Movie Review--The Words

Interesting and thought provoking but not a classic

This movie gave me a headache, although I mostly enjoyed it at the time.  On reflection, however, I didn’t understand it all that well.  How can that be?

First, it’s three stories in one with three flashbacks (a little hard to follow). 

Second, it’s written in the modern genre of letting the audience fill in the blanks.

Third, the characters aren’t developed to the point where we know or care about them (maybe except for Rory’s teary, blood-shot blue eyes).

It begins with a mature man, Clay Hammond (Dennis Quaid), before a large audience reading from his latest book titled “The Words.” 

Flashback to a young Rory Jansen (Bradley Cooper) receiving an award for writing his successful first novel “The Window Tears.”  Flashback to a couple of young lovers just out of college, Rory and Dora (Zoe Saldana) moving a mattress on to the floor of their loft where they can live happily after—Rory writing and Dora loving him—except it takes two years to finish his book.  The book is good, but not publishable according to those who publish books, partly because he is a new, unknown author.

Rory is forced to get a job with a publisher delivering interoffice mail.  He and Dora get married and go on a honeymoon to Paris (just a little trite).  While there they visit the former abode of Ernest Hemingway and explore a shop that sells artifacts from the period.  Rory finds an old and worn (but interesting) leather briefcase and Dora buys it for him.  Later at home, Rory still unable to write discovers an old manuscript hidden behind a flap in the briefcase.  This is the catalyst for the rest of the movie.

After the book is published, “an Old Man” (Jeremy Irons) sits next to Rory on a park bench and tells him his story.  Another flashback to just after WWII when a young American soldier falls in love with a French girl (Ben Barnes and Nora Arnezeder) in Paris and they eventually marry.  Their story is compelling but not all that different from what many others experience in their own lives (in my opinion).  However, the choices made by the couple are regrettable which is also true of the moral choice made by Rory. 

Clay Hammond (Quaid) is the puzzle of this movie although there are many clues to his identity.  He adds little to the plot especially when a “young, spoiled, American” girl, Daniella, (Olivia Wilde) is thrown into the mix.  Her purpose is one of the “blanks” that is nebulous to say the least.  Her only importance appears to be when she asks Clay if he wants “fiction or (real) life.”  I suppose that is about Truth.

If you want to be entertained on a long afternoon in a movie theater, expecting nothing and happy for something that is both interesting and thought provoking, this movie is for you.  If not, stick to the classics. 

Book Review--A Sunless Sea by Anne Perry

A Sunless Sea—Imagery at it’s best

Anne Perry masterfully links the name of this book, A Sunless Sea, with the poem Kubla Kahn written by Samuel Taylor Coleridge in 1797 as she did with The Sins of the Wolf and Dante’s Inferno.  Coleridge was a known opium user in England when the drug was totally unregulated which is also the main focus of this book. 

As opium addiction is described by the author, the image of a sunless sea is a place where there is no light—only darkness, no hope—only despair, and no life—only death. 

The book opens with Monk, commander of the Thames River Police at Wapping Station, and Orme, his right-hand man, rowing together in a boat on the river about 20 feet from the Limehouse Pier, when they hear a blood-curdling scream coming from someone standing on the pier.  As they dock the boat and run up the stairs, the person points to what looks like “a heap of rubbage” but is soon found to be the body of a woman who has been murdered and disemboweled.  As Monk and Orme begin their investigation to determine who the woman was, they assume maybe she was a prostitute who put herself in harms way.  As they search a neighborhood “about a quarter of a mile from the river” they soon discover her name is Zenia Gadney. 

All who knew of Zenia say she lived a quiet life with no visitors except for one man who came only once a month but hadn’t been around for two months.  No one seems to know who he is.  Monk deduces that the man probably comes by hansom cab which turns out to be the case.  With a little detective work, he learns the man is Dr. Joel Lambourn.  When he visits the Lambourn home, the beautiful Dinah, his wife, tells Monk her husband is two-months dead, ruled a suicide by the police, but she doesn’t believe it.  She also says she knew about her husband and Zenia for many years. 

The mystery deepens when Monk discovers that Dr. Lambourn had written a report for the government on the dangerous unregulated use of opium as a reference for passage of a proposed Pharmacy Act regulating its use.  The report was rejected and destroyed by those he gave it to, including his brother-in-law, Barclay Herne, whose wife was the sister of Dr. Lambourn.  The police determined that Dr. Lambourn's despair and embarrassment at the rejection of his work led him to commit suicide.

But, who killed Zenia and what was her connection to Dr. Lambourn?  Monk has found the only person with knowledge, access and motive is Dinah Lambourn who is shortly arrested for the murder.  She asks Monk if he will request that Oliver Rathbone represent her, which Oliver agrees to even though he has no evidence that she didn’t do it.  The courtroom drama plays an important part in this story.  The judge, the prosecutor, and the witnesses all pull the reader toward the anticipated conclusion.

 Britain finally passed the Opium Act in1878. 

Book Review--Dark Assassin by Anne Perry

Dark Assassin is indeed too “Dark”

Dark Assassin is the eighth of Anne Perry’s William Monk series books I have read.  I am also posting my review of “The Sunless Sea”—my number nine.

Anne Perry is a wonderful writer.  I am amazed at her depth of knowledge, her large vocabulary, her writing ability and her prolific writing history.  Her books are always worthwhile and a good read.

(Here comes the however) however, as I grow older and see more of the dark and sinister things of our world, the less I enjoy reading about them even if it is in Victorian times.  This book was too “dark” for me.  While I enjoyed most of the details of the story above the ground, the descriptions of the vast, filthy, rat-filled, pitch dark, damp, and dangerous underground sewer tunnels where people live, grub, struggle, are maimed, and die, is not enjoyable to me. 

At this time, William Monk is a newly-appointed Thames River senior officer policeman.  While patrolling on the river with his crew, he witnesses a young couple on the Waterloo Bridge who appear to be arguing when they fall into the water and drown.   They are quickly found and identified as Mary Havilland and Toby Argyll.   

As Monk tries to determine whether it was a suicide or an accident he discovers Mary’s father was thought to have committed suicide just two months earlier and that Toby Argyll is her ex-fiancé.  Mary’s father was an engineer working for Alan Argyll, Toby’s wealthy older brother who was drilling tunnels underground with big machines for London’s new sewer system.  The mystery unfolds as Monk and his old adversary, Superintendent Runcorn, work together to uncover what actually happened to Mary’s father and why, and what the Argyll’s had to do with it.  Also, what really happened on the Waterloo Bridge.

As always, the courtroom scenes with Oliver Rathborn are brilliant.  Ms. Perry knows how to develop the dialog and descriptions of non-verbal facial and bodily movements skillfully—making you feel as if you are actually there; (another however), I have learned after eight Monk books that Perry’s endings are often a let down.  Like other authors, they seem to have become somewhat the same—fade away into ______? (you fill in the blank).

Nevertheless, I will give this book five stars because all of Perry’s books are good.  I just didn’t enjoy the darkness of this particular subject.

Book Review--Raquela, A Woman of Israel

Raquela, A Woman of Israel
by Ruth Gruber

Of the 39 book reviews of this book on Amazon, 38 give Raquela 5 stars—one is 4 stars.

This is, first of all, a true story.  When Ruth Gruber, a foreign correspondent for the New York Herald Tribune set out in Israel to find one woman whose life “would define what it means to be a woman of Israel” (Gruber, Raquela, Forward), she found many candidates.  When she heard of a ninth-generation Jerusalemite, whose family settled in Jerusalem in 1650 from Spain, who was a nurse and midwife who had delivered babies in the camps at Athlit and Cyprus for the Jewish illegal immigrants who flocked to their promised land after World War II, she knew she had found her subject.

The book begins in Jerusalem in 1929 when Raquela (the Sephardic, [meaning Spanish,] version of Rachel) was five years old.  Her family lived in Bet Hakerem three miles from the center of Jerusalem, described as a “neighborhood [that] was founded in 1922 as one of six garden cities developed in Jerusalem during the days of the British Mandate for Palestine” (wikipedia.com).  The Arabs from the village of Colonia rose up and murdered the people of Motza, a nearby Jewish village, then looted and burned their houses. The book explains that this was the second riot since the Balfour Declaration of November 2, 1917, which stated, “His Majesty’s Government (the British) views with favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people.”  And, while the British police did nothing, the Arab terrorists went to Hebron, where Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob and their wives Sarah, Rebecca, and Leah were buried, and murdered all the prominent Jewish families.  When the British police finally came, they rounded up the rest of the Jews of Hebron (not the Arabs) and locked them up in the police station “for their own protection.” These people were never allowed to return to their homes which were ransacked by the Arabs.

From this time forward, there was no peace in Palestine.  The book takes us through the time when Raquela was twelve years old and she and her mother were on a bus traveling downtown to go shopping for her Bat Mitzvah. The bus was attacked by Arabs with guns and a hand grenade that miraculously exploded before it could be thrown in the bus.  On January 31, 1943 Raquela enrolled in the Hadassah (Hebrew name for Queen Esther, see Jeremiah 8:22) Henrietta Szold School of Nursing where she studied nursing and midwifery under her mentor, the renowned obstetrician Dr. Aron Brezezinski.  Raquela Levy graduated as a nurse/midwife on February 7, 1946 and was selected “the outstanding student” in her class.

Politically, because of The White Paper of 1939 issued by the British government under Neville Chamberlain, Palestine was partitioned into an independent Arab state and a Jewish state “in proportion to their population numbers in 1939”—which meant Palestine was virtually controlled by the greater number of Arabs.  Jewish immigration was limited to 75,000 over a five-year period from1940 to 1944—then all immigration would depend on the permission of the Arab majority.  During this time the Holy Land “became a police state.”  The British brought in “one hundred thousand soldiers …to keep order.”  Jerusalem was a mass of barriers and “rusted coils of barbed wire” where tanks and armored cars patrolled the streets.

The stamina, courage, industry, and determination of the Jewish people is obvious in this book.  If you are one of those who knows little of the history of Israel, you will be enlightened, but also entertained with the story of the remarkable life Raquela.  The facts of how Israel became an independent nation with all the hardships and wars for independence are the rest of the story.  Gruber weaves the heroic deeds of a woman of Israel into the compelling narrative of birth—not only of babies born in horrible conditions in British refugee camps—but also the inevitable and difficult birth of the State of Israel. 

Movie Review--2016: Obama's America

This movie has been reviewed hundreds, maybe even thousands, of times and published on the Internet.  Bloggers of some of these reviews call the writer/ director, Dinesh D’Souza, John Sullivan, and producer Gerald Molen liars, racists, and bigots and compare the movie to the propaganda put out by the Nazis before and during WWII.  Patricia Russell from West Hollywood, CA states in a comment on a review, “since this ‘movie’ was paid for and distributed by Mormons, I just consider the source” and she cites wikipedia.org/wiki/Gerald_R._Molen as her source.  After looking at the cited article on Wikipedia, I found no such reference to anything Mormon.  It’s a shame that so many reviewers are unable to critique the movie without being vicious, degrading, and insulting. 

This movie is actually about the facts that are Obama.  These are the facts that were seldom or never told during the 2008 election due to the euphoria by the media that surrounded the first “black” presidential candidate. It is a story about the miracle of an unknown man who became President with only two years experience in the Illinois state house, and two years as a U.S. Senator.  It’s the story of how President Obama became the person he is without any excuse or hesitation in achieving his goals.  The movie lets you be the judge of where he wants to take us as a nation by 2016 should he be re-elected.

Dinesh D’Souza is an immigrant from India, a conservative, a former staff member for President Reagan, the author of a book “The Roots of Obama’s Rage” on which this movie is based, and currently the president of King’s College in New York.  He methodically uncovers the history of Barack’s childhood, his relationship with his mother and the influence of his absent Kenyan father.  Much of Obama’s young life was spent in Indonesia with his mother and step-father, Lolo Soetoro.  Later he was sent back to Hawaii to live with his grandparents.  Many excerpts of his child and young adulthood are taken from Obama’s first autobiography, “Dreams from My Father.”

Some of those who had the most influence on Obama D’Souza calls “Obama’s Founding Fathers.”  Among them are Frank Marshall Davis, an avowed Communist, who became his mentor; Bill Ayers, former Weather Underground unrepentant terrorist; academic Edward Said, an anti-Israel activist; a Harvard Communist professor and Brazilian, Roberto Unger; and finally Jeremiah Wright, Obama’s religious Black Liberation Theology pastor and friend for 20 years.  All these men helped to define Obama’s anti-colonial worldview of America as a power that could (should) be neutralized.  All the incidents pertinent to this assessment of Obama are carefully enumerated, expounded, and documented on the screen. 

According to Matthew May, in his review, “Dinesh D’Souza asks viewers whether we will pursue the American dream or Barack Obama’s dream. That dream, as D’Souza argues, is the defeat [emphasis added] of oppressive colonialism that manifested itself in the rise of the United States as the dominant world power at the expense of the third world.” (American Thinker blog, August 26, 2012.) 

Finally, go to this movie!  It is enlightening and is not a vendetta against Obama.  It merely states those things about him that no one bothered to find out earlier.  It could have changed history then and maybe it will now.

Personal note: I realize that anyone who disagrees with Obama is subject to being called a racist.  I’m tired of that.  I was raised in Wyoming.  We had one black student in our class who was (as far as I know) accepted and treated the same as anyone else.  I never heard a harsh word said about him.  I lived in Texas for five years and never saw any instance of racism around anyone even though the area I lived in had lots of people of diverse ethnicity.  Calling a person a racist is easy but hard to defend.  So, let’s stop it and agree that to disagree with someone of another race is OK and does not mean they are racist.