Monday's Movie: The Horror and the Heist

Over at A Novel Menagerie, Sher is hosting Monday's Movie, in which she invites everyone to "write about any movies, television or big screen, that you’ve seen over the past week."

This is my first time participating, and as I only have a couple of movies to mention (we don't go out to movies much anymore, and I'm trying to keep myself focused on reading instead of staring at the TV screen), I'm going to combine them in one post.



Acacia
Korea, 2003
Written and Directed by Ki-hyeong Park
MPAA Rating: R for violence and language

Synopsis from SundanceChannel.com:
"Korean filmmaker Ki-Hyung Park (Whispering Corridors) serves up an unsettling tale of muted dread about a childless couple's attempts to forge a family. Despite her mother's disapproval, Mi-sook (Hye-jin Shim) and her husband (Jin-geun Kim) adopt Jin-seong (Oh-bin Mun), a quiet, artistic six-year-old boy. Soon Jin-seong evinces an obsessive attraction to a dying acacia tree in the backyard, which he associates with his birth mother. Yet even more unsettling events are in store when Mi-sook unexpectedly becomes pregnant."

My Thoughts:
Strange and definitely "unsettling" film with two adorably spooky kids who looked a little too much like the wraiths in The Grudge for my taste. Pretty good psychological suspense drama with a supernatural touch. One of those films that make the viewer work a little to figure things out. Kept me guessing about what was actually going on, and it delivered surprises right up to the end. Gorgeous cinematography and nice spare settings; even though the film was in color, it almost comes across as black-and-white so that the violent splashes of red in the final scenes are all the more shocking. If you're contemplating adoption, you'll probably want to stay away from this one.

This film kept me watching all the way through, even with its unpleasant subject matter and some pretty graphic violence (including, it should be noted, one rape scene), so in accordance with Sher's rating system, I'd give it two bags of popcorn, out of five.

The Thomas Crown Affair
USA, 1999
Directed by John McTiernan
Screenplay by Leslie Dixon and Kurt Wimmer
MPAA Rating: R for some sexuality and language

My Thoughts:
Part of my ongoing attempt to watch some of the movies I missed during the 1990s. This is a remake of director Norman Jewison's 1968 classic starring Steve McQueen and Faye Dunaway, with Pierce Brosnan and Rene Russo in the lead roles. The original Thomas Crown was one of the greatest "heist" films of all time, and arguably Steve McQueen's best on-screen work. Playing against type as the urbane, well-educated and fabulously wealthy Crown, McQueen brought the role to life in a performance that's a thrill to watch, even forty years later. Brosnan, although he's a fine actor and an appealing screen presence, never really sizzles here. And where Dunaway was beautiful, brainy, alluring and classy, Russo is abrasive, unkempt and just downright trashy at times. As my husband said, if you haven't seen the original version, this newer film would be a perfectly acceptable entertainment. But if you haven't seen the original, you're missing a great movie experience.

I'm not quite sure why directors want to try to tinker with film classics; it seems a shame to waste all that money and talent. I wasn't as charmed by this one as the hubby was. I thought the best things in it were Faye Dunaway (doing a cameo as Crown's rather unorthodox psychiatrist) and the reuse of the original's signature song "Windmills of Your Mind." So I'd give it a single bag of popcorn, out of a possible five.

Friday Finds: 6 March 2009

Friday Finds is a weekly event hosted by MizB at Should Be Reading. Participants are asked to share with other bloggers about the new-to-you books found during the week – books you either want to add to your TBR (to be read) list, or that you just heard about that sounded interesting.

This week I put quite a few new titles on my New Finds list. Well, new to me – actually, several of them have been around for a while. Some of these will undoubtedly make it to my TBR list after I've found out a little more about them.

• The Brontës Went to Woolworths. Rachel Ferguson (Bloomsbury Publishing, 2009). Source: Fleur Fisher Reads 3/05/2009
• Flannery: A Life of Flannery O'Connor. Brad Gooch (Little, Brown; 448 pp. $30). Source: New York Times Book Review 3/01/2009, cover review
• The Invisible Circus. Jennifer Egan (Nan A. Talese/Doubleday, 1995). Source: Discovered this one after happening upon the 2001 movie version on TV
• The Italian Lover. Robert Hellenga (Little, Brown, 2007; 352 pp.). Source: BermudaOnion's blog 3/02/2009
• The Crimes of Paris: A True Story of Murder, Theft, and Detection. Dorothy and Thomas Hoobler (Little, Brown, April 2009; 384 pp.). Source: BermudaOnion's blog 3/02/2009, which also led me to discover the following after a little searching around on the internet:
• The Monsters: Mary Shelley and the Curse of Frankenstein. Dorothy and Thomas Hoobler (Little, Brown, 2006; 384 pp.)
• The Cabinet of Curiosities. Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child (Warner Books, 2002). Source: I'm reading Preston's Blasphemy right now, for the Suspense-Thriller Challenge
• The Doomsday Key (Sigma Force series, no. 6). James Rollins (due in July 2009). Source: Discovered after Rollins started "following" me on Twitter. I seem to be going through a thriller-reading phase at the moment.
• The Red Leather Diary: Reclaiming a Life Through the Pages of a Lost Journal. Lily Koppel (Harper Perennial, $14.99). Source: New York Times Book Review 3/01/2009, new paperbacks
• Stone's Fall. Iain Pears (Spiegel & Grau, May 5th 2009; 608 pp.). Source: Found through Shelf Awareness ad
• The Ten-Cent Plague: The Great Comic-Book Scare and How It Changed America. David Hajdu (Picador, $16). Source: New York Time Book Review 3/01/2009, new paperbacks

Challenged Again: The 1% Well-Read Challenge

My Inner Responsible Person is wringing her hands and crying "No, no, NO!" right now. But I've found yet one more challenge that looks just too good to pass up. It's the 1% Well-Read Challenge, hosted by Michelle from 1 More Chapter, and running from March 1, 2009 to March 31, 2010.

Basically the challenge is to read 10-13 books from the lists put together by the editors of the book 1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die. Now I've already signed up for The Guardian 1000 Novels Challenge, and this one should match up well with that one, since crossovers are allowed.

The challenge announcement page has links to the original list of 1001 books, as well as the newer updated list. I haven't come up with a list of my own yet, but a brief preliminary check shows that I've only read something like 150 of the titles. So I've got plenty of choices to think about.

Now I just have to try to calm that Inner Responsible Person a little before I start thinking about joining the Cozy Mystery Challenge 2009, as well!

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For my tentative reading list, go here.

Booking Through Thursday: The Best Book You've Never Read

This week's BTT topic:

What’s the best book that YOU haven’t read yet?

Well, of course, the best book I haven't read is the book I haven't written yet!

Seriously, I'm not sure exactly how to answer that question. I mean, there are many thousands of books I haven't read out there on all those lists. How could I possibly know which is the best one of that unread number? I can say that there are several books that keep turning up on each of the best-book lists that are surprising to me. I hesitate to mention titles because – well, one person's trash is somebody else's certified classic, and I don't want to stir up a lot of ire and indignation.

But I will admit that there are quite a few books I myself consider "classics" that I haven't read yet. Some I fully intend to get to someday (Swann's Way, A Farewell to Arms, Sense and Sensibility, The Ambassadors, Rabbit Run, among many others); and some, although I know they're "worthy," just don't sound like my cup of tea (Last of the Mohicans, War and Peace, Tristram Shandy, The Naked and the Dead, anything by Charles Dickens).

This question was especially interesting to me because I recently read one of the classics I've had on my to-read list for many years – Edith Wharton's The Age of Innocence. Don't know why it took me so long to get around to it. I'd been putting it off and putting it off, year after year, thinking it would probably bore me to death – one of those things you read because you know you should, like medicine you know you should take. And then I finally made myself sit down and read the thing, and loved it. It's become one of my absolute favorite books – one that I know I'll probably re-read in years to come. So I guess there's just no accounting for taste, is there? Not even one's own.




Edith Wharton, 1915
Photo: Wikipedia Commons

Tuesday Thingers: Early Reviewers

Tuesday Thingers is hosted by Wendi of Wendi's Book Corner (thanks, Wendi!). And this week's topic is about the Early Reviewer Program:

Were you aware of the Early Reviewer Program? Have you received any books from the program? If you have, how have you liked the book(s)? Any other thoughts on the LTER program?

Well, I might not be remembering correctly, but didn't the Tuesday Thingers group actually start up as an offshoot of the Early Reviewers discussion group at LT? Hmmmm. Not completely sure about that.

Anyway, yes, I've been aware of the ER program almost since I first signed up with LT. I didn't join right away because I wasn't sure I'd be able to get the books read on a timely basis, but after a couple of months of "lurking," I decided to jump in. Looking back over my book list, I see that I didn't receive any books the first couple of months after I joined. But after that, I was lucky five months in a row, April through August of last year. Since then, I haven't received any books. Well, technically I "snagged" a book in the November listing, but I never received it (How to Profit from the Coming Rapture – as far as I can tell, nobody received any copies of that one – I guess the Rapture wasn't as lucrative as they thought it would be).

And as for the books I've received through the program, I can honestly say that there really wasn't a stinker in the bunch. Well, maybe that Rapture book - who knows what I might have thought of that one. I've enjoyed reading all of them, and one (The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society) has joined my long list of all-time favorites.

Actually, I'm really a little leery of talking openly about Early Reviewers because I have this personal superstition that the more I say about it, the less likely I am ever to get another book. Yes, I know that's completely bonkers, and it all has to do with the mighty algorithm and what sorts of books I've got catalogued, and what sorts of books I've reviewed, and being in the right place at the right time, and sending cheese offerings to Abby, and all that; but I was never really known for my rationality.

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Addendum: OK, as I was writing this, I checked my LT account and discovered I've snagged a book from the February batch (Bleeding Heart Square, by Andrew Taylor). And I hadn't even sent in my cheese bribe yet. I'll never doubt the sacred algorithm again, I promise!

Teaser Tuesdays: Gloom and Doom

Teaser Tuesdays is hosted by MizB at Should Be Reading. And these are the rules: Grab your current read; Let the book fall open to a random page. Share with us two (2) “teaser” sentences from that page, somewhere between lines 7 and 12. You also need to share the title of the book that you’re getting your “teaser” from … that way people can have some great book recommendations if they like the teaser you’ve given! Please avoid spoilers!

This week, I'm just getting started on Douglas Preston's Blasphemy; reading it for the Suspense-Thriller Challenge. And here, not for the squeamish, are my two teasers (from p.65 of the paperback edition):

"I brought my cat – I couldn't bear to be parted from her. Two days after we arrived, I heard a howl and saw a coyote running off with her."

Well, that was pretty awful, wasn't it? So, since I'm still reading A.S. Byatt's Angels & Insects as well, I thought I'd include a quote from that one, too – maybe lighten things up a little. No such luck, I'm afraid. These are from p.273:

Cecilia's lost children approached from the spirit world through the voices of Sophy Sheekhy and Mrs Papagay. Cecilia's marriage had been happy, but the boy Edmund, the child invoked into being in the poem, had died long ago, aged thirteen, followed by his two sisters Emily and Lucy, over the slow years, at nineteen and twenty-one, breaking poor Cecilia's heart.

Well, I guess you can't really expect a lot of laughs from Byatt. But I'm hoping the Preston doesn't turn out to be as gloomy as those teasers make it sound. Otherwise, I may have to limit my reading adventures to P.G. Wodehouse and Fannie Flagg for the rest of the year.

The Sunday Salon: Life List

This week was a pretty good reading week for me. I finished Barry Unsworth's Land of Marvels, and Edith Wharton's Age of Innocence; and I only have a few more pages left to read in Brian Moore's wonderful and weird 1975 novel, The Great Victorian Collection. I'm going to try to get reviews of all three posted on my blog this week. I'm so extremely far behind on review-writing, that I'll probably never catch up. But I did manage to post a review of one book (count 'em – one!) last week – P.D. James's first Adam Dalgliesh novel, Cover Her Face; and I'm hoping that means the dry spell is ending.

The main thing that's been swallowing up all my non-reading free time during the last couple of weeks is my obsession with creating a life list of books. Do you have a life list? Over the years, I've kept a lot of separate lists of the books I read each year – lists on pages in my journals, lists on the backs of envelopes, lists on scraps of newspaper, etc. But I've never tried putting them all together in one humongous list until now. It was all those darn "X Number of Books You Just Have to Read Before You Shuffle Off This Mortal Coil" lists that have been published lately: That's what did me in. I started comparing my own reading life to the various recommendations, and of course I was immediately hooked. I love lists and list-making – so I guess it was inevitable.

I started out keeping a Microsoft Works database of all the titles. But then I realized it might be more useful if I could keep it online, so I've converted it into a Google Docs spreadsheet which seems to work very nicely. I'm up to a little over a thousand titles now, but I'm listing everything I can remember – even the books I read as a child.

And now I've got my husband hooked, too. So we've been spending the last week or so reminding each other of books we remember reading, books we think we've read, books we should have read or probably read but can't remember now. It's actually been a lot of fun, in a deeply twisted sort of way. And it's been a very valuable memory-jogger, too. I've rediscovered dozens of books I'd forgotten about reading – it's almost like having the experience of reading them all over again. But now that my life list is almost complete (well, I think it is anyway), I'm really looking forward to getting back to reading in the present once again!