Ponder Post: Two Movies – Two Thumbs Up

Frank and I went to two movies recently and both were great. I highly recommend seeing them both.

Me Before You, the movie, is every bit as good as the book – a real rarity. I reviewed the book in my post for June 28, 2015. Check out the imdb link for the movie. It is surprising and gratifying to see the male and female actors play such tender leading roles after their demeanors in Game of Thrones (Emilia Clarke as Daenerys Targaryen) and The Hunger Games (Sam Claflin as Finnick Odair). They both exhibit a great range of acting skills. Mesh those talents with a story that is both thought-provoking and discussion-instigating and you have a winner. I interpreted the title as one person (un)selfishly placing themselves before another and debated who was the "me" and who was the "you" in the relationship. But Frank interpreted it as what a person was like before they met the other person. Both are intriguing viewpoints. The movie omits some side stories that were in the book but their omission in no way hampered the integrity of the story. Read the book. See the movie. Decide for yourself.

Now You See Me 2 is every bit as good as Now You See Me, also a rare phenomenon in the movie arena. The card scene is absolutely awesome. Do not miss it. I think I need to see this one again to figure out all the duplicity going on. Check out its trailer at imdb. You do not need to have seen Now You See Me to follow this sequel, but it does lend itself to the enjoyment and perplexing puzzle of cross and double-cross if you have. Most of the cast is the same. Mark Ruffalo and Morgan Freeman reprise their roles from the first movie as competing magicians. Michael Caine returns with his suave, unruffled mannerisms, but the female magician is different with amusingly laudable quirks of behavior. Daniel Radcliffe is cast very convincingly as the villain and I could easily get beyond him having been Harry Potter.

These two movies were very different in tone and genre and I loved them both.

Ponder Post: Wilde Lake

The opening lines of Laura Lippman's Wilde Lake are an attention getter:

When my brother was eighteen, he broke his arm in an accident that ended in another young man's death. I wish I could tell you that we mourned the boy who died but we did not.

This immediately brought to my mind the opening lines of Harper Lee's To Kill a Mocking Bird:

When he was nearly thirteen, my brother Jem got his arm badly broken at the elbow. When it healed and Jem's fears of never being able to play football again were assuaged, he was seldom self-conscious about his injury.

Both books are told as viewed through the childhood eyes of a young girl whose father is a lawyer and single parent. Both books are set in a small southern town. To Kill a Mockingbird, narrated by Scout, takes place in Alabama while Wilde Lake, told by Luisa, takes place in Maryland. To Kill a Mockingbird deals with a town's racial prejudice. By contrast, Wilde Lake is a very forward-thinking, accepting community - but is it really? How sincere is political correctness? Both books are equally stellar in my opinion.

A writing technique in Laura Lippman used in Wilde Lake has chapters narrated in first person from Luisa's vantage point as a naive young girl as well as chapters told in third person by Luisa as a grown female professional. I found it refreshingly creative. When the author retells a scene with the added retrospective and context of an adult, the interpretation can be very different. The juxtaposition of viewpoints is endearingly indicative of childhood innocence. I liked that, at the start of a chapter, the book alerts the reader to a transition between these two time periods immediately by using a san serif font for the childhood perspective and a font with serifs for the adult viewpoint narrative. Clever. And helpful.

There are many turns and surprises in this book interwoven around the main plot line of a criminal investigation associated with a murder trial. Like many crime drama series on television these days, CASTLE and BONES for example, there is a back story to the characters investigating the crime. Often the back story is as riveting or more so than the crime itself. This is the case with Wilde Lake. The crime takes a back seat to the personal lives of Luisa's family.

Laura Lippman is a New York Times best selling author and I think the title is well deserved. I am definitely going to seek out and read some of her other works. She has stand alone titles as well as a Tess Monaghan crime series. In researching her a bit, I found this blog post of hers amusing and thought-provoking. It is from a recent post dated May 11, 2016 and titled PC: Politically Correct or Just Profoundly Conscious? Here is the url for it.
http://www.lauralippman.net/blog/2016/5/11/9hvsukp2xl7a043oa5gjgsu4jrbupu

I definitely recommend this book. I was a bit disappointed with the ending but I think that is more a matter of my opinion and character attachment than a lack of worthiness from a literary point of view. The book was a page turner with nuggets of surprises laden throughout. I now have a new author to strongly consider when selecting my next book to read.

Ponder Post: Fire Season

Fire Season by Hollye Dexter is the story of family's journey back to solvency and security. Due to an undetected electric fire within the walls of their home, Hollye and her family lost all their material possessions –  their home and personal belongings, their pets, her billing and customer records and all stock from her children's clothing business, and her husband's equipment and instruments crucial to his job as a professional musician. The house burned completely down to the foundation, nothing remaining but rubble dotted with a few scattered scorched items. They escaped their totally destroyed home with moderately severe physical injuries but those injuries healed. The mental healing was another challenge, however.

Imagine losing everything, living in borrowed clothes, having no IDs to replace ones lost in the fire, and lacking a livelihood and therefore credit – truly starting again from nothing.  They were uninsured. They needed to swallow their pride and rely on charity. Feelings of loss often guiltily overshadowed feelings of gratitude, but society and politeness requires saying "thank you" none the less. Many of these conflicting emotions were well portrayed in the memoir.

The situation was indeed dire and I can be very sympathetic for the family. Fire Season got a 5 star review on Amazon from 93% of its readers but I am not of the same opinion. The subtitle of this novel is My Journey from Ruin to Redemption, and I think the author presented an imbalanced focus on "ruin" rather than "redemption". The book could not seem to choose among being a retrospective on a hippie lifestyle and unhappy childhood, a litany of optimistic but nevertheless poor decisions, a psychological analysis, or a religious revelation. At the risk of appearing cold-hearted, I will admit I thought it was repetitious. It spent too much time focusing on bad luck Hollye and her husband had experienced, before as well as after the fire, rather than on a victorious triumph over the odds. The frank detailing of hopelessness and disheartening thoughts was a brave expression of truth, but I felt the book dwelled too long on this aspect at the expense of revealing that there was indeed a light at the end of the tunnel.

This was not an enjoyable read for me. The emotional baggage the author carried with her, even before the fire, complicated her recovery from the disaster. The novel might resonate with others confronted with such a devastating loss, acknowledging the despair and struggles they would most certainly face; however, the tale and its telling would not be uplifting to the unfortunate. It would fail to give them the hope and encouragement they would crave to get back on their feet, eventually. My redeeming consolation in having spent time reading Fire Season was that perhaps my purchase of this depressing book contributed to its royalties and helped the family a bit financially.