The Thin Blue Line

This was a deep one on my queue, but with the help of FF BFD I polished it off last night. Very compelling. Both the form of the movie and content of the story kept me engaged. It was so artfully constructed it made me think most other people making documentaries are a whole class below Errol Morris.

Rise of the Planet of the Apes

This movie had a lot to enjoy, including a compelling father/chimp-son story, a nicely paced-out chimp prison story, and a crazy extended set piece of apes running rampant and kicking ass over San Francisco. James Franco is in it, looking weirdly both beefy and ragged. Another cool part is where the chimp-son is so hell bent on defending an Alzheimers John Lithgow that he causes serious personal injury to another person.

If you're like me, you'll certainly enjoy seeing Andy Serkis continue along his quick trajectory towards becoming the Daniel Day-Lewis of mo-cap.

Levels Of The Game by John McPhee

This is a short book, an extended New Yorker article really, about Arthur Ashe and Clark Graebner's tennis match during the 1968 US Open. The tennis stuff I ended up skimming, it's just not that compelling. Sportswriting to me is always best when it's about everything other than sports, and there's lots of that here. Arthur Ashe's boyhood - he lived in a park, where his father was a police officer - is interesting, and there's a whole part about his genealogy, and about a mentor who launched a program to promote black tennis players. There are extended descriptions of the lifestyles of both Graebner and Ashe who were both amateurs at the time.

The two best parts of the book:
1) Graebner's "training meal" that he eats every night: "a vodka martini, a shrimp cocktail, a baked potato without salt or butter, and roast beef or a steak." Ashe eats "soul food" and "once in a while he will have a glass of beer with a shot of lime juice in it."

2) Ashe, talking about Australia, says "Australian English is a barroom language. It is not a language for a woman."

All told I didn't like this book as much as DFW's tennis writing. But it was pretty compelling as a profile of two people from distinct backgrounds and their lives in the 1960s, performing as amateur athletes at the highest level.

Even the Giants, by Jesse Jacobs

I loved this little graphic novel. There are some really funny moments in it and the drawings are beautiful. It reminded me of another tiny favorite of mine: Tales of Woodsman Pete, by Lilli Carré. Enjoy!

The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet, by David Mitchell

Not as good as Cloud Atlas, but good. It took me a little while to warm up to the story, mainly because you don't get a solid sense of where it is going until the end of the first book, but after that I was hooked. I think the James Wood review in the New Yorker complained that there doesn't seem to be a real "reason" for this book, other than just to write a masterpiece of historical fiction. That seems like an okay enough reason to me, but I can see the point Wood was making: why write a work of historical fiction if not to prove some point about what we can learn from some era or way of thinking that persisted in the past? Mitchell does pay a little homage to the idea that slavery is wrong, which is pretty much what all historical fiction is about, since that is the only thing we have ever learned from the past—but he doesn't get bogged down in it and manages to turn out a pretty compelling story. Good work!

Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, 2011

I thought this movie was great. I was a little uncomfortable about the scene with all the Jew bankers, but it was still a good scene.

The Secret History by Donna Tartt

This book takes place at a small liberal arts college in Vermont. The protagonist/narrator is a self-hating suburban Californian who falls in with an exclusive and privileged group of ancient Greek scholars. The story (made clear in the two-page prologue) is about how five of the scholars (narrator included) come to murder the sixth.

It's definitely a page-turner, there's a lot of sordid stuff to suck you in, but it peaked around the midpoint and then the ending sort of petered out (the action of the ending, I felt, being sort of a cop-out). In many ways it's a fascinating study of how one powerful person can stealthily control a bunch of weaker people, but it never quite overcomes the inherent coldness of a study -- even though I suppose I did care about some of the characters. (Can a story ever be truly satisfying when the characters you care about most will always be fundamentally powerless?)

It's a good depiction of a middle-class outsider's relationship to old-money privilege, and it's very New England. I especially enjoyed the fantasy-fodder of weekends spent at one of the character's Gothic ancestral mansion. Worth reading, since it's a quickie.