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.