Beyond Borders

Movie, 127 min (2003)
Director: Martin Campbell

This movie is the non-story of an American woman (Angelina Jolie as Sarah), living in London with an at-times unemployed British husband. Sarah falls for a passionate doctor's pitch for aid to war-time refugees in Africa and soon travels there with food she's used her savings to buy. Clive Owen plays Nick, the doctor, as a snarly wretch who thinks the "rich lady" expects too much of the truckloads of food she delivers to a refugee camp. "It'll last two or three days," someone says.

There's not much plot, and what there is is wholly predictable. Sarah falls for Nick and he for her, but they must be noble and send her home to the husband and child and him back to his relief work in war-torn locales. In Africa, Cambodia, Chechnya, the genuine suffering seems superficially thrown in as a backdrop for the rest of the soap opera that plays out.

The characters are wooden and Jolie stays incredibly well kept together, even as she stumbles to the ground amidst a hysterical crowd in dusty Ethiopia and slogs through the snow in Russia -- she looks and acts so pat it's hard to keep looking. The dialog is stilted, so it's hard to keep listening. The tyrannical locals who are greedy for incoming food and supplies are played as stereotypically cruel and mercenary.

"Beyond Borders" is well meant, maybe, but too exploitative of truly awful famine and suffering for romance's sake. And for my taste.

ParaNorman

Movie (2012), 92 minutes
Directors: Chris Butler, Sam Fell
Screenplay: Chris Butler

What an entertaining romp with the living dead! Little Norman sees his old grandmother all the time, lounging in a corner of what appears to be the family room, but his family scoffs at his presumed delusion. His father wants Norman to straighten up and stop talking about ghosts. At school the stereotypical bully and others make fun of the geeky, shy boy.

It's an old line from Haley Joel Osment, "I see dead people," much made fun of over recent years; but, as it turns out, it's no joke. The dead of Norman's little town of Blithe Hollow are carrying a witch's curse from old New England days and cannot rest. A platoon of zombies rises from the cemetery and terrorizes the town. Norman must lay the ghosts.

The ghost of Norman's uncle (I think), the nicely named Mr. Penderghast, hints that Norman can find the info that will free the zombies from their curse in the Blithe Hollow town hall. As the zombies prowl the town, Norman and friends search for the secret.

The stop-motion animation is well done and the backgrounds are beautiful, showing Blithe Hollow and surrounds in subdued color and with much moody shadow. And -- this is a kindly film, with good-spirited messages about friendship, acceptance of others, and forgiveness.

LIfe of Pi (Book)

Yann Martel
Mariner Books (paperback), 2012, 336 pages
Available for Kindle (which is where I read the book)

Sometimes I read books just because everyone seems to be talking about them. Some such reads are to verify what the popular demand is about (Twilight, for example), and some are to check into what critics are raving about (Life of Pi).

The book has been made into a movie now, so the film is getting as much talk as the book did. The movie-makers must have been challenged in turning this talky preachment into a film.

What action there is is fantastic: Sixteen-year-old Pi is on his way to Canada from India with his brother and parents when the Japanese ship they're on sinks off Manila, with all hands and passengers -- except Pi. Pi takes to a lifeboat and survives many months with a Bengal tiger weighing 450 pounds sharing the boat. Plenty of cinematic possibilities there.

Back to fantastic . . .  Pi wants a story, so he tells one, endlessly interrupted by his thoughts on religion and spirituality; all this is preceded by a chatty narrative about his childhood on the grounds of his father's zoo in India.



For me, the first part of the book was the most enjoyable. I learned a lot about animals in captivity, their culture and care, and the planning needed for the enclosures in which the animals live.

I had to skim through much of the cross-Pacific journey to the sweet, puzzling ending on a beach in Mexico. Along the way, Pi fishes with a gaff, somehow keeps the tiger alive and at his end of the boat, encounters a carnivorous island (yes, the island eats living creatures who land there), and eats the eyes, organs, skin, and brains of his ocean catch. It's all colorful, but somehow dull with overly descriptive near-repetitions of the same sorts of challenges (all driven by hunger -- Pi's and the tiger's).

In Mexico, two Japanese investigators, trying to find out why the ship sank, listen to Pi's story, which he then revises so it's more everyday and more palatable to the businessmen. So we come to realize that Pi wants what he said he wanted -- story -- and we must figure out whether the stories are real, and, if real, which life of Pi is true. This is a good puzzlement, but raises questions deeper than the book seems to warrant.

Did I find God, as one character suggests a reader will? Not by a long shot.

P.S. There's a good review on Amazon (by someone named Steve Koss) about how the book is an allegory; this reader saw much more than I saw in Martel's work. The review is well worth reading. Sorry, I can't seem to get a link to work . . .

Death Pours the Coffee

This month I published my novel "Death Pours the Coffee" on Amazon Direct Publishing. The novel came in at around 250 or 260 pages -- though page count doesn't really matter on Kindle. However the reader sets the font size sets the book length.

"Death Pours the Coffee" is a sort of cozy set in the Silicon Valley of the 1990s. It's not very sexy, drugsy, or violence prone. It's a story of ordinary but ambitious people who get into serious trouble, mostly of their own doing, and who must face the consequences of their ambitions. I hope it's faithful to the culture of the time and place.

I welcome any reader comments pro or con. One thing I've learned as a writer is that we may mean one thing when we write, but a reader may see something entirely different in the same words.

Double Jeopardy

Movie, 108 min (1999)
Director: Bruce Beresford

With Ashley Judd as a framed murderer frantically searching for her son and the husband who betrayed her, and with Tommy Lee Jones as her parole officer, this half-action/half melodrama just had to be good, and it is. There's nothing profound about it, though, and it's beautifully shot around Washington state, so one can sit back and enjoy the smooth editing without wanting much more.

Ashley Judd plays Libby, who's convicted of killing her husband Nick aboard a borrowed yacht somewhere off Whidbey Island. She goes to prison and after six years is paroled to a halfway house, where Tommy Lee Jones, playing Travis Lehman, a gone-nearly-to-seed law professor, governs the parolees.

The rest is action, with Libby driving a car off a ferry into the Sound, getting buried alive in a New Orleans cemetery, breaking into a school to get records that might help her search -- and so on. Travis comes along in hot pursuit.

Not a great movie, but watchable. Ashley Judd's just-contained frenzy has a lot of power, much more than the movie as a whole.

Making Rounds with Oscar

The Extraordinary Gift of an Ordinary Cat
Hyperion (paperback), 2010, reprint 2011, 256 pp

In a nursing home in Rhode Island, a cat named Oscar displayed a mysterious gift: He seemed to know when a resident was about to die. Oscar would then come to the resident's bed to lie beside him or her, giving comfort to the dying resident as well as to family or loved ones who were in the room for the final hours of life. Between visits Oscar would sit Sphinx-like on a windowsill, "regal and mysterious," simply being a cat.

David Dosa, MD, chronicles Oscar's gifts in his 2010 book "Making Rounds with Oscar: The Extraordinary Gift of an Ordinary Cat." So the book has been around a while, but I just came upon it recently. A physician friend recommended the book to me, and at first I wasn't interested. Too far fetched. Too weird. But I downloaded the book on my Kindle and was immediately drawn in to the nursing-home world of Dr. Dosa, the nurses and caregivers, and the unique residents they watched over.

As I read, I found Dr. Dosa as skeptical as I was. At the repeated urging of one of the nurses, he interviewed the families of people who'd died on Oscar's watch, trying to determine whether the cat's visits to the dying were coincidental or purposeful. What could a cat know about death?

I also learned that Dr. Dosa's book was about a lot more than Oscar and his fellow cats at the nursing home. Much wisdom about the effects of illness, and the realities of death and dying, is packed into the doctor's review of Oscar's "work."

In cases of extreme personality changes caused by dementia, it seems we have to learn to say goodbye to the person we've known, even before that person is close to dying. I found the insights people had about their loved ones' illnesses and their eventual deaths to be valuable life lessons. In his interviews, Dr. Dosa heard about guilt -- lots of guilt -- and anger and grief, and learned much about how families dealt with these tough emotions.

Having a near relative with a recent stroke made the comments doubly useful to me. Someone with significant physical changes, such as paralysis of limbs or loss of the ability to speak, is also profoundly changed by disease. A different person, the stroke victim, emerges.

The dementia victims Dr. Dosa describes seem to disappear in a different way, as they lose the ability to recognize a spouse or form a coherent sentence. But I do think the obvious changes some illnesses bring require us to redefine the person affected, whether mentally or physically, and grow into a different relationship with the "new" person.

For another physician friend, a neurologist and psychiatrist who had not yet read the book, Oscar's behavior was a bit threatening. "I think I'd be real nervous if that cat even started toward me," he told me. So the catness of the story overwhelms the reality of the many insights the author gives us on attitudes toward illness, how we think about approaching death, and the realities of confronting changed people who are close to us . . . or were.

If you or anyone you know is struggling with a loved one who's challenged by great medical changes, "Making Rounds with Oscar" is well worth reading. Even if you're not sure whether Dr. Dosa solves the mystery of Oscar's gift, you'll come out richer for the read.

A piece in Daily Variety (August 20, 2010) says that a movie about Oscar was underway at that time. You can read all about the proposed film, and get more background, at Feline Oscar heads to bigscreen: Famous cat comforts dying in nursing center, in Variety online.

LET THE NORTHERN LIGHTS ERASE YOUR NAME

Vendela Vida
HarperCollins, 226 pp.

In far-north Lapland, Clarissa Iverton goes looking for her origins, searching for her father and looking, of course, for what she can learn about who and what she’s come from. Can we ever know?

From New York, Clarissa travels to Helsinki and north to the Arctic Circle, where it’s so cold a snow-mobiler gets frostbite when a new face mask doesn’t quite cover his face. The air is cold, the days are dark, and so is this story. Joan Didion is quoted as saying of Vida’s first novel, “[This book] is so fast, so mesmerizing to read, and so accomplished that it’s hard to think of it as a first novel, which it is.” I agree the story here is also accomplished, insofar as pace and structure are concerned. But I found it neither fast nor mesmerizing.



How can you be mesmerized by people you can’t possibly like? It’s not the fabled oddness of far-north Scandinavians that makes them unlikeable (to me). Or maybe it is. Can you relate to a reindeer herder? A Sami healer with secrets? Maybe so. There's also something I can only call superficial about Clarissa. Yes, she has problems. Yes, I empathize. But I don't much care for her even so.

I do love Vida’s style; she is a poetic writer and captures the darknesses in the heart as well as in the days.

The best thing about this book to me is the title. Erase your name. Think about it. I guess the northern lights could do it right.