are also a number of references to people I believe I probably would know about, if I lived in England, but since I don’t, I had no clue.So this book is not as long, as detailed and does not have as many characters as Empire of the Sun. In some ways I think that’s good, because they are different kinds of stories — this one a record of personal history before terminal cancer — but at the same time, I wish, the reader could see the characters of Ballard’s children, wife, and friends, just as easily as it is to picture Mr. Maxted, Basie and Jim’s parents in Empire of the Sun. They are mentioned, and it is easy to read, but even though this autobiography and the other fiction, the other characters are more defined.

Which does make sense in a way…

Before I get back to my review of No Pity, I want to review the book Peter & Max: A Fables Novel by Bill Willingham. I saw this book, along with The Child Thief: A Novel by Brom, at the local comic book store. Both had been written by comic book authors, and both were illustrated. I was interested, in part because the first comic book author novel I read there turned out to be one of the funniest books I’ve read, and the other a Niel Gaiman book with plenty of folklore in it. So I was willing to give them a try.

I read them, and having finished Peter and Max, have decided that I like it best. Both books did folkloric research, which is obvious when you read them — Brom’s fairies, and fairy land, like J.M. Barrie’s, is dark and somewhat frightening, certainly not the land created by Disney. This is all well and good, since there is a tradition with Grimm’s Fairy Tales et al., that a lot of violence happens in fairy tales. The Child Thief is clever in creating a Peter Pan who is a trickster, who only wants children to support warfare, and who doesn’t really care what happens to them — in fact, in this respect as a “new” Peter Pan novel, I like it better than others I’ve seen meant for children. The explanation of why and how the story was created is worth rereading. I enjoyed the idea that children would have to adjust to being kidnapped and brought to Neverland, that Captain Hook was a kind man with children of his own, and that he was plagued by reverends straight out of the Salem Witch Trials. That being said, like The Book of Lost Things by John Connolly, this book is excessively violent. But I could, at times with difficulty, ignore the violence in The Book of Lost Things in favor of a clever story rooted in folklore, I found it much harder with The Child Thief. For one thing, this book is longer. For another, by the time I got near the end I was growing tired of it. The magic that happens makes sense, and is set up well, as is the ending, but even the people meant to be friendly turn angry and mean, even the Devils (Brom’s name for the Lost Boys). I loved the fact that Peter Pan is a changeling, and felt that his parent’s response was well done, and that he is adopted and trained by creatures in the forest. There are moments in Peter’s training that are quite good, before violence once again comes into the story. Although at times, the violence is appropriate and makes sense in the story — for instance that Peter needs to be without a family — and there are echoes of the original Peter Pan (”I’m a Peterbird,” says Peter, what the Lost Boys will call Wendy in Barrie’s version), I was glad when the story ended. The illustrations are good, if somewhat superhero/fantasy-like for my taste.