Julia Barrett's World

Every once in a while I decide to get serious. Seriously. My husband and I watched the above award-winning movie made by the Coen brothers last night. Normally I prefer not to tackle movie reviews, but here goes. This is a case of a seriously over-rated move. As in the emperor is wearing no clothes. Yes, they got the cars right and the clothes right and they even got the hair right for the mid to late 1960s. That’s about it. It reminded me a bit of Grand Torino - which I absolutely loved - where you had some seriously flawed and stereotyped characters but as that movie unfolded there was character growth and movement and redemption.

The overarching theme of A Serious Man is story of Job and his suffering for no reason - the main character, a Conservative Jew, suffers one existential crisis after another from which there is no relief, no guidance and not a single shred of hope - oh, maybe at the end there is a single shred of hope, but it’s ripped from his hands in the very next instance. There is no character with whom I can identify, and I’m Jewish and grew up in the Midwest and my husband grew up in St. Louis Park, Minnesota - where the movie takes place. He couldn’t identify with the movie either. He watched, open-mouthed, appalled. Every Jew acts like the worst stereotype of a Jew a Jew-hater can imagine, in addition, there is the non-Jewish (goyish) blond neighbor who hunts, mows his lawn incessantly and plays baseball with his kid - as if Jews don’t play baseball? There’s a secular Jewish woman who acts as neighborhood temptress and pot smoker. We watch unsympathetic rabbis mouthing meaningless platitudes…blech. If a nonJewish director made a movie like this, he’d be castigated, but because the Coen brothers are Jewish, they can get away with it.

In a nutshell, they boil Judaism down to bubbemeitzes - old grandmothers’ tales that have no meaning in today’s world…and never did. The movie hits you in the face with the fact that the movie makers view the religion as nothing more than Eastern European superstitious nonsense. It’s a religious polemic - or perhaps a secular polemic and worse, the scenes don’t ring true. Back in 1967, kids didn’t say ‘fuck’ with any regularity and public extra-marital affairs were frowned upon to say the least. And what was with the woman thrown in the scene at Lake Harriet…Lake Calhoun…wearing the leg braces??? Are you serious, Coen brothers? I’ve always loved your quirky movies but you seriously lost me with this one. The movie was seriously depressing and devoid of any redeeming value, except perhaps as a venue for the writers/directors to express their serious dislike of their upbringing in St. Louis Park, but if so, it’s the wrong era. They are younger than the characters portrayed. Look, I have my own issues with Judaism and questions about its attempts to remain relevant in the modern world, but you can’t boil down nearly 6000 years of history to a Dybbuk story. Well…I suppose you can seriously try.

In other news - It’s burkini weather - yes, I seriously own one - minus the hair cover and the skirt. Mine’s blue and I love it! Here’s a cute green burkini:

Genella deGrey has a new release out today - Love Divine.

Here’s the buy link: http://www.total-e-bound.com/product.asp?strParents=&CAT_ID=&P_ID=734

Blurb: In the Highlands of Britannia, Aslyn, was raised a Druid by her late mother. Rome has returned, but instead of a legion of solders, a single man comes to the little village of Cardamon Long, peddling a new Roman god.
Ryus Jorian was sent on a mission for the new religion. But instead of a cave of barbaric souls in need of saving, he finds an intelligent, beautiful, hedonistic distraction, who makes him question the very reason for his journey.

Happy sales, Genella!

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Tied for first - Jennifer and Beth.

Coming in a close second - Mindy.

Answers:

The Wizard in The Wizard of Oz.

John Smith in Mr. and Mrs. Smith.

Guy in Galaxy Quest.

Ripley in Aliens.

Imhotep in The Mummy.

White Goodman in Dodgeball.

Annie, or Joanna Stayton in Overboard.

J.C. Wiatt in Baby Boom.

Norman Maclean in A River Runs Through It.

Thanks for participating!

Back to work on the sci fi menage - wink…wink…wink…

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With Romance Junkies!

http://www.romancejunkies.com/rjblog

A guest blog, a contest, and a promo for Captured!

Drop by and check it out. I love reading your comments.

On the heavier side, just finished watching Gran Torino, with Clint Eastwood. To be honest, I didn’t know what to expect. One daughter didn’t like it. She claimed the acting was amateurish. The other daughter thought the movie was okay.

Baby girls, it was way more than okay. The acting wasn’t amateurish, it was real. Once again, just as occurred when I watched The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, my eyes were riveted on the screen. Clint Eastwood, is, of course, riveting all by himself, but the Hmong actors were outstanding as well, the story heartrending. For me, the themes were personal. I work in neighborhoods like this. I have patients who are the spitting image of Walt Kowalski and I love them, while I have other patients who are part of a community just like the Hmong community of Thao Vang Lor. And I have to watch out for the gang bangers when I make my home visits.

Gran Torino, five stars out of five. Thanks, Mr. Eastwood.

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if I could travel back in time

to the Court of Henry the VIII, I think I ‘d take one item…actually, one related cluster of items - my LCD TV and surround sound system and parts one, two and three of Peter Jackson’s The Lord of the Rings.

I’d play the movie for the King’s Court and I bet they’d just love it. Of course my husband says I could play them Gilligan’s Island and they’d love it…but no, it would have to be The Lord of the Rings because they’d understand it. Even if some of the words were foreign, the symbolism and the action would make sense and I know Good King Harry would cry. I just know it. Men were much more sentimental back then.

Of course I’d go back to the Court of the young King Henry, the golden boy of Christendom, to the time when he felt chivalrous and knightly and still possessed a sense of humor, before he became old and irascible and autocratic.

Ah well, French champagne and baked cheese and The Lord of the Rings on New Years Eve.

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Blockbuster. No shit!

Groundbreaking animation, a magical melding of computer generated creatures and human actors.

Green Morality Play ala James Cameron.

Classic Romance Novel. Boy meets girl. Girl wants to kill boy but saves him instead. Girl and boy come to understand and respect one another. Love and lust blossom. BIG misunderstanding and breakup. Boy proves himself and saves the day, winning the girl’s heart. HEA.

Wake up, Joseph Campbell, your Hero Archetype is on starring on IMAX! How do ya like those apples?

Although Avatar does have an overt, duh, (not covert as some film critics have suggested), political agenda, and despite some motion sickness due to the 3D glasses, my eyes were pretty much riveted on the screen for nearly three hours.

It wasn’t until I slept on it that I woke up wondering about a few points, such as…How come two hundred years in the future, we can travel for five (Light years?) to another star system but our soldiers still wear the exact same fatigues they do now and shoot automatic weapons? What? We don’t have laser guns in the future?

What is the point of mining if there are no human colonies nearby? Cuz it sorta seems to me to be prohibitively expensive to be shipping the ore - absolutelyimpossibletogetium - across the galaxy on the off chance that humans still want it or need it or even still survive on earth. Doesn’t the theory of relativity hold that the faster you travel, relatively less time passes for you while back on earth, we age…like…a million years? Of course, I’m paraphrasing here. It’s not as if I’m a physicist or anything. I just didn’t understand the point of the mining operation - because the ore and the far too young, sniveling weasel of a…nope, won’t give away a spoiler here.

And then, what was with the masks? Seems to me that Pandora is an earth-like planet with a pretty much earth-like atmosphere, water, water vapor, so on and so forth, yet if you stepped outside without your oxygen mask, you were unconscious within seconds. But whatever was in the atmosphere didn’t bother your skin. Not in the slightest. I’m thinking, okay, since the Na’vi are blue, perhaps there is a higher percentage of carbon monoxide in their atmosphere. Yes, but if so, it still wouldn’t render you unconscious within seconds. Or as my daughter suggests, maybe the oxygen molecules on Pandora are too big to slip through our alveola and into our bloodstream. Tapping my chin…sounds reasonable. Still, the plants on Pandora are green so I suspect we’re talking chlorophyll here, along with an atmospheric mix of oxygen, nitrogen, carbon dioxide and the other gases in our own atmosphere, plus the life forms are carbon-based. The sky is blue and to all intents and purposes, Pandora appears to have a yellow sun. Oh my head is spinning with possibilities.

To quote my daughter: “Suspend disbelief all who enter here!”

To quote my bird: “Maybe.”

Think, Dances with Wolves meets anti-Independence Day, or check out the South Park Episode, Dances with Smurfs. Cartman goes native…

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War of the Worlds

I came home after a tough day of work, showered…because after a day of dealing with the situations I deal with I often feel like I need a shower…pulled on my jammies and climbed into bed. At 7:20 in the evening. I reached for my book. I’m reading Corvus, A Life With Birds, by Esther Woolfson, which is a series of engrossing tales about her feathered friends and how they’ve come to be integrated into her home, her life and her heart. Meanwhile, my own two birds, their cage covered, were murmuring in their sleep as they do, kind of pillow talking. Occasionally I could catch a distinct word, usually not. And of course, suffering from ADD as I do, I flipped on the TV - sometimes I find that I concentrate better if I concentrate against something. In this case, that something turned out to be Steven Spielberg’s relatively recent version of H.G. Wells, War of the Worlds.

I must admit I didn’t enjoy the movie when I saw it in the theater. Yes, the special effects were impressive, but it was the story that disappointed me - I found it too embellished and gory, too unnecessarily convoluted and too far removed from the spare original versions, written, radio and film. But I noticed something last night, other than Tom Cruise’s short thighs and Dakota Fanning’s unusually large, wide-set eyes. There is a common thread running through many of our popular movies these days - the archetype of the hand of man. Yes, we screw things up. Yes, we ignore warning signs. Yes, we behave in stupid, self-destructive ways. And yet…when our backs are against the wall, we, as a species, have the capacity to square our shoulders and find within ourselves unexpected courage and compassion. Of course as the movie shows us, we are also equally capable of killing each other in our haste to steal a car, an action that will just get us killed in turn.

Gory or not, the archetype of the hero has survived the ages. Men and women who rise above their station in life to achieve the unexpected, the sublime, even if they lose their own lives in the process. Think Greek mythology, Norse mythology, Beowulf, the Mabinogion, the dream of Camelot.

Thus we have the romance novel - not so different from Tristan and Isolde, the triad of Lancelot, Arthur and Gwenevere, Abelard and Heloise, Romeo and Juliet, Isis and Osiris - all tragedies, but heroic love stories nonetheless.

So, how did I get from there to here? Hmm…I think it was as simple as watching Tom Cruise play an unlikely hero in a lousy movie. Even schmucks can rise to the occasion.

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The List

Favorite Book - too many to name just one, but I have a tradition…every year I reread Dune, by Frank Herbert, Shogun, by James Clavell, Little Women, by Louisa May Alcott, and Jane Eyre, by Charlotte Bronte. I’m currently into nonfiction, biographies and George R.R. Martin’s science fiction series - A Game of Thrones. I must say, my favorite morality play - I mean book, is East of Eden, by John Steinbeck.

Favorite Movie - McCabe and Mrs. Miller, starring Warren Beaty and Julie Christie and directed by Robert Altman. But I love the Lord of the Rings trilogy too. The movie that left me sobbing (besides Bambi) - Dead Man Waling with Susan Sarandon and Sean Penn, directed by Tim Robbins.

Favorite sports movie - Bull Durham.

Favorite military movie - The Great Santini.

Favorite cowboy movie - Brokeback Mountain…second favorite- The Magnificent Seven - Yul Brynner was so sexy as a bald guy!

Favorite Old Movies - lots! The Wizard of Oz, All About Eve, The Ghost and Mrs. Muir, anything with Marilyn Monroe in it..Katherine Hepburn in Bringing Up Baby, The Philadelphia Story and The Lion in Winter.

Favorite off-beat movies - Frequency, Enemy of the State, Parenthood, A River Runs Through It, Bend It Like Beckham, especially the Indian dancing part, Die Hard, The Terminator.

Favorite food - milk chocolate, after that…vegetarian spicy stuff - love me some curries!

Tomorrow - Why do I write and maybe what do I write…See ya!

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